Arnold wrote..."many people yearn for a strong leader. Perhaps they are wise to do so, or perhaps they will end up getting what they want “good and hard,” in Mencken’s phrase." Any leader who is merely competent and honest would these days be considered to be and attacked as being an authoritarian strong man, never mind how legally compliant and legitimately elected. Notice the treatment of Hungarian leader Victor Orban, whose administration is routinely criticized as authoritarian and undemocratic, even though overwhelmingly re-elected. Any leader not in the pocket of the ruling globalist Left will be called "far-right" and persecuted by all means fair or foul no matter what his actual policies are.
Right. Ordinary person, "It's very irritating to me when the trains don't run on time." Leftist commentator. "What's that? You have some kind of problem with the trains no longer running on time? Is what you really mean that you want a *dictator* to *terrorize* rail-workers into actually making the trains run on time?!" - "Hang on, the thing is ... " - "You know who said they deserved to be in charge because they would make the trains run on time, and the kind of people who supported them so that the trains would run on time? FASCISTS, THAT'S WHO, YOU FAR-RIGHT FASCIST!!" - "Please just provide me with a list of what I'm not allowed to complain about today, ok?" - "Gladly!"
Julian Waller has a review of Jacob Heilbrunn's idiotic contribution to the bottomless well of the old smear-genre, " America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators," which includes this line, "Donald Trump, who seems to have a preference for boss-like figures perceived to be in decisive control over their political domains."
People even remotely familiar with the actual Trump might generalize that statement to "a preference for chief-executive-like figures perceived to be in decisive control over the organizations they lead."
And then people remotely familiar with, you know, normal human beings, their friends and neighbors, and so-forth, might generalize it further by getting rid of "Trump" and replacing it with "Almost everybody".
At least, almost everybody, when they are talking about their own field, and especially anybody who has had ten seconds of experience of what real leadership requires, looks like, and is capable of accomplishing. Or, on the other hand, what it's like to experience the aggravating dysfunctional pathologies associated with being part of an institution in which good, strong leadership is clearly absent.
It really is a simple as the double-standard of Russel Conjugation for people designated good guys and bad guys. Everybody wants their own institution and those of their friends to have good, strong leaders. Everybody hates the idea of "against our team" institutions having good, strong leaders. My strong leader is a champion and hero. Your strong leader is a tyrant and authoritarian.
France may not have been officially Protestant in the manner of Germany, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries but there were French Protestant leaders even before Luther (e.g. John Calvin) and it was quite anti-Catholic during the Revolution. I'd say it's more than just (literally) Protestant-adjacent and more like England in rejection of Catholicism.
The history is complicated. England didn't so much as "reject Catholicism" as nationalize it as Anglicanism in what was originally a mostly political, not theological, schism with Rome. Yes, a lot of figures at the time wanted much bigger changes and saw the political split as as opportunity to get the ball rolling, but the truly radical Calvinist stuff didn't really get going until the Stuarts.
My sense of the history is that France was on a similar trajectory as England with growing populations of Lutherans and Huegenots with the major difference in the outcome of how the dust settled in the 17th century being that various pivotal political and armed conflicts that could have gone either way ended up being won by the Roman Catholic side in the case of France culminating in the Edict of Fontainebleau.
By the time before the Revolution when many French elites had already stopped supporting the Church, they had not so much "rejected Roman Catholicism for a 'better' Christianity" in the manner of England, but rejected Christianity outright (literally "Dechristianization") for 'atheism' (i.e., new secular political religions). A Muslim invasion could hardly have done worse than the horrendous massacres and desecrations unleashed by former French Catholics upon the people who had recently been their clergy and places where they had recently worshiped.
Napoleon agreed to the Concordat of 1801 (partly as one of many genius maneuvers intended to bring an end to the War of the Second Coalition on terms favorable to France) and put the worst of it to an end and tried to settle a peace between the post-revolutionary secular state and loyal Catholic adversaries. But by that time the damage had been done and proved irreversible.
"... conservatives will lose the argument over immigration, for reasons of path dependency and class interests, but win on crime/disorder ..."
But crime and immigration are inextricably linked. If we don't want immigration to lead to more crime, then we ought to weed out obvious criminals (by our nation's definition of "criminal"). But ought implies can. To vet immigrants we need some sort of security (e.g., a wall) that prevents gang members, terrorists, murderers, rapists, etc. from entering at will. We also need a gate through which prospective immigrants and refugees must pass and pass review. Finally, we need to be able to limit the rate at which immigrants pass through the gate if for no other reason than such reviews take time and resources.
I think the illegal immigration problem being one of crime/disorder is a two pronged one. On the one hand, illegal immigration is itself due to crime/disorder, by definition. People don't like that.
On the other hand, people don't like immigration because they see immigrants as committing more crimes. Whether or not that is true, that stems from the problem of laws against crime/disorder being unenforced, and increasingly so. Prosecutors are not doing their jobs, and police are ordered to not pursue some types of cases. Clearance rates are very low, and when you see stories about illegal immigrants eg killing a girl after interacting with authorities 4-5 times for various offenses and not being dealt with it is obvious that law and order are off the menu.
I make this distinction because of this: If crime and disorder cease being a problem, people are more comfortable with strangers. At the end of the day, people don't care who stole their car or where they were born, they care that their car got stolen. The response to a breakdown in law and order is to retreat from wider society to more insular groups that are more like oneself. Conversely, when the strangers you meet follow the same laws and codes of behavior you do, because those who don't are punished and removed from society, people are far more accepting of differences.
Which is all to say: if you are in favor of higher immigration you should also be in favor of stricter enforcement of laws protecting property and life. (Or enforcement, period.) That does rule out being in favor of abolishing bad laws; lord knows there are plenty of those and they crowd out enforcement of the necessary ones (Hi, Scotland). But critically, you cannot have a society with both high crime, open borders and expect people to be happy with that situation.
Also: somehow this question/contention - already muddied by the fertility differential - is applied in a way one might think would be irrelevant to it - to prevent the US from deporting people.
There’s no logic to that, regardless of the veracity of the answer supplied by unlimited immigration’s most ardent supporters.
“Immigrants” include Asians and “natives” includes blacks.
But it’s pretty clear that what people mean by immigrants is Hispanics and by natives they mean whites. Nobody cares that Hispanics commit less crimes then blacks, and Asian h1bs aren’t immigrating illegally.
In Europe where immigrant = Muslim especially refugee the crime issue is even starker.
That's not what "people" say but let's assume you are correct about what they mean. That changes things quite a bit but my rough estimate is that Illegal Hispanic immigrants commit crime at rates no worse than native whites.
- CATO included stats for illegal immigrants. That pretty much excludes Asians, at least until very recently.
- Drawing from memory that might be faulty, blacks commit about half the murders in the US. If other crime rates are similar, that suggests white crime rates are similar to illegal Hispanic immigrants.
Hispanics do have higher crime rates. Obviously nowhere near black levels, but higher.
Like all things Hispanic it varies signifanctely based on source demographics and place of settlement. Hispanic crime is more gang focused rather then individual in the case of blacks, and as such is worse in cities.
Crime is one statistic where Hispanics do worse in the 2nd generation then the first (things like income and English usually improve). They appear to assimilate to underclass American norms, and fear of deportation is gone. The one group that bucks this trend is Puerto Ricans, but for a bad reason. They have high crime already I. The 1st generation, so it doesn’t get worse. This is likely because Puerto Rico is already part of the USA.
Regardless of more of less crime committed by natives vs immigrants (Hispanic or otherwise) I still hold that the problem is that we don’t punish crime. Even when we catch the criminals we don’t prosecute much of the time. Most of the crime is committed by a few criminals in an 80/20 situation, yet we let repeat offenders go. With or or without immigration that is a recipe for high crime.
Police have no grounds to inquire about immigration status in my state. I have no idea how stats could ever be collected in that case, but I do have an idea why it would have become the norm.
Recently the bubbas in the state Lege tried one of their feckless efforts to change this situation, in some probably mild fashion - but while they always have plenty of leeway to do the stupid things they want to do, they are like a little kid going up against an NFL linebacker whenever they’ve chanced upon an obviously correct notion and try to outwit the federal government.
They will always be out lawyered.
This is why I have less reverence for “rule of law” than most.
"The results are similar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 native‐born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native‐born Americans in Texas. The general pattern of native‐born Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowest holds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes."
That’s true, but it is also true of natives. As I understand it there is a pretty high correlation between public assistance program utilization and crime, which makes me suspect that deporting criminal immigrants lowers the burden there, too.
Can’t help you on the public school aspect… ending the public school system is a good idea but a bit of a stretch.
"Most immigrant theft is of the legal variety - food stamps, public education, Medicaid, etc."
Never mind that illegal immigrants can't collect food stamps or qualify for Medicaid. (yes, their children born in US can.) You want to bet on which is greater? (1) the theft you describe (2) payments into Soc Sec that they will never collect on.
I have no idea how you are determining legal and illegal as applies to our conversation prior to your last comment but an employer legally has to pay soc sec taxes regardless of whether the employee is working legally and the illegal immigrants legally can't collect soc sec. It seems irrelevant to the subject of our conversation whether the employment is legal or the ss# used is legal.
As for what illegal immigrants "cost," that is extremely subjective in how one counts what but it has another flaw. We have a shortage of workers and we have a birth rate below the replacement level. One could argue illegal immigrants, almost entirely workers and children, are needed to fill a void, regardless of whether we would prefer this be addressed through legal means. Calling it a cost seems to miss the bigger picture.
Agreed. I would point out though that back paying hospitals for uncompensated care is a really big issue in general, with or without immigrants. (Legal or otherwise.)
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there IS more persecution of heterodox thinking within academia, how do we know it is a “feminine” trait or the result of more women in academia. And even if in one’s heart of hearts one is convinced that it IS because of more women in academia, is highlighting that (which even if true may not be necessarily true) the best way to promote more diverse viewpoints?
“Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”
I get that treating men and women "the same" (without prejudice or discrimination?) frees them up to express numerous differences. In what instance does treating them different make them the same?
If Weber meant by 'fraternal ethics' something on the order of what Hayek discussed in the first chapter of The Fatal Conceit - "rules of solidarity and altruism" "adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed" - then I think you are too harsh on him. Hayek continued, meaning by 'natural', 'instinctual' and 'good' the above-mentioned rules and behavior,
---
Thus, forming superindividual patterns or systems of cooperation required individuals to change their `natural' or `instinctual' responses to others, something strongly resisted. That such conflicts with inborn instincts, `private vices', as Bernard Mandeville described them, might
turn out to be `public benefits', and that men had to restrain some `good' instincts in order to develop the extended order, are conclusions that became the source of dissension later too. For example, Rousseau took the side of the `natural' although his contemporary Hume clearly
saw that `so noble an affection [as generosity] instead of fitting men for large societies, is almost as contrary to them, as the most narrow selfishness' (1739/1886: 11, 270).
---
What Hayek calls the extended order makes use of 'fraternal ethics', certainly, but it also restricts it in important and 'unnatural', painful ways, and that is where Protestantism might come in (or, more than likely, co-evolved).
"The real fun begins when you try to cancel after the trial subscription period is over and your credit card has just been charged some outrageous amount."
It is sometimes easier to cancel the card with its unique number than to get a subscription cancelled.
Even better - Last I knew some cards (Discover?) would give you a one-time use number if you were worried about the honesty of a vendor. That might be te best solution.
I don't know, but it's possible that they could try to ding one's credit record. On the one hand it seems like it wouldn't be worth it on their part and maybe risk getting them into trouble on some kind of prohibited debt collection practices rule, but on the other hand it could just be a standard practice in the industry, fully automated, and thus nearly costless to them. I look at the combination of 'trial' and "give me your credit card info and the right to charge you again in the future without your affirmation" as a certain recipe for mischief and thus subject to blanket prohibition as personally haram.
Arnold wrote..."many people yearn for a strong leader. Perhaps they are wise to do so, or perhaps they will end up getting what they want “good and hard,” in Mencken’s phrase." Any leader who is merely competent and honest would these days be considered to be and attacked as being an authoritarian strong man, never mind how legally compliant and legitimately elected. Notice the treatment of Hungarian leader Victor Orban, whose administration is routinely criticized as authoritarian and undemocratic, even though overwhelmingly re-elected. Any leader not in the pocket of the ruling globalist Left will be called "far-right" and persecuted by all means fair or foul no matter what his actual policies are.
Right. Ordinary person, "It's very irritating to me when the trains don't run on time." Leftist commentator. "What's that? You have some kind of problem with the trains no longer running on time? Is what you really mean that you want a *dictator* to *terrorize* rail-workers into actually making the trains run on time?!" - "Hang on, the thing is ... " - "You know who said they deserved to be in charge because they would make the trains run on time, and the kind of people who supported them so that the trains would run on time? FASCISTS, THAT'S WHO, YOU FAR-RIGHT FASCIST!!" - "Please just provide me with a list of what I'm not allowed to complain about today, ok?" - "Gladly!"
Julian Waller has a review of Jacob Heilbrunn's idiotic contribution to the bottomless well of the old smear-genre, " America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators," which includes this line, "Donald Trump, who seems to have a preference for boss-like figures perceived to be in decisive control over their political domains."
People even remotely familiar with the actual Trump might generalize that statement to "a preference for chief-executive-like figures perceived to be in decisive control over the organizations they lead."
And then people remotely familiar with, you know, normal human beings, their friends and neighbors, and so-forth, might generalize it further by getting rid of "Trump" and replacing it with "Almost everybody".
At least, almost everybody, when they are talking about their own field, and especially anybody who has had ten seconds of experience of what real leadership requires, looks like, and is capable of accomplishing. Or, on the other hand, what it's like to experience the aggravating dysfunctional pathologies associated with being part of an institution in which good, strong leadership is clearly absent.
It really is a simple as the double-standard of Russel Conjugation for people designated good guys and bad guys. Everybody wants their own institution and those of their friends to have good, strong leaders. Everybody hates the idea of "against our team" institutions having good, strong leaders. My strong leader is a champion and hero. Your strong leader is a tyrant and authoritarian.
France may not have been officially Protestant in the manner of Germany, Scandinavia, and the Low Countries but there were French Protestant leaders even before Luther (e.g. John Calvin) and it was quite anti-Catholic during the Revolution. I'd say it's more than just (literally) Protestant-adjacent and more like England in rejection of Catholicism.
The history is complicated. England didn't so much as "reject Catholicism" as nationalize it as Anglicanism in what was originally a mostly political, not theological, schism with Rome. Yes, a lot of figures at the time wanted much bigger changes and saw the political split as as opportunity to get the ball rolling, but the truly radical Calvinist stuff didn't really get going until the Stuarts.
My sense of the history is that France was on a similar trajectory as England with growing populations of Lutherans and Huegenots with the major difference in the outcome of how the dust settled in the 17th century being that various pivotal political and armed conflicts that could have gone either way ended up being won by the Roman Catholic side in the case of France culminating in the Edict of Fontainebleau.
By the time before the Revolution when many French elites had already stopped supporting the Church, they had not so much "rejected Roman Catholicism for a 'better' Christianity" in the manner of England, but rejected Christianity outright (literally "Dechristianization") for 'atheism' (i.e., new secular political religions). A Muslim invasion could hardly have done worse than the horrendous massacres and desecrations unleashed by former French Catholics upon the people who had recently been their clergy and places where they had recently worshiped.
Napoleon agreed to the Concordat of 1801 (partly as one of many genius maneuvers intended to bring an end to the War of the Second Coalition on terms favorable to France) and put the worst of it to an end and tried to settle a peace between the post-revolutionary secular state and loyal Catholic adversaries. But by that time the damage had been done and proved irreversible.
"... conservatives will lose the argument over immigration, for reasons of path dependency and class interests, but win on crime/disorder ..."
But crime and immigration are inextricably linked. If we don't want immigration to lead to more crime, then we ought to weed out obvious criminals (by our nation's definition of "criminal"). But ought implies can. To vet immigrants we need some sort of security (e.g., a wall) that prevents gang members, terrorists, murderers, rapists, etc. from entering at will. We also need a gate through which prospective immigrants and refugees must pass and pass review. Finally, we need to be able to limit the rate at which immigrants pass through the gate if for no other reason than such reviews take time and resources.
I think the illegal immigration problem being one of crime/disorder is a two pronged one. On the one hand, illegal immigration is itself due to crime/disorder, by definition. People don't like that.
On the other hand, people don't like immigration because they see immigrants as committing more crimes. Whether or not that is true, that stems from the problem of laws against crime/disorder being unenforced, and increasingly so. Prosecutors are not doing their jobs, and police are ordered to not pursue some types of cases. Clearance rates are very low, and when you see stories about illegal immigrants eg killing a girl after interacting with authorities 4-5 times for various offenses and not being dealt with it is obvious that law and order are off the menu.
I make this distinction because of this: If crime and disorder cease being a problem, people are more comfortable with strangers. At the end of the day, people don't care who stole their car or where they were born, they care that their car got stolen. The response to a breakdown in law and order is to retreat from wider society to more insular groups that are more like oneself. Conversely, when the strangers you meet follow the same laws and codes of behavior you do, because those who don't are punished and removed from society, people are far more accepting of differences.
Which is all to say: if you are in favor of higher immigration you should also be in favor of stricter enforcement of laws protecting property and life. (Or enforcement, period.) That does rule out being in favor of abolishing bad laws; lord knows there are plenty of those and they crowd out enforcement of the necessary ones (Hi, Scotland). But critically, you cannot have a society with both high crime, open borders and expect people to be happy with that situation.
I've never seen or heard of a study that didn't conclude immigrants, legally in the US or not, commit less crime.
Also: somehow this question/contention - already muddied by the fertility differential - is applied in a way one might think would be irrelevant to it - to prevent the US from deporting people.
There’s no logic to that, regardless of the veracity of the answer supplied by unlimited immigration’s most ardent supporters.
WTF?
“Immigrants” include Asians and “natives” includes blacks.
But it’s pretty clear that what people mean by immigrants is Hispanics and by natives they mean whites. Nobody cares that Hispanics commit less crimes then blacks, and Asian h1bs aren’t immigrating illegally.
In Europe where immigrant = Muslim especially refugee the crime issue is even starker.
That's not what "people" say but let's assume you are correct about what they mean. That changes things quite a bit but my rough estimate is that Illegal Hispanic immigrants commit crime at rates no worse than native whites.
- CATO included stats for illegal immigrants. That pretty much excludes Asians, at least until very recently.
- Drawing from memory that might be faulty, blacks commit about half the murders in the US. If other crime rates are similar, that suggests white crime rates are similar to illegal Hispanic immigrants.
Data on this exists.
Hispanics do have higher crime rates. Obviously nowhere near black levels, but higher.
Like all things Hispanic it varies signifanctely based on source demographics and place of settlement. Hispanic crime is more gang focused rather then individual in the case of blacks, and as such is worse in cities.
Crime is one statistic where Hispanics do worse in the 2nd generation then the first (things like income and English usually improve). They appear to assimilate to underclass American norms, and fear of deportation is gone. The one group that bucks this trend is Puerto Ricans, but for a bad reason. They have high crime already I. The 1st generation, so it doesn’t get worse. This is likely because Puerto Rico is already part of the USA.
Regardless of more of less crime committed by natives vs immigrants (Hispanic or otherwise) I still hold that the problem is that we don’t punish crime. Even when we catch the criminals we don’t prosecute much of the time. Most of the crime is committed by a few criminals in an 80/20 situation, yet we let repeat offenders go. With or or without immigration that is a recipe for high crime.
Police have no grounds to inquire about immigration status in my state. I have no idea how stats could ever be collected in that case, but I do have an idea why it would have become the norm.
Recently the bubbas in the state Lege tried one of their feckless efforts to change this situation, in some probably mild fashion - but while they always have plenty of leeway to do the stupid things they want to do, they are like a little kid going up against an NFL linebacker whenever they’ve chanced upon an obviously correct notion and try to outwit the federal government.
They will always be out lawyered.
This is why I have less reverence for “rule of law” than most.
Google "do immigrants commit more crime"
From CATO:
"The results are similar to our other work on illegal immigration and crime in Texas. In 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants, and 1,422 per 100,000 native‐born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45 percent below that of native‐born Americans in Texas. The general pattern of native‐born Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowest holds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes."
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-research-illegal-immigration-crime-0
Not only that, but it says that Texas keeps records of immigration status of those arrested.
“CATO”.
Police do not determine guilt. Immigration status is determined before sentencing, if not before the conviction.
“Conviction”.
That’s true, but it is also true of natives. As I understand it there is a pretty high correlation between public assistance program utilization and crime, which makes me suspect that deporting criminal immigrants lowers the burden there, too.
Can’t help you on the public school aspect… ending the public school system is a good idea but a bit of a stretch.
"Most immigrant theft is of the legal variety - food stamps, public education, Medicaid, etc."
Never mind that illegal immigrants can't collect food stamps or qualify for Medicaid. (yes, their children born in US can.) You want to bet on which is greater? (1) the theft you describe (2) payments into Soc Sec that they will never collect on.
I have no idea how you are determining legal and illegal as applies to our conversation prior to your last comment but an employer legally has to pay soc sec taxes regardless of whether the employee is working legally and the illegal immigrants legally can't collect soc sec. It seems irrelevant to the subject of our conversation whether the employment is legal or the ss# used is legal.
As for what illegal immigrants "cost," that is extremely subjective in how one counts what but it has another flaw. We have a shortage of workers and we have a birth rate below the replacement level. One could argue illegal immigrants, almost entirely workers and children, are needed to fill a void, regardless of whether we would prefer this be addressed through legal means. Calling it a cost seems to miss the bigger picture.
Agreed. I would point out though that back paying hospitals for uncompensated care is a really big issue in general, with or without immigrants. (Legal or otherwise.)
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there IS more persecution of heterodox thinking within academia, how do we know it is a “feminine” trait or the result of more women in academia. And even if in one’s heart of hearts one is convinced that it IS because of more women in academia, is highlighting that (which even if true may not be necessarily true) the best way to promote more diverse viewpoints?
Trying to find the cause (as opposed to assuming one knows the cause) seems very useful if not also a necessity.
That is part of my point. We do not know the cause. Labeling it "feminism" may send us on a wild good chase.
“Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”
I get that treating men and women "the same" (without prejudice or discrimination?) frees them up to express numerous differences. In what instance does treating them different make them the same?
If Weber meant by 'fraternal ethics' something on the order of what Hayek discussed in the first chapter of The Fatal Conceit - "rules of solidarity and altruism" "adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed" - then I think you are too harsh on him. Hayek continued, meaning by 'natural', 'instinctual' and 'good' the above-mentioned rules and behavior,
---
Thus, forming superindividual patterns or systems of cooperation required individuals to change their `natural' or `instinctual' responses to others, something strongly resisted. That such conflicts with inborn instincts, `private vices', as Bernard Mandeville described them, might
turn out to be `public benefits', and that men had to restrain some `good' instincts in order to develop the extended order, are conclusions that became the source of dissension later too. For example, Rousseau took the side of the `natural' although his contemporary Hume clearly
saw that `so noble an affection [as generosity] instead of fitting men for large societies, is almost as contrary to them, as the most narrow selfishness' (1739/1886: 11, 270).
---
What Hayek calls the extended order makes use of 'fraternal ethics', certainly, but it also restricts it in important and 'unnatural', painful ways, and that is where Protestantism might come in (or, more than likely, co-evolved).
"The real fun begins when you try to cancel after the trial subscription period is over and your credit card has just been charged some outrageous amount."
It is sometimes easier to cancel the card with its unique number than to get a subscription cancelled.
Even better - Last I knew some cards (Discover?) would give you a one-time use number if you were worried about the honesty of a vendor. That might be te best solution.
I don't know, but it's possible that they could try to ding one's credit record. On the one hand it seems like it wouldn't be worth it on their part and maybe risk getting them into trouble on some kind of prohibited debt collection practices rule, but on the other hand it could just be a standard practice in the industry, fully automated, and thus nearly costless to them. I look at the combination of 'trial' and "give me your credit card info and the right to charge you again in the future without your affirmation" as a certain recipe for mischief and thus subject to blanket prohibition as personally haram.