By Ross Mackenzie
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The primary campaigns have featured little discussion about energy.
Democrats tend to favor renewable fuels (solar, wind) and biofuels such as ethanol, but the prospects for such fuels adding much to the energy mix are limited. Democrats also favor tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and imposing strict emission controls for petroleum power — carbon output regulation (with federal penalties) and bagging stacks.
They favor reduction of gasoline usage through mandated fuel efficiencies (as in legislation signed by President Bush last month). They favor “excess profits” taxes on oil companies (remember?). And they favor international accords (e.g., Kyoto), wherein we would limit our industrial output while subsidizing Third World economies that lack our manufacturing capacity.
Republicans tend to favor building more nuclear plants (none authorized since the mid-1970s) and more oil refineries (none built in generally the same period). They also favor drilling on federal lands (e.g., the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge) and on the outer continental shelf.
To get the nation unhooked from petroleum long-term, Republicans favor — as well — incentives for nuclear-plant construction and tax credits for research and development of non-petroleum, alternative-fuel (especially hydrogen-driven) cars.
Generally, what Democrats favor Republicans oppose — and what Republicans favor Democrats oppose. This is why Washington accomplishes little to reduce our dependence on foreign petroleum. And so, our foreign oil habit grows ever worse, with our principal suppliers (or, to continue the metaphor, dealers )too often regimes and autocrats accustomed to making their way in the world detesting Uncle Sam. Their economies require that we continue to be hooked on their oil.
When the Democrats controlled Congress, they did little to break our foreign-oil habit. When the Republicans controlled Congress, they lacked sufficient numbers or sufficient leadership to overcome Democratic obstructionism fostered by “greens” clustered on the eco-left. And the 1990s, for instance, boasted a mere $8 for a barrel of crude — and the consequently soaring “Clinton economy.” In the year of their most recent congressional control (2007), the Democrats felt insufficiently moved by the crisis of our foreign oil habit to do much about it.
Now oil (in December) has topped $100 a barrel. The foreign percentage of our total petroleum usage stands at all-time highs. And the federal pols are pushing stimulus packages to ignite a recessioning economy.
For their part, many foreign countries are going nuclear in big ways. Nuclear power produces about 19 percent of U.S. power generation, with seven new reactors now in early-planning stages — at last. France, by contrast, is self-sufficient for 79 percent of its energy, most of it nuclear-generated; it is a net nuclear-power exporter.
Notes French President Nicolas Sarkozy:
“I cannot forget that nuclear energy contributes in a decisive manner to the three objectives of our energy policy as defined by French law: to guarantee national independence in energy and the security of supply; to take action against the greenhouse effect (of carbon emissions); and to make sure that the price of electricity remains competitive and stable.
With the OPEC cartel’s 12 members controlling 77 percent of proven petroleum reserves, 40 percent of today’s supplies, and 55 percent of the petroleum traded in global markets, they effectively determine price. Other countries — most of them non-oil exporters — see the problem clearly. That is why they are turning to nuclear power generation. At least 78 new reactors now are planned, including: six in South Korea, eight in Russia, 10 in India, 11 in Japan, and 30 (yes) in China.
To too many, the cry “energy independence” translates into: “keep the U.S. independent of domestic oil.”
Yet while we develop hydrogen cars and triple or quadruple our nuclear-power reliance, we easily could (a) access more of our domestic petroleum, (b) build more refining capacity, and (c) as the Saudi Arabia of coal, use more of our black gold. And we could do those things if, politically, ideologized greens would let us — let us employ new, greatly cleaner technologies, to drill and burn.
The tide may be turning. Among others Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, and Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and an early principal in the environmentalist movement, have moved away from their dogmatic opposition to nuclear energy. Brand views it as a way to “decarbonize energy production.”
It’s almost enough to make one weep with joy. Could such enlightenment spread to the Democrats, so in thrall to the greens, and persuade them finally to work with the Republicans in breaking our foreign-oil addiction? To stick it to the OPECs who detest us as we enrich them by driving ourselves down on their oil — and thereby to gain our own energy independence — we may stand at the brink of a historic bipartisan moment.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Reagan 'Myth'
By William Rusher
Thursday, January 31, 2008
It's slowly dawning on the liberals that it's not going to be enough to ignore Ronald Reagan. Like it or not, they're going to have to take him on, head-first, and try to convince the American people, or at least the historians of his era, that he was a fundamentally bad guy.
I don't envy them the job. Reagan was an immensely popular president. Not long after his retirement I told him, in a private conversation, that I thought his historical popularity would follow the trajectory of most of his predecessors' -- declining somewhat at first, then rising again till he assumed at last his proper place in the presidential pantheon.
I was wrong. Right from the start, after he left the White House, commentators on both the right and the left have recognized him as one of the major presidents of the 20th century, who shaped the country's policies and future in important ways. This is already, clearly, the judgment of history, and there is nothing the liberals can do about it.
They can, however, try to distort his achievements. For a long time they pretty much neglected this, preferring to hope that, if they just ignored him, his memory would gradually fade. But it has failed to do so. On the contrary, he is as alive as ever in the memory of the American people, and is almost (if not quite) universally beloved. It is positively comical to see how all of the Republican presidential wannabes, in election after election, proclaim themselves "Reagan Republicans," and vie for the honor of wearing his mantle. It is almost the exact equivalent of the fetish the Democrats have made of FDR.
As you might expect, some of the current crop of Democratic politicians are not above trying to get a little of the Reagan glory to rub off on them. One of the most recent is Barack Obama, who told a Nevada newspaper that Reagan had offered America a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." This is incontestably true, but Obama neglected to couple it with some balancing words of condemnation that certain of his Democratic colleagues apparently felt were necessary.
So Obama has been landed on by the gatekeepers of the Democratic shrine, for whom Ronald Reagan was -- and must always be portrayed as -- irremediably evil. Thus Paul Krugman, who embarrasses even the Op-Ed page of The New York Times with his frantic liberalism, bluntly declared, "the furor over Obama's praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics."
Krugman follows this up with a column's worth of tendentious denunciations of Reagan's policies: "Reaganomics failed. ... The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. ... (T)he inevitable recession arrived (in the Bush years).... There wasn't any resurgence (in productivity)." Etc., etc.
In all of this, of course, Krugman misses the point. Perhaps more accurately, he avoids the point. Arguing over this or that aspect of Reagan's economic record misses the true significance of the man as totally as the Liberty-League nitpickers of the mid-1930s missed the significance of Franklin Roosevelt. It wasn't FDR's grotesque economics, or his disastrous court-packing plan, that made the New Deal memorable and popular. It was the man's panache, and his obvious confidence in the fundamental strength and vitality of American society, that endeared him to the voters.
Similarly, what characterized Ronald Reagan, and made him memorable, was his pride in this country and in its commitment to the principles of freedom, both here and abroad. Americans saw in him a reflection of their own nobility, and responded to it. That is the mark of a true leader, and that is what the Reagan "myth" was really about.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
It's slowly dawning on the liberals that it's not going to be enough to ignore Ronald Reagan. Like it or not, they're going to have to take him on, head-first, and try to convince the American people, or at least the historians of his era, that he was a fundamentally bad guy.
I don't envy them the job. Reagan was an immensely popular president. Not long after his retirement I told him, in a private conversation, that I thought his historical popularity would follow the trajectory of most of his predecessors' -- declining somewhat at first, then rising again till he assumed at last his proper place in the presidential pantheon.
I was wrong. Right from the start, after he left the White House, commentators on both the right and the left have recognized him as one of the major presidents of the 20th century, who shaped the country's policies and future in important ways. This is already, clearly, the judgment of history, and there is nothing the liberals can do about it.
They can, however, try to distort his achievements. For a long time they pretty much neglected this, preferring to hope that, if they just ignored him, his memory would gradually fade. But it has failed to do so. On the contrary, he is as alive as ever in the memory of the American people, and is almost (if not quite) universally beloved. It is positively comical to see how all of the Republican presidential wannabes, in election after election, proclaim themselves "Reagan Republicans," and vie for the honor of wearing his mantle. It is almost the exact equivalent of the fetish the Democrats have made of FDR.
As you might expect, some of the current crop of Democratic politicians are not above trying to get a little of the Reagan glory to rub off on them. One of the most recent is Barack Obama, who told a Nevada newspaper that Reagan had offered America a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." This is incontestably true, but Obama neglected to couple it with some balancing words of condemnation that certain of his Democratic colleagues apparently felt were necessary.
So Obama has been landed on by the gatekeepers of the Democratic shrine, for whom Ronald Reagan was -- and must always be portrayed as -- irremediably evil. Thus Paul Krugman, who embarrasses even the Op-Ed page of The New York Times with his frantic liberalism, bluntly declared, "the furor over Obama's praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics."
Krugman follows this up with a column's worth of tendentious denunciations of Reagan's policies: "Reaganomics failed. ... The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. ... (T)he inevitable recession arrived (in the Bush years).... There wasn't any resurgence (in productivity)." Etc., etc.
In all of this, of course, Krugman misses the point. Perhaps more accurately, he avoids the point. Arguing over this or that aspect of Reagan's economic record misses the true significance of the man as totally as the Liberty-League nitpickers of the mid-1930s missed the significance of Franklin Roosevelt. It wasn't FDR's grotesque economics, or his disastrous court-packing plan, that made the New Deal memorable and popular. It was the man's panache, and his obvious confidence in the fundamental strength and vitality of American society, that endeared him to the voters.
Similarly, what characterized Ronald Reagan, and made him memorable, was his pride in this country and in its commitment to the principles of freedom, both here and abroad. Americans saw in him a reflection of their own nobility, and responded to it. That is the mark of a true leader, and that is what the Reagan "myth" was really about.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
The Politics of Foreclosure
By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Who says bipartisanship is dead? From President Bush to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, to Mitt Romney and John McCain, virtually everyone in Washington agrees: The government must Do Something to stop home foreclosures across the country. These leaders agree on the total presumption of homeowner innocence. The borrower-as-victim and lender-as-predator storylines are etched in stone. Can't let reality get in the way of election-year pander-monium.
Special guests at the State of the Union address are usually extraordinary heroes, entrepreneurs or citizens who've gone above and beyond the call of duty. On Monday night, one of those guests was an Indiana woman whose claim to fame is that she called a 1-800 number and was assisted by the "Hope Now Alliance," a group Bush convened, which, according to him, "is helping many struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure."
Subprime victims are the new heroes. Welcome to the politics of foreclosure.
Housing Czarina Hillary immediately jumped on the president's address and on news that foreclosure rates skyrocketed 79 percent over the last year. She reiterated her call for "a 90-day foreclosure moratorium on subprime mortgages and a 5-year freeze in rates on subprime loans." Borrowers who knowingly bought more house than they could pay for have no place in Hillary's world. "It is indisputable that brokers and mortgage companies lured families into mortgages that were designed to end in foreclosure," she stated in a Denver Post questionnaire this week.
Continuing the theme of duped borrowers, Sen. Chuck Schumer is crusading for more federally subsidized "mortgage counseling." He wants $200 million more, in addition to the $180 million for "Housing Counseling Assistance" that he helped stick into the omnibus spending bill last year. A significant portion of that will go to government-approved counselors affiliated with left-wing activist groups such as La Raza and ACORN.
I certainly have sympathy for borrowers who may have been misled. But for every "predatory lender" out there, you can find a predatory borrower. For every fraud-minded loan officer or mortgage broker, you can find a homeowner who secured financing and bought a home he knew he couldn't afford with little money down and bogus or no income verification. Washington is silent about this reckless behavior, which it is encouraging both tacitly and explicitly.
Now comes word from California that some of these homeowners Washington is rushing to rescue are simply walking away -- abandoning their mortgage commitments and contractual obligations. Poof: "Foreclose me. ... I'll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I'll save my money and I'll move on," one homeowner blithely told the Los Angeles Times this week.
The stigma of default is gone. Political rhetoric absolving borrowers of their responsibilities -- and encouraging them to spend, spend, spend even more -- has made it possible. And so has federal legislation intended to "help." The omnibus spending bill passed last year prevents the IRS from taxing mortgage forgiveness as income up to $1 million for a two-year period.
Finance blog Calculated Risk reported last week that increasing numbers of homeowners are walking away from their homes by choice. A Wachovia executive noted during a conference call that they are "people that have otherwise had the capacity to pay, but have basically just decided not to because they feel like they've lost equity, value in their properties..." Some are bailing for cheaper homes in the same neighborhoods. There's even a term that's become popular over the last couple of years -- "Jingle Mail" -- that describes when homeowners cut loose and mail in the keys to the bank. Ho, ho, ho.
The true victims in this "crisis" are those who paid for homes within their means and those who waited to enter the housing market. A reader in New York City wrote me last week:
"My husband and I patiently sat back and watched while our friends made a killing in real estate over the past six years. … Now, after several years, we are ready to move to the 'burbs, and we feel it is responsible people like us who are going to get hurt by this mortgage mess. We're the ones who have to sit back and wait for housing prices to fall, while our government, looking to protect only the homeowners, keeps prices artificially high with bailout programs and artificially low interest rates.
"What about programs to help out renters who didn't make any money in this bubble because we were responsible? What about government intervention to lower the still-high housing prices so we aren't locked out of the market? A natural correction in the housing market is in order, but the government seems hellbent to prevent it from taking place. In the meantime, we are priced out of the market because we aren't willing to get in over our heads financially (unlike some of these revered homeowners)."
Sorry, responsible Americans. There's no seat at the next State of the Union address, or the next Hillary Rescue roundtable, for you.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Who says bipartisanship is dead? From President Bush to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, to Mitt Romney and John McCain, virtually everyone in Washington agrees: The government must Do Something to stop home foreclosures across the country. These leaders agree on the total presumption of homeowner innocence. The borrower-as-victim and lender-as-predator storylines are etched in stone. Can't let reality get in the way of election-year pander-monium.
Special guests at the State of the Union address are usually extraordinary heroes, entrepreneurs or citizens who've gone above and beyond the call of duty. On Monday night, one of those guests was an Indiana woman whose claim to fame is that she called a 1-800 number and was assisted by the "Hope Now Alliance," a group Bush convened, which, according to him, "is helping many struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure."
Subprime victims are the new heroes. Welcome to the politics of foreclosure.
Housing Czarina Hillary immediately jumped on the president's address and on news that foreclosure rates skyrocketed 79 percent over the last year. She reiterated her call for "a 90-day foreclosure moratorium on subprime mortgages and a 5-year freeze in rates on subprime loans." Borrowers who knowingly bought more house than they could pay for have no place in Hillary's world. "It is indisputable that brokers and mortgage companies lured families into mortgages that were designed to end in foreclosure," she stated in a Denver Post questionnaire this week.
Continuing the theme of duped borrowers, Sen. Chuck Schumer is crusading for more federally subsidized "mortgage counseling." He wants $200 million more, in addition to the $180 million for "Housing Counseling Assistance" that he helped stick into the omnibus spending bill last year. A significant portion of that will go to government-approved counselors affiliated with left-wing activist groups such as La Raza and ACORN.
I certainly have sympathy for borrowers who may have been misled. But for every "predatory lender" out there, you can find a predatory borrower. For every fraud-minded loan officer or mortgage broker, you can find a homeowner who secured financing and bought a home he knew he couldn't afford with little money down and bogus or no income verification. Washington is silent about this reckless behavior, which it is encouraging both tacitly and explicitly.
Now comes word from California that some of these homeowners Washington is rushing to rescue are simply walking away -- abandoning their mortgage commitments and contractual obligations. Poof: "Foreclose me. ... I'll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I'll save my money and I'll move on," one homeowner blithely told the Los Angeles Times this week.
The stigma of default is gone. Political rhetoric absolving borrowers of their responsibilities -- and encouraging them to spend, spend, spend even more -- has made it possible. And so has federal legislation intended to "help." The omnibus spending bill passed last year prevents the IRS from taxing mortgage forgiveness as income up to $1 million for a two-year period.
Finance blog Calculated Risk reported last week that increasing numbers of homeowners are walking away from their homes by choice. A Wachovia executive noted during a conference call that they are "people that have otherwise had the capacity to pay, but have basically just decided not to because they feel like they've lost equity, value in their properties..." Some are bailing for cheaper homes in the same neighborhoods. There's even a term that's become popular over the last couple of years -- "Jingle Mail" -- that describes when homeowners cut loose and mail in the keys to the bank. Ho, ho, ho.
The true victims in this "crisis" are those who paid for homes within their means and those who waited to enter the housing market. A reader in New York City wrote me last week:
"My husband and I patiently sat back and watched while our friends made a killing in real estate over the past six years. … Now, after several years, we are ready to move to the 'burbs, and we feel it is responsible people like us who are going to get hurt by this mortgage mess. We're the ones who have to sit back and wait for housing prices to fall, while our government, looking to protect only the homeowners, keeps prices artificially high with bailout programs and artificially low interest rates.
"What about programs to help out renters who didn't make any money in this bubble because we were responsible? What about government intervention to lower the still-high housing prices so we aren't locked out of the market? A natural correction in the housing market is in order, but the government seems hellbent to prevent it from taking place. In the meantime, we are priced out of the market because we aren't willing to get in over our heads financially (unlike some of these revered homeowners)."
Sorry, responsible Americans. There's no seat at the next State of the Union address, or the next Hillary Rescue roundtable, for you.
Who's Afraid of Prosperity?
By John Stossel
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Should we worry that the people of China, India and other undeveloped countries are getting richer? Apparently so, according to the newspapers and the "experts" they quote. They don't come right out and say that global prosperity is bad for us. Instead they say, as The New York Times recently said, "As development rolls across once-destitute countries at a breakneck pace, lifting billions out of poverty, demand for food, metals and fuel is red-hot, and suppliers are struggling to meet it. Prices are spiraling, and Americans find themselves in what amounts to a bidding war with overseas buyers for products as diverse as milk and gasoline [http://tinyurl.com/2m6m8n]."
It is certainly true that China's economy is expanding dramatically -- 10 percent last year. The Chinese build factories like crazy to pump out the inexpensive exports we Americans love to buy. To do that, Chinese producers have to purchase oil, steel and lots of other commodities. The new demand drives prices up.
And as the Chinese and other people get richer, they improve their diets and eat more meat, putting pressure on world food prices.
So media handwringers suggest we should worry about the poor becoming rich.
Actually, we shouldn't. It would be a sad world if one person's economic success depended on another's failure?
More of us would understand this if we learned what the great economics writer Henry Hazlitt preached in his classic book, "Economics in One Lesson": "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy."
In the short run, richer Chinese and Indians bid up the prices of things. But that's just the beginning of the story. Increased demand and higher prices create opportunities for entrepreneurs.
When the price of, say, oil goes up, entrepreneurs and inventors have a strong incentive to: 1) find more, 2) find alternatives, and 3) find ways to use oil more efficiently. You and I cannot foresee what they will invent, but that means nothing. Predictions about the end of progress have been issued countless times. There is no reason to think they will be right this time.
Assuming government stays out of the way. Our current "leaders" are full of promises about "protecting" workers and industries, creating new "green" industries, and starting worker-retraining programs. For example, Hillary Clinton promises government support for "research (to) stimulate the development of new technologies and life-saving medicines [http://tinyurl.com/37zo3s]." Mitt Romney wants "to initiate a bold, far-reaching research initiative -- an Energy Revolution, if you will. It will be our generation's equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the mission to the moon [http://tinyurl.com/3a92ut]."
The media lap it up, apparently believing that no one will produce unless our wise leaders create an inducement. Nonsense.
The market would deliver the goods if government doesn't impose crippling regulations and tax away everyone's capital to fund its coercive utopian schemes. I like what Henry David Thoreau once said: "This government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way."
George Mason University economist Alexander Tabarrok has another way to demonstrate the benefits of spreading prosperity. Tabarrok wrote in Forbes [http://tinyurl.com/32hqw3] recently that the bigger the market, the more worthwhile it is for companies to make products that require costly research and development, such as medicines and chemicals. As the Chinese and Indians become more able to buy things, businesses everywhere will find it profitable to make products that yesterday weren't profitable enough. The result will be cures for diseases and other products that make our lives better.
Tabarrok takes this a step further: "Amazingly, there are only about 6 million scientists and engineers in the entire world, nearly a quarter of whom are in the U.S. Poverty means that millions of potentially world-class scientists today spend their lives trying to eke out a subsistence living, rather than leading mankind's charge into the future. But if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the U.S. and were devoting the same share of population to research and development, there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers worldwide."
When it comes to being wealthy, the more the merrier.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Should we worry that the people of China, India and other undeveloped countries are getting richer? Apparently so, according to the newspapers and the "experts" they quote. They don't come right out and say that global prosperity is bad for us. Instead they say, as The New York Times recently said, "As development rolls across once-destitute countries at a breakneck pace, lifting billions out of poverty, demand for food, metals and fuel is red-hot, and suppliers are struggling to meet it. Prices are spiraling, and Americans find themselves in what amounts to a bidding war with overseas buyers for products as diverse as milk and gasoline [http://tinyurl.com/2m6m8n]."
It is certainly true that China's economy is expanding dramatically -- 10 percent last year. The Chinese build factories like crazy to pump out the inexpensive exports we Americans love to buy. To do that, Chinese producers have to purchase oil, steel and lots of other commodities. The new demand drives prices up.
And as the Chinese and other people get richer, they improve their diets and eat more meat, putting pressure on world food prices.
So media handwringers suggest we should worry about the poor becoming rich.
Actually, we shouldn't. It would be a sad world if one person's economic success depended on another's failure?
More of us would understand this if we learned what the great economics writer Henry Hazlitt preached in his classic book, "Economics in One Lesson": "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy."
In the short run, richer Chinese and Indians bid up the prices of things. But that's just the beginning of the story. Increased demand and higher prices create opportunities for entrepreneurs.
When the price of, say, oil goes up, entrepreneurs and inventors have a strong incentive to: 1) find more, 2) find alternatives, and 3) find ways to use oil more efficiently. You and I cannot foresee what they will invent, but that means nothing. Predictions about the end of progress have been issued countless times. There is no reason to think they will be right this time.
Assuming government stays out of the way. Our current "leaders" are full of promises about "protecting" workers and industries, creating new "green" industries, and starting worker-retraining programs. For example, Hillary Clinton promises government support for "research (to) stimulate the development of new technologies and life-saving medicines [http://tinyurl.com/37zo3s]." Mitt Romney wants "to initiate a bold, far-reaching research initiative -- an Energy Revolution, if you will. It will be our generation's equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the mission to the moon [http://tinyurl.com/3a92ut]."
The media lap it up, apparently believing that no one will produce unless our wise leaders create an inducement. Nonsense.
The market would deliver the goods if government doesn't impose crippling regulations and tax away everyone's capital to fund its coercive utopian schemes. I like what Henry David Thoreau once said: "This government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way."
George Mason University economist Alexander Tabarrok has another way to demonstrate the benefits of spreading prosperity. Tabarrok wrote in Forbes [http://tinyurl.com/32hqw3] recently that the bigger the market, the more worthwhile it is for companies to make products that require costly research and development, such as medicines and chemicals. As the Chinese and Indians become more able to buy things, businesses everywhere will find it profitable to make products that yesterday weren't profitable enough. The result will be cures for diseases and other products that make our lives better.
Tabarrok takes this a step further: "Amazingly, there are only about 6 million scientists and engineers in the entire world, nearly a quarter of whom are in the U.S. Poverty means that millions of potentially world-class scientists today spend their lives trying to eke out a subsistence living, rather than leading mankind's charge into the future. But if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the U.S. and were devoting the same share of population to research and development, there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers worldwide."
When it comes to being wealthy, the more the merrier.
Confession
By Paul Greenberg
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
A curious reader of our editorial page here at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wants to know if we publish every Paul Krugman column we get from the New York Times Syndicate or just the gloomy ones.
It is wholly a pleasure to satisfy Curious Reader's curiosity:
Sir, they are all gloomy, and have been since my memory runneth not to the contrary.
But, no, we don't publish every Paul Krugman column we get.
For that matter, we don't - and couldn't - publish all the work of any single syndicated columnist, there's so much out there in the not so brave new world of electronic cyberspace, where anybody can be his own pundit, even anonymously.
I think, Descartes declared, therefore I am. Today it's: I blog, therefore I am.
But before I start sniffing at these mere amateurs, allow me to be candid on that subject, too: The proliferation of blogs may be much closer than oh-so-respectable journalism to the freedom of the press envisioned by the authors of the First Amendment. They lived in a world of pamphleteers in which the readers were the judge of quality, not some distant authority cloaked in a Ph.D. with a magisterial column in the New York Almighty Times.
Respectability may be a far greater enemy of freedom of thought than the wildest array of opinions on the net. In the Golden Age of television, which was really more like brass, the whole country tuned in to Walter Cronkite on CBS every evening to see the proper way to react to the news. (The really adventurous might try NBC's Huntley-Brinkley on occasion.) Those were the days when the gamut of American opinion ran from A to B. Give me the wild, wild net any time.
Which brings me to the respectable if not dowdy Dr. Krugman. His mantra not only of the day but of the Bush Years has been that we stand on the edge of worldwide economic collapse, another Great Depression, widespread panic, and maybe an asteroid shower to top off Global Warming. A collection of his columns would beat any disaster movie ever made, including Al Gore's. After reading Dr. Krugman first thing in the morning, it's a wonder Times readers have the strength to finish their breakfast. What's the point?
The only thing funny about the professor's oeuvre is his prose, as in his philippic against the Bush tax cuts years ago, a tax cut that launched one of the great growth spurts of the American economy: "And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg."
Just try to picture all those unhatched chickens coming home to roost only to find the nest egg gone. That's good for a smile on even the cloudiest day.
This does not mean that Professor Krugman's lamentations are without their uses. While not printing them all, we do save the most depressing for those times when the economy seems to need a real boost. What with all the talk of recession in the air, the stock market skidding, the Fed cutting its interest rate like mad, the president and Congress hurrying to do something even if it's wrong, the time had come to roll out the ultimate weapon: a Paul Krugman column. Maybe two in succession. Desperate times required desperate measures.
Sure enough, the Dow promptly proceeded to rise more than 600 points from its morning nadir Wednesday to close some 300 points higher for the day, or up 2.5 percent. It was the biggest swing in a single day's trading since 2002. Once again the professor had worked his magic.
Who knows if it'll take? Or should? There may be worse things than an overdue recession of short duration - like cures that only inflate the dollar instead of strengthening the economy, and could lead to a return of Carter Era stagflation.
But there's little doubt that Paul Krugman's voodoo still works, if not in the way intended. This guy may be the greatest prophet since Balaam. Every curse he utters has a way of turning into a blessing.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
A curious reader of our editorial page here at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wants to know if we publish every Paul Krugman column we get from the New York Times Syndicate or just the gloomy ones.
It is wholly a pleasure to satisfy Curious Reader's curiosity:
Sir, they are all gloomy, and have been since my memory runneth not to the contrary.
But, no, we don't publish every Paul Krugman column we get.
For that matter, we don't - and couldn't - publish all the work of any single syndicated columnist, there's so much out there in the not so brave new world of electronic cyberspace, where anybody can be his own pundit, even anonymously.
I think, Descartes declared, therefore I am. Today it's: I blog, therefore I am.
But before I start sniffing at these mere amateurs, allow me to be candid on that subject, too: The proliferation of blogs may be much closer than oh-so-respectable journalism to the freedom of the press envisioned by the authors of the First Amendment. They lived in a world of pamphleteers in which the readers were the judge of quality, not some distant authority cloaked in a Ph.D. with a magisterial column in the New York Almighty Times.
Respectability may be a far greater enemy of freedom of thought than the wildest array of opinions on the net. In the Golden Age of television, which was really more like brass, the whole country tuned in to Walter Cronkite on CBS every evening to see the proper way to react to the news. (The really adventurous might try NBC's Huntley-Brinkley on occasion.) Those were the days when the gamut of American opinion ran from A to B. Give me the wild, wild net any time.
Which brings me to the respectable if not dowdy Dr. Krugman. His mantra not only of the day but of the Bush Years has been that we stand on the edge of worldwide economic collapse, another Great Depression, widespread panic, and maybe an asteroid shower to top off Global Warming. A collection of his columns would beat any disaster movie ever made, including Al Gore's. After reading Dr. Krugman first thing in the morning, it's a wonder Times readers have the strength to finish their breakfast. What's the point?
The only thing funny about the professor's oeuvre is his prose, as in his philippic against the Bush tax cuts years ago, a tax cut that launched one of the great growth spurts of the American economy: "And when the chickens that didn't hatch come home to roost, we will rue the day when, misled by sloppy accounting and rosy scenarios, we gave away the national nest egg."
Just try to picture all those unhatched chickens coming home to roost only to find the nest egg gone. That's good for a smile on even the cloudiest day.
This does not mean that Professor Krugman's lamentations are without their uses. While not printing them all, we do save the most depressing for those times when the economy seems to need a real boost. What with all the talk of recession in the air, the stock market skidding, the Fed cutting its interest rate like mad, the president and Congress hurrying to do something even if it's wrong, the time had come to roll out the ultimate weapon: a Paul Krugman column. Maybe two in succession. Desperate times required desperate measures.
Sure enough, the Dow promptly proceeded to rise more than 600 points from its morning nadir Wednesday to close some 300 points higher for the day, or up 2.5 percent. It was the biggest swing in a single day's trading since 2002. Once again the professor had worked his magic.
Who knows if it'll take? Or should? There may be worse things than an overdue recession of short duration - like cures that only inflate the dollar instead of strengthening the economy, and could lead to a return of Carter Era stagflation.
But there's little doubt that Paul Krugman's voodoo still works, if not in the way intended. This guy may be the greatest prophet since Balaam. Every curse he utters has a way of turning into a blessing.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Too Much "No" In NATO
By Ed Feulner
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
If the truth hurts, you can do two things: Get angry at the messenger, or fix the situation so the truth won’t hurt anymore.
Recently, Defense Secretary Robert Gates engaged in some truth-telling that hurt some of our allies. When asked about the progress of the war in Afghanistan (which is officially under NATO control), he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations.”
Gates later made it clear that he respected the contributions made by troops from specific nations, including Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. But his overall criticism is valid.
Let’s do the math. Roughly 41,000 NATO forces are in Afghanistan. Some 19,000 -- nearly half -- are U.S. troops. The remaining 22,000 come from a combined 38 NATO and non-NATO member nations. Too many of these alliance members are punching below their weight.
For example, Germany has 3,200 troops in Afghanistan, and commands NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the north. But Germans are not allowed to deploy more than two hours from a “role two medical facility,” a stationary hospital set up to perform emergency surgery. That, clearly, limits German deployments.
So do the restrictions on their helicopter pilots, who won’t fly after dark. Other NATO forces have been forced to call off missions when the German pilots left the field in mid-afternoon so they could return to their base before sundown.
As a Norwegian officer told The Times of London, “It’s hopeless. We were attacking the bad guys, then [at] three or four o’clock, the helicopters are leaving.” That attack stalled, by the way, until American Humvees arrived to reinforce it the next day.
Financial contributions are wanting as well.
Last year 20 of the 26 NATO members spent less than a meager 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. By comparison, the United States spends just under 4 percent, and that’s barely adequate for our needs. Our allies must stop relying on Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for their defense.
As evidence, consider NATO’s lack of planes. There’s no point to having an intercontinental military alliance if you can’t deploy its forces quickly across long distances. Yet when NATO wanted to send troops to Afghanistan, it had to borrow American C-17s, because it didn’t own a single aircraft capable of getting its forces there. NATO has agreed to buy several long-range aircraft, but the first won’t be delivered until later this year.
Finally, NATO must address its members’ lack of willingness to serve. In October 2006, Gen. James Jones -- then NATO’s top commander -- estimated that member nations had placed more than 100 restrictions on what their troops could do. At least half of those restrictions, he said, significantly hampered alliance operations. In fact, only six NATO nations placed no restrictions on the forces they sent to Afghanistan.
NATO was a critical reason the West won the Cold War. Just by existing, it proved to the Soviets that many nations were united against them, ready to defend freedom at a moment’s notice. To remain relevant, the alliance must beef up its forces to send the same message to today’s threat, radical Islam.
It’s worth noting that Gates’ criticism didn’t upset everyone, since some nations have well-trained troops. “U.K. forces have extensive experience in counterinsurgency” and maintain a “good working relationship with the U.S. and other NATO allies,” the British Ministry of Defense said.
Britain is confident because it knows its troops are prepared. The truth doesn’t hurt in London. But to make NATO the alliance it needs to be, we must extend that truth to more capitals across western Europe.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
If the truth hurts, you can do two things: Get angry at the messenger, or fix the situation so the truth won’t hurt anymore.
Recently, Defense Secretary Robert Gates engaged in some truth-telling that hurt some of our allies. When asked about the progress of the war in Afghanistan (which is officially under NATO control), he told the Los Angeles Times, “I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency operations.”
Gates later made it clear that he respected the contributions made by troops from specific nations, including Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. But his overall criticism is valid.
Let’s do the math. Roughly 41,000 NATO forces are in Afghanistan. Some 19,000 -- nearly half -- are U.S. troops. The remaining 22,000 come from a combined 38 NATO and non-NATO member nations. Too many of these alliance members are punching below their weight.
For example, Germany has 3,200 troops in Afghanistan, and commands NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in the north. But Germans are not allowed to deploy more than two hours from a “role two medical facility,” a stationary hospital set up to perform emergency surgery. That, clearly, limits German deployments.
So do the restrictions on their helicopter pilots, who won’t fly after dark. Other NATO forces have been forced to call off missions when the German pilots left the field in mid-afternoon so they could return to their base before sundown.
As a Norwegian officer told The Times of London, “It’s hopeless. We were attacking the bad guys, then [at] three or four o’clock, the helicopters are leaving.” That attack stalled, by the way, until American Humvees arrived to reinforce it the next day.
Financial contributions are wanting as well.
Last year 20 of the 26 NATO members spent less than a meager 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. By comparison, the United States spends just under 4 percent, and that’s barely adequate for our needs. Our allies must stop relying on Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for their defense.
As evidence, consider NATO’s lack of planes. There’s no point to having an intercontinental military alliance if you can’t deploy its forces quickly across long distances. Yet when NATO wanted to send troops to Afghanistan, it had to borrow American C-17s, because it didn’t own a single aircraft capable of getting its forces there. NATO has agreed to buy several long-range aircraft, but the first won’t be delivered until later this year.
Finally, NATO must address its members’ lack of willingness to serve. In October 2006, Gen. James Jones -- then NATO’s top commander -- estimated that member nations had placed more than 100 restrictions on what their troops could do. At least half of those restrictions, he said, significantly hampered alliance operations. In fact, only six NATO nations placed no restrictions on the forces they sent to Afghanistan.
NATO was a critical reason the West won the Cold War. Just by existing, it proved to the Soviets that many nations were united against them, ready to defend freedom at a moment’s notice. To remain relevant, the alliance must beef up its forces to send the same message to today’s threat, radical Islam.
It’s worth noting that Gates’ criticism didn’t upset everyone, since some nations have well-trained troops. “U.K. forces have extensive experience in counterinsurgency” and maintain a “good working relationship with the U.S. and other NATO allies,” the British Ministry of Defense said.
Britain is confident because it knows its troops are prepared. The truth doesn’t hurt in London. But to make NATO the alliance it needs to be, we must extend that truth to more capitals across western Europe.
A Response to "What You Have To Believe To Be a Republican Today"
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
For four years, a list of alleged Republican positions -- "What You Have To Believe To Be a Republican Today" -- has been circulating on the Internet and forwarded in countless e-mails. In this presidential election year, it is important to respond to these charges. If people want to vote for a Democratic president, they should not do so based on falsehoods about Republicans.
Given space limitations, I cannot respond to all of them. I have decided to respond to the 13 most significant.
"What you have to believe to be a Republican today":
1. "Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a 'we can't find Bin Laden.'"
Response: Saddam Hussein was always considered a bad guy by anyone with a working moral compass, and that included Democratic President Bill Clinton and his administration. The main reason that President Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein was so as to enable Saddam to fight against Iran so that Iran would not be the dominant power in the Muslim Middle East. Arming an evil man to fight another evil man does not make the former less of an evil man. America aided Stalin's genocidal Communist Soviet Union in order for him to better fight against Hitler. And after World War II, America aided some former Nazis in order to be able to fight Stalin. That is moral wisdom, not hypocrisy.
2. "Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony."
Response: For the left, the desire to normalize relations with Communist regimes has been a constant. Liberals who were not on the far left and conservatives alike fought some Communist regimes -- militarily as in Vietnam and Korea, and economically as in Cuba -- and normalized relations with some others. Mature people know that they have to pick and choose which evils can be fought and which cannot. Having said that, there are good arguments on both sides about whether to lift the embargo on Cuba since the fall of the Soviet Union.
3. "The United States should get out of the United Nations..."
Response: Very few Republicans advocate America getting out of the United Nations, but Republicans do regularly point out the UN's dismal record on human rights -- as when Sudan, a regime regarded even by most of the left as engaged in genocide, was made vice-chair (with Cuba) of the UN Human Rights Commission. The UN has failed virtually all victims of mass murder since its inception -- including most recently those in the Rwanda genocide. The UN has done commendable work on some health matters, but otherwise it has been worse than morally worthless. The UN has become a haven for the cruelest regimes on earth. The left's adulation of the UN is but one more example of its preference for institutions over fighting evil.
4. "A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation."
Response: Unlike those on the left, many Republicans, not to mention medical science, view a human fetus as having its own body and not being a mere extension of a woman's body. People can differ on the legality of early abortions -- not every immoral action is necessarily illegal -- but to belittle the killing of a human fetus for no medical reason as "a woman doing what she wants with her own body" is only one more example of the left's broken moral compass.
5. "Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton."
Response: No mainstream Republican or conservative has ever said that he or she, let alone Jesus, hates homosexuals. But because there is so much hatred on the left for Republicans and for religious conservatives, many on the left, like the writer of this list, constantly accuse Republicans and conservatives of being haters. It is usually projection.
6. "The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay."
Response: There are many ways to improve military morale. One is to increase the military budget, not to slash it as the Clinton administration did; to honor military heroes during wartime, not to feature front page article after front page article about troops who murder when they come home, as The New York Times has been doing for weeks, or publish fraudulent articles, as the New Republic recently did, about our troops committing atrocities; and to allow the military to recruit on college campuses, something many liberal colleges ban.
7. "If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex."
Response: While many Republicans believe that teenage sexual standards should be left to parents and not to schools, no mainstream Republican has ever argued, "If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex." But many people, not just Republicans, think that teaching "safe sex" to middle schoolers sends a message to young minds that society assumes they will have sexual intercourse. And what society assumes usually happens. When society assumed teenagers should not have sex, they rarely had it. For generations before schools put condoms on bananas, there was far less teenage sex because society has a profound impact on teenage sexual behavior. The message in schools since then has often been that the only reason not to have sex at age 16 (or 15 or 14) is that you might get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease. The portrayal of sex as almost exclusively a biological act has been one of contemporary liberalism's greatest sins against young people.
8. "HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart."
Response: Who ever said that? HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of their owners or stockholders at heart. The question is not whether companies want to make profits, it's whether individuals will have a choice about how to obtain health care, and whether the state should massively expand to create Canada-like socialist medicine with its triage and long waiting periods.
9. "Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools."
Response: Many conservatives and more than a few liberals argue that climate change has occurred throughout the earth's history, that carbon emission is therefore not the primary cause of the minimal warming that is taking place, and that the manmade-global warming-will-lead-to-worldwide-destruction scenario is therefore a form of hysteria -- as were the left's cries about heterosexual AIDS in America, the threat to mankind's future if people have more than one child, and breast implants, among many others. As for tobacco and cancer, no mainstream Republican argues that tobacco's link to cancer is junk science. The charge is deceitful. But many conservatives do believe that banning all outdoor smoking, for example, is both scientifically and morally indefensible. And few Republicans argue for Creationism in schools, but many do argue that, in addition to whatever science is taught, the idea that the universe was designed and all of existence is therefore not a random purposeless event might be both scientific and beneficial to students.
10. "A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy."
Response: Had President Clinton simply said to the American people, "I lied to save myself and my family public humiliation," the whole Monica Lewinsky matter would have died in a few weeks. It was his lying under oath while president that brought on the impeachment trial. Many decent people thought that was impeachable; many decent people thought it was not an impeachable offense. It was a tragic farce that America was preoccupied with semen stains for so long. Much of the blame goes to the news media, which a generation ago would never have reported the affair to begin with. As for President George W. Bush, he did not "lie" us into war, but used the best assessments that nearly all Western intelligence agencies provided concerning Saddam Hussein building weapons of mass destruction. When he was president, President Clinton warned of the exact same WMD threat from Saddam.
11. "Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet."
Response: No Republican argues that the Constitution now defines marriage. Many, however, want the American people, not judges, to decide how America defines marriage. And since some liberal judges will force states to redefine marriage to include marriage to a person of the same sex, a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman may be necessary. The charge that Republicans want to censor the Internet is a lie. It is, in any case, impossible. Moreover, it is the left that far more frequently advocates censorship, as it does, for example, on campuses where leftist students stifle conservative speakers' freedom of speech.
12. "Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery."
Response: Most conservatives and liberals believe that legalizing drugs would result in large numbers of young people using life-destroying drugs. As for Rush Limbaugh, he illegally acquired prescription painkillers for chronic back pain. Only people with hatred in their hearts can liken that to using heroin and other nonprescription drugs that crush lives.
13. "That Bush, who doesn't read newspapers, and who can't speak an intelligible paragraph on his own (not written for him), is intelligent enough to rid the planet Earth of all evil."
Response: George W. Bush is a voracious reader and is almost certainly far better read than the author of these points. The widespread belief that Bush cannot speak well is ad hominem nonsense. And one need not be particularly intelligent to have regarded the North Korean, Iranian and Saddam Hussein regimes as evil. One only had to be a Republican. It is to the left's everlasting shame that it reviled President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and reviles George W. Bush for labeling North Korea, Iran and Saddam's Iraq an "Axis of Evil."
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
For four years, a list of alleged Republican positions -- "What You Have To Believe To Be a Republican Today" -- has been circulating on the Internet and forwarded in countless e-mails. In this presidential election year, it is important to respond to these charges. If people want to vote for a Democratic president, they should not do so based on falsehoods about Republicans.
Given space limitations, I cannot respond to all of them. I have decided to respond to the 13 most significant.
"What you have to believe to be a Republican today":
1. "Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a 'we can't find Bin Laden.'"
Response: Saddam Hussein was always considered a bad guy by anyone with a working moral compass, and that included Democratic President Bill Clinton and his administration. The main reason that President Ronald Reagan armed Saddam Hussein was so as to enable Saddam to fight against Iran so that Iran would not be the dominant power in the Muslim Middle East. Arming an evil man to fight another evil man does not make the former less of an evil man. America aided Stalin's genocidal Communist Soviet Union in order for him to better fight against Hitler. And after World War II, America aided some former Nazis in order to be able to fight Stalin. That is moral wisdom, not hypocrisy.
2. "Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony."
Response: For the left, the desire to normalize relations with Communist regimes has been a constant. Liberals who were not on the far left and conservatives alike fought some Communist regimes -- militarily as in Vietnam and Korea, and economically as in Cuba -- and normalized relations with some others. Mature people know that they have to pick and choose which evils can be fought and which cannot. Having said that, there are good arguments on both sides about whether to lift the embargo on Cuba since the fall of the Soviet Union.
3. "The United States should get out of the United Nations..."
Response: Very few Republicans advocate America getting out of the United Nations, but Republicans do regularly point out the UN's dismal record on human rights -- as when Sudan, a regime regarded even by most of the left as engaged in genocide, was made vice-chair (with Cuba) of the UN Human Rights Commission. The UN has failed virtually all victims of mass murder since its inception -- including most recently those in the Rwanda genocide. The UN has done commendable work on some health matters, but otherwise it has been worse than morally worthless. The UN has become a haven for the cruelest regimes on earth. The left's adulation of the UN is but one more example of its preference for institutions over fighting evil.
4. "A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation."
Response: Unlike those on the left, many Republicans, not to mention medical science, view a human fetus as having its own body and not being a mere extension of a woman's body. People can differ on the legality of early abortions -- not every immoral action is necessarily illegal -- but to belittle the killing of a human fetus for no medical reason as "a woman doing what she wants with her own body" is only one more example of the left's broken moral compass.
5. "Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton."
Response: No mainstream Republican or conservative has ever said that he or she, let alone Jesus, hates homosexuals. But because there is so much hatred on the left for Republicans and for religious conservatives, many on the left, like the writer of this list, constantly accuse Republicans and conservatives of being haters. It is usually projection.
6. "The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay."
Response: There are many ways to improve military morale. One is to increase the military budget, not to slash it as the Clinton administration did; to honor military heroes during wartime, not to feature front page article after front page article about troops who murder when they come home, as The New York Times has been doing for weeks, or publish fraudulent articles, as the New Republic recently did, about our troops committing atrocities; and to allow the military to recruit on college campuses, something many liberal colleges ban.
7. "If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex."
Response: While many Republicans believe that teenage sexual standards should be left to parents and not to schools, no mainstream Republican has ever argued, "If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex." But many people, not just Republicans, think that teaching "safe sex" to middle schoolers sends a message to young minds that society assumes they will have sexual intercourse. And what society assumes usually happens. When society assumed teenagers should not have sex, they rarely had it. For generations before schools put condoms on bananas, there was far less teenage sex because society has a profound impact on teenage sexual behavior. The message in schools since then has often been that the only reason not to have sex at age 16 (or 15 or 14) is that you might get pregnant or contract a sexually transmitted disease. The portrayal of sex as almost exclusively a biological act has been one of contemporary liberalism's greatest sins against young people.
8. "HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart."
Response: Who ever said that? HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of their owners or stockholders at heart. The question is not whether companies want to make profits, it's whether individuals will have a choice about how to obtain health care, and whether the state should massively expand to create Canada-like socialist medicine with its triage and long waiting periods.
9. "Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools."
Response: Many conservatives and more than a few liberals argue that climate change has occurred throughout the earth's history, that carbon emission is therefore not the primary cause of the minimal warming that is taking place, and that the manmade-global warming-will-lead-to-worldwide-destruction scenario is therefore a form of hysteria -- as were the left's cries about heterosexual AIDS in America, the threat to mankind's future if people have more than one child, and breast implants, among many others. As for tobacco and cancer, no mainstream Republican argues that tobacco's link to cancer is junk science. The charge is deceitful. But many conservatives do believe that banning all outdoor smoking, for example, is both scientifically and morally indefensible. And few Republicans argue for Creationism in schools, but many do argue that, in addition to whatever science is taught, the idea that the universe was designed and all of existence is therefore not a random purposeless event might be both scientific and beneficial to students.
10. "A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy."
Response: Had President Clinton simply said to the American people, "I lied to save myself and my family public humiliation," the whole Monica Lewinsky matter would have died in a few weeks. It was his lying under oath while president that brought on the impeachment trial. Many decent people thought that was impeachable; many decent people thought it was not an impeachable offense. It was a tragic farce that America was preoccupied with semen stains for so long. Much of the blame goes to the news media, which a generation ago would never have reported the affair to begin with. As for President George W. Bush, he did not "lie" us into war, but used the best assessments that nearly all Western intelligence agencies provided concerning Saddam Hussein building weapons of mass destruction. When he was president, President Clinton warned of the exact same WMD threat from Saddam.
11. "Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet."
Response: No Republican argues that the Constitution now defines marriage. Many, however, want the American people, not judges, to decide how America defines marriage. And since some liberal judges will force states to redefine marriage to include marriage to a person of the same sex, a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman may be necessary. The charge that Republicans want to censor the Internet is a lie. It is, in any case, impossible. Moreover, it is the left that far more frequently advocates censorship, as it does, for example, on campuses where leftist students stifle conservative speakers' freedom of speech.
12. "Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness, and you need our prayers for your recovery."
Response: Most conservatives and liberals believe that legalizing drugs would result in large numbers of young people using life-destroying drugs. As for Rush Limbaugh, he illegally acquired prescription painkillers for chronic back pain. Only people with hatred in their hearts can liken that to using heroin and other nonprescription drugs that crush lives.
13. "That Bush, who doesn't read newspapers, and who can't speak an intelligible paragraph on his own (not written for him), is intelligent enough to rid the planet Earth of all evil."
Response: George W. Bush is a voracious reader and is almost certainly far better read than the author of these points. The widespread belief that Bush cannot speak well is ad hominem nonsense. And one need not be particularly intelligent to have regarded the North Korean, Iranian and Saddam Hussein regimes as evil. One only had to be a Republican. It is to the left's everlasting shame that it reviled President Ronald Reagan for labeling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and reviles George W. Bush for labeling North Korea, Iran and Saddam's Iraq an "Axis of Evil."
Exploiting America's Veterans
By Chuck Colson
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Have you received one of those letters in the mail—asking you to send money to help wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan?
If so, I hope you ignored it—not because I do not care about our troops, but because I do. It turns out that at least two of these charities are run by people who would rather line their own pockets than help veterans.
One charity is called Help Hospitalized Veterans. The Washington Post reports that this outfit spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal expenses for Roger Chapin, who manages the charity. Richard Viguerie, “to whom the charity has awarded millions in fundraising-consulting contracts,” also reportedly used contributions to pay for personal expenses.
What kind of expenses? At least $340,000 in meals, hotels, and entertainment. And Mike Lynch, the executive director, received a loan of $135,000 for a divorce settlement for his ex-wife. Donations also paid for trips to Hawaii, country club memberships, and a million-dollar loan to Viguerie for a start-up initiative at his company. That does not even count the half-a-million-dollar yearly salary Chapin paid himself and his wife!
The second charity, the Coalition to Support America’s Heroes, raised in excess of $168 million from 2004 to 2006. How much did America’s heroes actually get? One-quarter. The rest went to direct-mail fundraising, salaries, and other expenses.
These abuses—both of the people who donated the money and the veterans the funds were supposed to benefit—were so serious that Congress decided to investigate. Retired Army General Tommy Franks, who had lent his name to Coalition to Support America’s Heroes, stopped doing so when he found out how little money was actually helping the veterans.
Last week Congress condemned Chapin for what they called “an intolerable fraud”—squandering money intended for wounded warriors. When asked what would happen if the public found out, Chapin answered, “We’d be out of business.” Let’s hope so!
The military charity scandals illustrate why good character is so important when we are choosing leaders—whether they are leaders of charities or leaders of government. The Old Testament reminds us that leaders are not to pervert justice or take bribes. They should fear God and hate dishonest gain.
All waste and fraud are wrong, but the squandering of money intended for our veterans truly makes me ill. These are the men and women who risked their lives to protect America. To exploit our veterans to enrich oneself is contemptible.
Shockingly, there are not any laws that require charities to tell donors how their contributions are used. This means that when appeals arrive in your mailbox, like those letters with the coin in the window or the dollar bill, watch out. I would take the money, give it to a deserving charity, and throw the letter away.
You can check on charities’ records with a watchdog group—like the American Institute of Philanthropy. Or go to Wallwatchers.org for information on Christian charities. And I urge you to visit the BreakPoint website for a list of fiscally responsible charities that help our men and women in uniform—charities that offer our wounded veterans the help they richly deserve.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Have you received one of those letters in the mail—asking you to send money to help wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan?
If so, I hope you ignored it—not because I do not care about our troops, but because I do. It turns out that at least two of these charities are run by people who would rather line their own pockets than help veterans.
One charity is called Help Hospitalized Veterans. The Washington Post reports that this outfit spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal expenses for Roger Chapin, who manages the charity. Richard Viguerie, “to whom the charity has awarded millions in fundraising-consulting contracts,” also reportedly used contributions to pay for personal expenses.
What kind of expenses? At least $340,000 in meals, hotels, and entertainment. And Mike Lynch, the executive director, received a loan of $135,000 for a divorce settlement for his ex-wife. Donations also paid for trips to Hawaii, country club memberships, and a million-dollar loan to Viguerie for a start-up initiative at his company. That does not even count the half-a-million-dollar yearly salary Chapin paid himself and his wife!
The second charity, the Coalition to Support America’s Heroes, raised in excess of $168 million from 2004 to 2006. How much did America’s heroes actually get? One-quarter. The rest went to direct-mail fundraising, salaries, and other expenses.
These abuses—both of the people who donated the money and the veterans the funds were supposed to benefit—were so serious that Congress decided to investigate. Retired Army General Tommy Franks, who had lent his name to Coalition to Support America’s Heroes, stopped doing so when he found out how little money was actually helping the veterans.
Last week Congress condemned Chapin for what they called “an intolerable fraud”—squandering money intended for wounded warriors. When asked what would happen if the public found out, Chapin answered, “We’d be out of business.” Let’s hope so!
The military charity scandals illustrate why good character is so important when we are choosing leaders—whether they are leaders of charities or leaders of government. The Old Testament reminds us that leaders are not to pervert justice or take bribes. They should fear God and hate dishonest gain.
All waste and fraud are wrong, but the squandering of money intended for our veterans truly makes me ill. These are the men and women who risked their lives to protect America. To exploit our veterans to enrich oneself is contemptible.
Shockingly, there are not any laws that require charities to tell donors how their contributions are used. This means that when appeals arrive in your mailbox, like those letters with the coin in the window or the dollar bill, watch out. I would take the money, give it to a deserving charity, and throw the letter away.
You can check on charities’ records with a watchdog group—like the American Institute of Philanthropy. Or go to Wallwatchers.org for information on Christian charities. And I urge you to visit the BreakPoint website for a list of fiscally responsible charities that help our men and women in uniform—charities that offer our wounded veterans the help they richly deserve.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Actually Bush Didn't Lie
By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, January 28, 2008
Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we've heard that one before. Well, the two groups--the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism--managed to secure major media attention by making the claim that the Bush administration released 935 false statements. Clearly no one was in the mood to read all 935, so the leftist groups boiled them down to 532. We hear that on 532 occasions the Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the claim is not that Bush told 532 lies, but that he told the same lie 532 times.
But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn't Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out? When I raise this point with liberals on campus, they typically say, "Well, we're not saying that Bush knew for sure that there were no such weapons. We are saying that his administration stacked the data." But this is another way of saying that Bush actually believed that there were those weapons, and he mobilized whatever evidence he could muster to make his case. This may reflect prejudice against Saddam Hussein's motives or even imprudent decision making but it is hardly proof of lying.
Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of refugee German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb. The project was headed by that country's greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler getting such a weapon, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. America built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan.
Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan Project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, "Einstein lied" or "FDR lied." They didn't lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.
The same is true of Bush. As a statesman, he had to act in the moving current of events. He didn't have the luxury of hindsight. To those leftist pundits who say, "Knowing what we know now, President Bush, why did you do what you did then?" Bush's answer is, "Obviously I didn't know what we know now." Acting against the somber backdrop of 9/11, Bush made a hard call based on an assessment of the intelligence provided to him.
He may have acted in haste, and he may have acted in error. But even this is not so clear. Do you recall recent reports from the CIA that Iran stopped working on its nuclear program in 2003? The reports were interpreted as a reversal for the Bush administration, because Bush has allegedly been trying to raise public concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. But many people forgot to ask why Iran’s mullahs decided to suspend their nuclear program in 2003. That happens to be the time that America invaded Iraq. So it’s quite possible that the Iranian mullahs were deterred from their nuclear ambitions because of the fear that the U.S. military might call on them next.
Whatever you think of this analysis, there is no evidence that Bush made his decision about the Iraq war in bad faith. Therefore the claim that Bush lied is itself a lie.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Two leftist organizations have released a study that claims that the Bush administration lied about Iraq. Somehow I think we've heard that one before. Well, the two groups--the Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism--managed to secure major media attention by making the claim that the Bush administration released 935 false statements. Clearly no one was in the mood to read all 935, so the leftist groups boiled them down to 532. We hear that on 532 occasions the Bush administration claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. So the claim is not that Bush told 532 lies, but that he told the same lie 532 times.
But consider this: If Bush actually knew that Iraq didn't possess weapons of mass destruction, and yet repeatedly told the American people that Iraq had them, didn't Bush expect that following the Iraq invasion his deception would be found out? When I raise this point with liberals on campus, they typically say, "Well, we're not saying that Bush knew for sure that there were no such weapons. We are saying that his administration stacked the data." But this is another way of saying that Bush actually believed that there were those weapons, and he mobilized whatever evidence he could muster to make his case. This may reflect prejudice against Saddam Hussein's motives or even imprudent decision making but it is hardly proof of lying.
Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of refugee German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb. The project was headed by that country's greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler getting such a weapon, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. America built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan.
Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan Project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, "Einstein lied" or "FDR lied." They didn't lie. They used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.
The same is true of Bush. As a statesman, he had to act in the moving current of events. He didn't have the luxury of hindsight. To those leftist pundits who say, "Knowing what we know now, President Bush, why did you do what you did then?" Bush's answer is, "Obviously I didn't know what we know now." Acting against the somber backdrop of 9/11, Bush made a hard call based on an assessment of the intelligence provided to him.
He may have acted in haste, and he may have acted in error. But even this is not so clear. Do you recall recent reports from the CIA that Iran stopped working on its nuclear program in 2003? The reports were interpreted as a reversal for the Bush administration, because Bush has allegedly been trying to raise public concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. But many people forgot to ask why Iran’s mullahs decided to suspend their nuclear program in 2003. That happens to be the time that America invaded Iraq. So it’s quite possible that the Iranian mullahs were deterred from their nuclear ambitions because of the fear that the U.S. military might call on them next.
Whatever you think of this analysis, there is no evidence that Bush made his decision about the Iraq war in bad faith. Therefore the claim that Bush lied is itself a lie.
No Freedom Without Economic Freedom
By Doug Wilson
Monday, January 28, 2008
Populism is all the rage these days. This election season we’ve heard it from both sides of the aisle, most despicably from a Democrat, John Edwards, and most dishearteningly from a Republican, Mike Huckabee. As the campaign has moved beyond the early voting states, these candidates have slipped from the public view. I fear, however, that their populist rhetoric—not to mention policies—may be here to stay.
More than at any time in recent memory, troubled citizens want the government to address their most basic problems. Whether it’s healthcare, the economy or the mortgage crisis the common thought process seems as follows: “I have a problem. What is the government going to do about it?”
This is a dangerous, if slightly understandable impulse—and it is one that Washington does nothing to curb. Consider, for example, that Washington’s response to the current economic slowdown consists largely of tax rebates despite the fact that supply-side tax cuts would do more to stimulate the economy by incentivizing work and investment in a way that a check-in-the-mailbox never will. But a rebate, of course, reinforces the notion that government gives and takes as it pleases, and that it can and will cater to the needs of its increasingly dependent citizens.
That brings us to the newly-released Index of Economic Freedom, a joint venture of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. Since 1995, the Index has measured 10 different categories of economic freedom in nearly every country in the world and compared those results on a global scale.
For Americans, the results of the Index are especially important this year. They serve as a barometer, a scorecard in the on-going battle between tax and regulation-heavy populism, and free market capitalism.
Investment
The United States scored 80 out of 100 in the Index’s category of investment freedom, tied with four other nations in second place. According to the Index, the U.S. received points because it does not require foreign investors to register with the federal government, nor does it restrict the purchase of real estate on a national level. The U.S. lost points, however, because of its restrictions on foreign investment in banking, mining, defense contracting, certain energy-related industries, fishing, shipping, communications and aviation. While the U.S. allows for relatively free investment, it should move to ease some of these restrictions in order to expand investment opportunities.
Spending
Last year, U.S. government expenditures equaled 36.6 percent of gross domestic product. Thus, the U.S. rates 59.81 in the Index’s rankings for size of government; that’s fully 35 points behind Hong Kong, the most economically free nation in the world. Despite the severity of the problem, excessive spending has long been a concern limited mostly to political junkies and economists. No more. In an increasingly global and competitive economy, the U.S. must reduce its spending in order to limit public debt and foster private enterprise.
Business Climate
The Index confirms what many enterprising individuals have long known: America is a great place to do business. Accordingly, the U.S. received a 91.7 rating for business freedom. These high scores result, in part, from the fact that business owners are largely free to launch, maintain and close businesses with impunity. Across the globe, it takes an average of 43 days to start a new business. By contrast, one needs an average of only six days to start a business in the U.S.
A strong rating for labor freedom also contributed to the U.S.’s high business climate score, as flexible, market-driven employment policies bolster expansion, output and employment opportunities.
What’s It All Mean?
The Index’s overall rankings place the U.S. as the fifth-most economically free nation in the world. Clearly, this is a good thing. But, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
One way we can remain vigilant in the protection of our economic freedom is to support the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Indeed, my friend Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, has noted that if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire in 2010, the U.S. will almost certainly fall from its position among the five most economically free nations in the world.
Ultimately, true economic freedom stands in stark contrast to the populist instinct to encourage government meddling in the economy. In light of this, our duty this political season is clear: We must demand nothing less from our candidates than full support for true economic freedom for all Americans.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Populism is all the rage these days. This election season we’ve heard it from both sides of the aisle, most despicably from a Democrat, John Edwards, and most dishearteningly from a Republican, Mike Huckabee. As the campaign has moved beyond the early voting states, these candidates have slipped from the public view. I fear, however, that their populist rhetoric—not to mention policies—may be here to stay.
More than at any time in recent memory, troubled citizens want the government to address their most basic problems. Whether it’s healthcare, the economy or the mortgage crisis the common thought process seems as follows: “I have a problem. What is the government going to do about it?”
This is a dangerous, if slightly understandable impulse—and it is one that Washington does nothing to curb. Consider, for example, that Washington’s response to the current economic slowdown consists largely of tax rebates despite the fact that supply-side tax cuts would do more to stimulate the economy by incentivizing work and investment in a way that a check-in-the-mailbox never will. But a rebate, of course, reinforces the notion that government gives and takes as it pleases, and that it can and will cater to the needs of its increasingly dependent citizens.
That brings us to the newly-released Index of Economic Freedom, a joint venture of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. Since 1995, the Index has measured 10 different categories of economic freedom in nearly every country in the world and compared those results on a global scale.
For Americans, the results of the Index are especially important this year. They serve as a barometer, a scorecard in the on-going battle between tax and regulation-heavy populism, and free market capitalism.
Investment
The United States scored 80 out of 100 in the Index’s category of investment freedom, tied with four other nations in second place. According to the Index, the U.S. received points because it does not require foreign investors to register with the federal government, nor does it restrict the purchase of real estate on a national level. The U.S. lost points, however, because of its restrictions on foreign investment in banking, mining, defense contracting, certain energy-related industries, fishing, shipping, communications and aviation. While the U.S. allows for relatively free investment, it should move to ease some of these restrictions in order to expand investment opportunities.
Spending
Last year, U.S. government expenditures equaled 36.6 percent of gross domestic product. Thus, the U.S. rates 59.81 in the Index’s rankings for size of government; that’s fully 35 points behind Hong Kong, the most economically free nation in the world. Despite the severity of the problem, excessive spending has long been a concern limited mostly to political junkies and economists. No more. In an increasingly global and competitive economy, the U.S. must reduce its spending in order to limit public debt and foster private enterprise.
Business Climate
The Index confirms what many enterprising individuals have long known: America is a great place to do business. Accordingly, the U.S. received a 91.7 rating for business freedom. These high scores result, in part, from the fact that business owners are largely free to launch, maintain and close businesses with impunity. Across the globe, it takes an average of 43 days to start a new business. By contrast, one needs an average of only six days to start a business in the U.S.
A strong rating for labor freedom also contributed to the U.S.’s high business climate score, as flexible, market-driven employment policies bolster expansion, output and employment opportunities.
What’s It All Mean?
The Index’s overall rankings place the U.S. as the fifth-most economically free nation in the world. Clearly, this is a good thing. But, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
One way we can remain vigilant in the protection of our economic freedom is to support the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Indeed, my friend Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, has noted that if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire in 2010, the U.S. will almost certainly fall from its position among the five most economically free nations in the world.
Ultimately, true economic freedom stands in stark contrast to the populist instinct to encourage government meddling in the economy. In light of this, our duty this political season is clear: We must demand nothing less from our candidates than full support for true economic freedom for all Americans.
Enabling Animal House: America Needs to Create Rational Higher Ed Policy
By Dr. Matthew Ladner
Monday, January 28, 2008
America needs to invest more financial resources to help address a looming shortage of college graduates needed for the high-tech economy of tomorrow. Or do we?
Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, current chair of the National Governor’s Association, used her 2008 State of the State address to call for doubling the number of college graduates in Arizona by 2020. Napolitano proposed paying the tuition for students who graduate high school with a B average to accomplish this goal.
“We must recognize that higher education is something that all Arizona children will need to succeed,” stated Governor Napolitano.
In the Carnegie Foundation’s publication Change, Paul Barton wrote that the notion that the U.S. has a dire need for an ever increasing number of college graduates is a myth. “Confusion about the demand for college graduates runs throughout discussions of national workforce needs,” Barton wrote.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only 29 percent of all jobs actually required a degree in 2004. The Bureau projects that of the top ten occupations with the largest growth from 2004 to 2014, seventy percent won’t require a college education.
Interestingly, the U.S. Department of Education's National Education Longitudinal Study reports that 40 percent of its sample attained a two- or four-year degree or higher. Therefore, many people with college degrees have jobs that don’t require them. So it really might be true when your cabbie says he has a Ph.D.
Barton’s clear-eyed presentation of the data reveals a job market far more complex than simply an unmet demand for college-educated job applicants. For example, proponents of greater higher education funding often point to an increasing wage gap between the college educated and those who aren’t.
Barton, however, notes that the wage gap is due largely to the falling earnings of high-school graduates and dropouts rather than to higher earnings for college graduates.
While governors around the country call for more public spending so more people will have college degrees, no one seems to have noticed just how poor many universities actually perform in graduating students. The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona State’s four year graduation rate as 28 percent, the University of Arizona at 30 and Northern Arizona University at 27. The six year graduation rates for these three schools stand at 56%, 56% and 47% respectively.
Furthermore, a growing and alarming body of research raises questions about what students are actually learning in college. For example, the American Institutes for Research recently assessed the literacy of 1,800 graduating seniors from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year colleges. The Institute found that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges can’t do a basic task like summarize the arguments in a newspaper editorial.
The crisis in our public universities is effectiveness, not affordability. They need competition, not new subsidies. The Arizona legislature created a higher education voucher program, called the Private Postsecondary Education Student Financial Assistance Program, in 2006 in an attempt to do just that. Colorado also has a voucher system in place for its college students.
Arizona’s higher education voucher program helps students pay for private colleges and technical training schools, which often have far higher graduation rates than the public colleges and universities. The program also costs less than the state’s public universities. Because no good deed goes unpunished, Governor Napolitano recommended that the Arizona legislature cut funding for the voucher program.
Our country’s higher education policy needs to return to first principles. Students enjoy the primary benefits of a college education, not taxpayers. Students should therefore have financial skin in the game.
Today’s higher education scene includes out of control costs, questionable and declining value, lack of focus on teaching over research, and a general lack of transparency. We need to fix the system, not throw good money after bad.
Monday, January 28, 2008
America needs to invest more financial resources to help address a looming shortage of college graduates needed for the high-tech economy of tomorrow. Or do we?
Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, current chair of the National Governor’s Association, used her 2008 State of the State address to call for doubling the number of college graduates in Arizona by 2020. Napolitano proposed paying the tuition for students who graduate high school with a B average to accomplish this goal.
“We must recognize that higher education is something that all Arizona children will need to succeed,” stated Governor Napolitano.
In the Carnegie Foundation’s publication Change, Paul Barton wrote that the notion that the U.S. has a dire need for an ever increasing number of college graduates is a myth. “Confusion about the demand for college graduates runs throughout discussions of national workforce needs,” Barton wrote.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, only 29 percent of all jobs actually required a degree in 2004. The Bureau projects that of the top ten occupations with the largest growth from 2004 to 2014, seventy percent won’t require a college education.
Interestingly, the U.S. Department of Education's National Education Longitudinal Study reports that 40 percent of its sample attained a two- or four-year degree or higher. Therefore, many people with college degrees have jobs that don’t require them. So it really might be true when your cabbie says he has a Ph.D.
Barton’s clear-eyed presentation of the data reveals a job market far more complex than simply an unmet demand for college-educated job applicants. For example, proponents of greater higher education funding often point to an increasing wage gap between the college educated and those who aren’t.
Barton, however, notes that the wage gap is due largely to the falling earnings of high-school graduates and dropouts rather than to higher earnings for college graduates.
While governors around the country call for more public spending so more people will have college degrees, no one seems to have noticed just how poor many universities actually perform in graduating students. The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona State’s four year graduation rate as 28 percent, the University of Arizona at 30 and Northern Arizona University at 27. The six year graduation rates for these three schools stand at 56%, 56% and 47% respectively.
Furthermore, a growing and alarming body of research raises questions about what students are actually learning in college. For example, the American Institutes for Research recently assessed the literacy of 1,800 graduating seniors from 80 randomly selected two- and four-year colleges. The Institute found that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges can’t do a basic task like summarize the arguments in a newspaper editorial.
The crisis in our public universities is effectiveness, not affordability. They need competition, not new subsidies. The Arizona legislature created a higher education voucher program, called the Private Postsecondary Education Student Financial Assistance Program, in 2006 in an attempt to do just that. Colorado also has a voucher system in place for its college students.
Arizona’s higher education voucher program helps students pay for private colleges and technical training schools, which often have far higher graduation rates than the public colleges and universities. The program also costs less than the state’s public universities. Because no good deed goes unpunished, Governor Napolitano recommended that the Arizona legislature cut funding for the voucher program.
Our country’s higher education policy needs to return to first principles. Students enjoy the primary benefits of a college education, not taxpayers. Students should therefore have financial skin in the game.
Today’s higher education scene includes out of control costs, questionable and declining value, lack of focus on teaching over research, and a general lack of transparency. We need to fix the system, not throw good money after bad.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
How government expansion worsens hard times
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
For those Americans who know anything at all about the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the story line seems simple, dramatic, inspiring and familiar:
Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation. Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this “new deal for the American people” improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again – just in time to face the challenges of World War II. No wonder a grateful nation rewarded Franklin Roosevelt with an unprecedented four terms – and a consistent ranking as one of our three greatest presidents (along with Washington and Lincoln).
Like most other Americans of my generation, I learned this story from my parents and grandparents, not just from history teachers in school. My grandparents on my father’s side, immigrants from Ukraine, became naturalized citizens in part to vote for Roosevelt: in their tiny home in a gritty neighborhood of South Philadelphia, they always kept a heroic black-and-sepia portrait of FDR over the mantelpiece, encased in a dime-store brass frame with a cracked pane of glass. My grandfather was a barrel-maker who managed to keep working throughout the Depression, so he never benefited personally from New Deal programs, but he revered the 32nd President for his general support for “the little guy.” My father recalled April 12, 1945, the day of Roosevelt’s sudden and shocking death from a cerebral hemorrhage, as one of the darkest occasions of his life: along with many other sailors at his base in San Francisco, he wept uncontrollably.
Unfortunately, the nearly universal canonization of Franklin Roosevelt has helped all succeeding generations learn false lessons about the right way to deal with hard times and poverty. These assumptions continue to shape political debate, especially at moments like the present day when some three-quarters of the people (according to recent polls) feel convinced that the economy’s in recession or headed in that direction. Democrats in particular love to invoke the Depression and summon the noble ghost of FDR: some 40 years after his death, Barbra Streisand thrilled a party fundraiser with her heart-wrenching rendition of Roosevelt’s campaign song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” which suggested that in the right hands, enlightened government could stop suffering and uplift the downtrodden. In the same spirit, in 1992, Bill Clinton declared that the first President Bush had left the nation with “the worst economy since the Great Depression” and in his First Inaugural Address suggested that even in the midst of January’s chill he meant to “force the spring.” In 2004, numerous Democratic candidates (Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry) made similar analogies between the presumed economic wreckage left by George W. Bush and the dark days of 1932, and we’ll undoubtedly hear similar alarmist rhetoric in 2008. In response to the presumed economic disasters and hardships which they always discern, liberals instinctively invoke FDR’s stirring words from his First Inaugural: “This nation asks for action, and action now.”
According to the conventional wisdom, Roosevelt proved that such governmental action – bold, aggressive, experimental, and sweeping – restored vigor to the economy and improved the lives of the suffering masses.
Unfortunately, such assumptions rest upon a foundation of myths, distortions, half-truths and outright lies. The truths about the New Deal, and all other notable attempts in the course of American history to use the power of the federal government to rescue the poor over the course of 230 years of American history, show the same disturbing results: higher tax burdens and a corresponding loss of liberty, with little gain (and sometimes serious damage) for the intended beneficiaries of bureaucratic largesse.
An understanding of this destructive and increasingly dangerous pattern in our politics must begin with an examination of the pernicious legend of Franklin Roosevelt as America’s savior.
1. THE NEW DEAL NEVER BROUGHT RECOVERY – IN FACT, IT PROLONGED THE DEPRESSION
In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the great depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, the national unemployment rate stood at 17.4%. Seven years later, after more than five years of FDR and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, after more than doubling federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at --- 17.4%! As economist Jim Powell, author of the devastating book “FDR’s Folly” points out: “From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2%. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%. Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9% of American workers were unemployed. Living standards remained depressed until after the war.”
In his celebrated Inaugural Address of March 4, 1933, FDR unequivocally declared: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.” For the President and his economic planners, the task of putting people to work did remain an unsolvable problem –until world conflict led to sixteen million Americans leaving the work force for the military, and others finding new jobs in humming defense plants. Considering Roosevelt’s self-proclaimed priorities, the persistence of devastating unemployment rates (in an era when the typical family relied on only one wage earner and women for the most part remained uninvolved in the work force) should alone identify the New Deal as a wretched, ill-conceived failure. Other measures of recovery show similarly dismal results. After the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 250 in 1930 under Hoover (it had been 343 just before the crash). By January, 1940 the market had collapsed to 151 (remaining in the low 100’s through most of Roosevelt’s terms) and didn’t return to its 1929 levels until the 1950’s. At the same time, federal spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product soared at an unprecedented rate: from 2.5% in 1929, to 9% in 1936 (long before the wartime spending began). In other words, the portion of the total economy controlled by Washington increased by a staggering 360% in the course of just seven years – without providing discernable benefit to the economy.
Such statistics look so disturbing, so incontrovertible, that they raise serious questions about the survival of the New-Deal-Fixed-the-Depression myth. How could reputable historians pretend that the vast expansion of government power between 1933 and 1941 somehow brought the nation out its persistent, nightmarish hard times?
Out of curiosity, I took from my shelf the college history textbook assigned to me at Yale in 1968. The relevant chapters had been written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the most acclaimed and authoritative of all New Deal historians. To my surprise, not even this fervent liberal and stalwart admirer of FDR attempted to pretend that his hero’s policies had solved the Depression. In “The National Experience,” published in 1963 (just 18 years after FDR’s death), Schlesinger wrote: “Though the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produced recovery…The New Deal had done remarkable things, especially in social reform, but the formula for full recovery evidently still eluded it.” He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937 – in the midst of “the Second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s second term. “The collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression (or, indeed, than in any other period in American history for which statistics are available). National income fell 13 per cent, payrolls 35 per cent, durable goods production 50 per cent, profits 78 per cent. The increase in unemployment reproduced scenes of the early depression and imposed new burdens on the relief agencies.”
In the view of such acknowledged economic disaster after more than five years of vaunted reform, how can fawning historians still worship at the altar of Rooseveltian idolatry? Normal depressions or recessions last between one to three years; the Great Depression continued to depress living standards and impose severe hardships for more than a decade. A growing majority of economic historians now concede that the programs of the New Deal prolonged, rather than terminated, the Depression. David Kennedy, the former President of Stanford University, wrote a 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning account called Freedom from Fear in which he concluded: “Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.” In nearly all European nations, afflicted by the worldwide economic crisis as was the United States, the depression ended more quickly than it did in Roosevelt’s America; in the words of economic historian Lester V. Chandler, “in most countries the depression was less deep and prolonged.” Even at the time, experts understood the misguided nature of FDR’s policies. In 1935, the Brookings Institution (then, as now, a left-leaning think tank) produced a 900-page report considering the impact of the New Deal’s most ambitious and controversial program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and concluded, “on the whole it retarded recovery.”
To counter the brute facts about the persistence of crippling unemployment and pervasive poverty in the face of the huge increases in governmental spending and activism, New Deal apologists cite two positive results from the feverish emergence of new programs: the restoration of “hope” in place of despair, and the implementation of needed “reforms” that planted the long-term seeds of justice even if they failed to bring economic recovery.
Concerning the notion of FDR’s alleged conquest of fear, Amity Shlaes (in her brilliant history of the Great Depression “The Forgotten Man”) points out that he achieved this change of mood through an old-fashioned vote-buying scheme in the style of the venal ward-heelers and big city bosses who still dominated the Democratic Party. She cites the nakedly political emphasis on the PWA, or Public Works Administration, under the control of Secretary of the Interior Harold I. Ickes. This federal operation laid the groundwork for the current Washington mania for “earmarks” –in which Congressional power-brokers arrange for buildings, bridges, and other facilities to gratify constituents across the country. With more than 3,000 counties in America, the PWA provided at least one project for all but 33 of them. The scale of spending startled even the responsible parties: with $3 billion in its first few years, at a time when the total federal budget in any given year was barely $6 billion. Secretary Ickes himself wrote concerning the expenditure for his program, “It helped me to estimate its size by figuring that if we had it all in currency and should load it into trucks, we could set out with it from Washington, D.C., for the Pacific Coast, shovel off one million dollars at every milepost and, at the end, still have enough left to build a fleet of battle ships.”
The other defense of Roosevelt’s programs, beyond their success in brightening the national mood (and insuring his perpetual re-election) involves their inherent justice: Schlesinger and others suggest that even if the reforms failed to bring the promised recovery, their inherent “justice” (concerning the empowerment of labor unions, the regimentation of agriculture under federal control, tighter supervision of banking, and countless other “improvements”) made them nonetheless worthwhile. Regarding this argument, no less a leftist hero than the British economist John Maynard Keynes offered a tart response. He wrote FDR a letter published on December 31, 1933 in the New York Times in which he warned that “even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action.”
In other words, he perceived at the very beginning of the New Deal its most damaging aspect: treating the nation’s capitalists as an enemy --“the unscrupulous money changers” FDR called them in his inaugural, who “have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” With new, unpredictable government regulatory schemes and law suits and political attacks emerging every week, business leaders found it difficult to prepare the long term planning that alone could restore investment and entrepreneurial energy and put Americans back to work.
2. MAJOR RECESSIONS – BOTH BEFORE AND SINCE FDR – HAVE ENDED MORE QUICKLY WITHOUT MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION
The Great Depression hardly constituted the only economic collapse in US history. The nation endured major reverses and sharply increased unemployment in 1815, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1920, 1958, 1979 and many other occasions. The record shows consistently that leaders who cut government to revive the economy succeeded far more quickly and painlessly than the New Deal.
The punishing Panic of 1837 wrought havoc for American commerce and cost President Martin Van Buren his chances of re-election in 1840, but Jim Powell points out that Van Buren responded in precisely the appropriate way: he cut federal spending from $37.2 million to $24.3 million and sharply reduced taxes (mainly tariff revenue). He determined “to make government cheaper and stay out of the way of the private sector.” As a result, the young nation roared back to recovery and resumed its spectacular economic growth shortly after Van Buren left office.
Another serious downturn, the Depression of 1893, produced four million unemployed, violent strikes and a colorful march on Washington by the dispossessed of “Coxey’s Commonweal Army” who marched en masse from Ohio behind a banner with an image of Christ and the legend “HE IS RISEN!! BUT DEATH TO INTEREST ON BONDS!!!” The marchers demanded interest free advances from the government and a new program to hire the legions of unemployed to build highways across America, but the Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, refused to see them or to consider their pleas. Instead, he determined to reduce burdens on taxpayers, cutting tariffs and blocking an income tax. He even vetoed a bill (among more than 300 “relief” measures he stopped) to distribute $10,000 in seed grain to drought-stricken Texas farmers. In his veto message, the President wrote: “Federal aid in such cases encourages an expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” By the end of 1894, depressed income figures began to turn upward and the entire depression ended within two years.
Most striking of all, the reviled President Warren Harding proved himself a masterful manager of the sharp recession that followed the conclusion of World War I and which he faced when he came to power in 1921. Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman identified the decline of the money supply “as the largest percentage decline” up to that time, and the largest in American history other than the Great Depression. As the great British historian Paul Johnson (“A History of the American People”) writes: “Harding inherited from the comatose Wilson regime one of the sharpest recessions in American history." By July, 1921 it was all over, and the economy was booming again. Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon had done nothing except cut government expenditure by a huge 40 percent from Wilson’s peacetime level, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ The cuts were not ill-considered but part of a careful plan to bring the spending of the monster state which had emerged under Wilson back under control. The result of these cuts, and of even sharper tax cuts under Harding’s successor Coolidge, was the long period of growth and rising living standards associated with the “Roaring Twenties,” interrupted only by the prolonged Depression made worse by governmental meddling by both Hoover and Roosevelt.
Reagan enjoyed similar success by cutting taxes dramatically to cope with the crippling and stubborn Carter legacy of “stagflation,” and Eisenhower and both Presidents Bush managed to make other recessions short-lived without ambitious new government programs. Rather than depending on government programs to cushion us from the impact of inevitable economic downturns, the American people have benefited far more reliably by the proper instinct to cut government and stimulate the economy in times of slow or negative growth.
3. THE MOST CELEBRATED ADVOCATES FOR THE POOR IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY CALLED FOR LESS GOVERNMENT, NOT MORE
The Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, which evolved into the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson (hence the “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners” that today’s Democrats still celebrate) argued for less government involvement in the economy, not more. Their opponents, Federalists and later Whigs, favored a more activist government that would assist business interests in building prosperity. For more than a hundred years, the chief intrusion of government policy into economic activity involved tariffs and other restrictions on free trade--- generally supported by Federalists, Whigs and later Republicans – designed to benefit business interests even while increasing costs for the consumer. At least through President Cleveland (who left office in 1897) the Democrats, who claimed as they do now to represent the “working man” and “the little guy” favored small government, low taxes, low tariffs and the disentanglement of business from bureaucracy as the best way to assure that ordinary citizens escaped the destructive impact of governmental favoritism for big business.
4. THE ERA OF SMALL GOVERNMENT PROVIDED GREATER, NOT LESSER, ECONOMIC MOBILITY
Despite the absence of federal programs to “help” the poor and downtrodden, the nineteenth century in America remained an unprecedented era of social and economic mobility. The Horatio Alger stories that became bestsellers and inspired the nation reflected reality, and the unprecedented ability of American families (including those of newly arrived immigrant masses) to rise from abject poverty to middle class status (or above) in one, two or three generations. Social programs didn’t power this escalator to prosperity: economic growth did. In their 1963 book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz write: “The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a growth of population of over 2 percent per year, rapid extension of the railroad network, essential completion of continental settlement, and an extraordinary increase both in the acreage of land in farms and the output of farm products. The number of farms rose by nearly 50 per cent – despite the price decline. Yet at the same time, manufacturing industries were growing even more rapidly, and the Census of 1890 was the first in which the net value added by manufacturing exceeded the value of agricultural output. A feverish boom in western land swept the country during the eighties.” Meanwhile, with government consuming a smaller portion of the Gross Domestic Product than other industrial powers (Britain, Germany, France) the United States emerged as the most open and mobile society on earth, providing opportunities for the penniless that more bureaucratic nations couldn’t match.
5. ANTI-POVERTY AND GREAT SOCIETY PROGRAMS OF THE ‘60’S AND ‘70’S WORSENED, RATHER THAN IMPROVED, THE STATUS OF THE POOR
As Ronald Reagan famously declared, “We had a war on poverty. And poverty won.” Charles Murray’s ground-breaking 1984 book “Losing Ground” asks an obvious question about the era of the “Great Society” and its aftermath: what caused the obvious and painful increase in poverty, illegitimacy, crime and social dysfunction at the same time that government spending to address these pathologies vastly increased? He concluded that the well-intentioned and monumentally expensive programs of the period contributed to the problems, rather than to their solutions.
Most importantly, the programs of the Great Society went far beyond the New Deal in erasing the distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”—making all struggling citizens eligible for the same programs, regardless of the respectability or destructiveness of their behavior. This approach stemmed from the assumption that the poor bore no responsibility for their status – creating a culture of helpless victimhood and presumed powerlessness that undermined the confidence and self-discipline needed to escape poverty. An individual who bears no responsibility for his situation exerts no control over it – and must depend on outside forces (in this case the federal government) for his redemption. By removing the stigma previously associated with accepting “the dole,” anti-poverty programs encouraged a culture of dependency and discouraged self-reliance. The very concept of “Welfare Rights” (eagerly promoted in the 1970’s) worked against the old idea that the “honest poor” who refused hand-outs and insisted on toiling for their own advancement deserved special respect and encouragement.
The ultimate vindication for Murray’s arguments came with federal welfare reform in 1996 which succeeded in cutting the number of dependent individuals by more than half and corresponded with a period or rapidly declining poverty.
6. GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS CROWD OUT THE MORE EFFECTIVE WORK OF PRIVATE CHARITY
A paper by Daniel Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrates the precipitous decline in church-based private charity to benefit the needy as government aid expenditures increased more than six-fold from 1933 to 1939. In “Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out During the Great Depression” he shows that in 1926, congregations invested vastly more ($150 million) on these charities than federal, state and local agencies combined ($60 million at most). With the rise in New Deal expenditures, each dollar of government-relief spending in a state led to between three-and-seven cents less church spending. Since overall federal investment dwarfed the charitable investment (by a ratio of more than 10 to 1) this meant a significant reduction – an estimated 30% -- in the amount devoted by churches to helping the poor.
In “The Tragedy of American Compassion” (1992), Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas explores numerous reasons that private charities function more effectively to uplift the poor. For instance, “A century ago, when individuals applied for material assistance, charity volunteers tried first to ‘restore family ties that have been sundered’ and ‘reabsorb in social life those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to other members of the community.’ Instead of immediately offering help, charities asked, ‘Who is bound to help in this case?” This approach of course discouraged the extension of poverty as a semi-permanent status passed on from one generation to another. As Olasky maintains, faith-based and private aid organizations also maintained the crucial ability to make distinctions between “deserving” and “self-destructive” poor. “Charities a century ago realized that two persons in exactly the same material circumstances, but with different values, need different treatment. One might benefit most from some material help and a pat on the back, the other might need spiritual challenge and a push.”
One of the great difficulties of all bureaucratized and governmental interventions, no matter how well intentioned, is the official difficulty in making such distinctions, or helping to repair or encourage the family relationships so essential to escape from poverty and dysfunction.
7. NOSTALGIA AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS CLOUD CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE RECENT PAST
With rapid upward mobility still a prominent factor in American life, many families feel proud to exaggerate their own past destitution and somehow prefer to identify government as the source of their progress rather than business. A few years ago I saw this principle at work when speaking to a Jewish Temple in Florida. An angry questioner denounced my conservative politics by insisting that Jews in America owed our prosperity exclusively to liberal programs: were it not for the unions and the radical organizers and for the leftists and their compassionate initiatives, we’d all still be toiling in sweat shops and living in tenements. In response to his impassioned declaration, I asked for a show of hands in the crowd of some 700 people. I asked how many came from families in which labor unions played an important role in economic advancement. A few hands shot up, proudly—at most two or three dozen. Then I asked how many people in the audience came from families who had arrived in the middle class because of federal welfare programs. Members of the crowd looked at one another nervously, but only three people raised their hands in the entire Temple. Finally, I asked the most telling question: how many in that crowd had come to their current state of comfort and opportunity because someone, a parent or a grandparent or the individual himself, had worked hard in business and achieved some measure of success? At this, the overwhelming majority of the audience lifted hands, laughed and applauded in recognition.
Whether the crowd happened to be Jewish, or Irish, or Italian, or Mexican-American, or black, the response wouldn’t have been much different. The vast expansion of the Middle Class that occurred in the 1950’s involved productive work in the private sector and only one prominent form of governmental assistance: the GI Bill, which helped countless veterans (like my father) pay for education and housing and the launching of businesses. The GI Bill – providing long-term reward for military service – hardly constituted a something-for-nothing welfare program.
America has always been a compassionate society, finding various means – mostly private but occasionally involving state and local funds – to provide help to those who required it. “Rugged individualism” never meant isolation from neighbors, family, or fellow congregants. In that context, attempts by left-leaning commentators to credit government alone for social and economic progress remain strained and unpersuasive.
Consider, for example, the argument offered by comedian, talk-show host and Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken concerning his wife, Franni. In his stump speeches, he often re-tells “Franni’s Story” in these terms:
“When she was seventeen months old, her dad – a decorated veteran of World War II – died in a car accident, leaving her mother, my mother-in-law, widowed with five kids.
“My mother-in-law worked in the produce department of a grocery store, but that family made it because of Social Security survivor benefits....Every single one of the four girls in Franni’s family went to college, thanks to Pell Grants and other scholarships… And my mother-in-law got herself a $300 GI loan to fix her roof, and used the money instead to go the University of Maine. She became a grade school teacher, teaching Title One kids- poor kids- so her loan was forgiven. “My mother-in-law and every single one of those five kids became a productive member of society. Conservatives like to say that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – and that’s a great idea. But first, you’ve got to have the boots. And the government gave my wife’s family the boots.”
It’s a moving tale, but it’s hard to believe that without federal programs Franni’s family, with its obvious motivation and intelligence, would have found no way to become “productive members of society.” Especially as the survivors of a decorated veteran, assistance would have been available – if not through the VA, then certainly through local or private agencies. Would the University of Maine truly (or properly?) deny scholarship aid to a widow of a war hero who’s trying to raise five kids? The recent e-bay auction of an angry Senatorial letter to Rush Limbaugh has now raised more than four million dollars (with Limbaugh’s matching contribution) for a private charity that provides scholarships for the children of fallen warriors in the Marines and in law enforcement. This prominent story should serve as a reminder that acts of kindness, decency and generosity are hardly limited to the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
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That’s the problem with the underlying assumption that the poor can only advance in this nation with the assistance of the federal government: it not only dismisses (and undermines) the self-help potential of the needy, but ignores all those other sources of assistance beyond the Beltway.
In this sense, it’s instructive to go back one last time to Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address. Everyone recalls its reassuring opening: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…” Unfortunately, the rest of the speech includes chilling language reminiscent of the Fascist dictatorships simultaneously taking shape in Europe. “….if we are to go forward,” the new President declared, “we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.”
Was the audience at this point supposed to raise arms and shout “Sieg Heil”?
“With this pledge taken,” FDR continued, “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack on our common problems…It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.”
Is it any wonder that conservatives gravely feared a grievous suspension of Constitutional rule?
Roosevelt baldly announced: “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
In giving some indication just how he might employ that power, Roosevelt spoke (in the speech’s single most shocking (and altogether forgotten) passage of the need for a relocation program that might have pleased Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot: “Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”
Fortunately, the New Deal never included a new alphabet agency to correct “the overbalance of population in our industrial centers” by driving people by bayonet into the country, but the mere suggestion illuminates the mentality behind FDR’s initiatives and all other sweeping liberal “reforms” over the years.
Under this thinking, the government and its planners make the crucial economic decisions for the people they command --- the enlisted men in the “trained and loyal army” who are “willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.” The very idea that bureaucrats and politicos can direct economic advancement more reliably than individuals making millions of small decisions for themselves has not only reduced liberty, but invariably threatened prosperity in the process.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
For those Americans who know anything at all about the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the story line seems simple, dramatic, inspiring and familiar:
Capitalists and speculators went wild with greed in “The Roaring Twenties,” leading to a stock market crash and hard times. Banks closed, once prosperous workers sold apples on street-corners or became hobos in shanty-towns, while the Republican President Herbert Hoover did nothing for the destitute and suffering nation. Then FDR arrived on the scene, inspiring new hope with his golden words (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and a flurry of radical reform in his first hundred days in office. While conservatives squealed, this “new deal for the American people” improved the lives of everyone and got the economy humming again – just in time to face the challenges of World War II. No wonder a grateful nation rewarded Franklin Roosevelt with an unprecedented four terms – and a consistent ranking as one of our three greatest presidents (along with Washington and Lincoln).
Like most other Americans of my generation, I learned this story from my parents and grandparents, not just from history teachers in school. My grandparents on my father’s side, immigrants from Ukraine, became naturalized citizens in part to vote for Roosevelt: in their tiny home in a gritty neighborhood of South Philadelphia, they always kept a heroic black-and-sepia portrait of FDR over the mantelpiece, encased in a dime-store brass frame with a cracked pane of glass. My grandfather was a barrel-maker who managed to keep working throughout the Depression, so he never benefited personally from New Deal programs, but he revered the 32nd President for his general support for “the little guy.” My father recalled April 12, 1945, the day of Roosevelt’s sudden and shocking death from a cerebral hemorrhage, as one of the darkest occasions of his life: along with many other sailors at his base in San Francisco, he wept uncontrollably.
Unfortunately, the nearly universal canonization of Franklin Roosevelt has helped all succeeding generations learn false lessons about the right way to deal with hard times and poverty. These assumptions continue to shape political debate, especially at moments like the present day when some three-quarters of the people (according to recent polls) feel convinced that the economy’s in recession or headed in that direction. Democrats in particular love to invoke the Depression and summon the noble ghost of FDR: some 40 years after his death, Barbra Streisand thrilled a party fundraiser with her heart-wrenching rendition of Roosevelt’s campaign song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” which suggested that in the right hands, enlightened government could stop suffering and uplift the downtrodden. In the same spirit, in 1992, Bill Clinton declared that the first President Bush had left the nation with “the worst economy since the Great Depression” and in his First Inaugural Address suggested that even in the midst of January’s chill he meant to “force the spring.” In 2004, numerous Democratic candidates (Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry) made similar analogies between the presumed economic wreckage left by George W. Bush and the dark days of 1932, and we’ll undoubtedly hear similar alarmist rhetoric in 2008. In response to the presumed economic disasters and hardships which they always discern, liberals instinctively invoke FDR’s stirring words from his First Inaugural: “This nation asks for action, and action now.”
According to the conventional wisdom, Roosevelt proved that such governmental action – bold, aggressive, experimental, and sweeping – restored vigor to the economy and improved the lives of the suffering masses.
Unfortunately, such assumptions rest upon a foundation of myths, distortions, half-truths and outright lies. The truths about the New Deal, and all other notable attempts in the course of American history to use the power of the federal government to rescue the poor over the course of 230 years of American history, show the same disturbing results: higher tax burdens and a corresponding loss of liberty, with little gain (and sometimes serious damage) for the intended beneficiaries of bureaucratic largesse.
An understanding of this destructive and increasingly dangerous pattern in our politics must begin with an examination of the pernicious legend of Franklin Roosevelt as America’s savior.
1. THE NEW DEAL NEVER BROUGHT RECOVERY – IN FACT, IT PROLONGED THE DEPRESSION
In 1931, in some of the darkest days of the great depression and the middle of the Hoover administration, the national unemployment rate stood at 17.4%. Seven years later, after more than five years of FDR and literally hundreds of wildly ambitious new government programs, after more than doubling federal spending, the national unemployment rate stood at --- 17.4%! As economist Jim Powell, author of the devastating book “FDR’s Folly” points out: “From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2%. At no point during the 1930’s did unemployment go below 14%. Even in 1941, amidst the military buildup for World War II, 9.9% of American workers were unemployed. Living standards remained depressed until after the war.”
In his celebrated Inaugural Address of March 4, 1933, FDR unequivocally declared: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.” For the President and his economic planners, the task of putting people to work did remain an unsolvable problem –until world conflict led to sixteen million Americans leaving the work force for the military, and others finding new jobs in humming defense plants. Considering Roosevelt’s self-proclaimed priorities, the persistence of devastating unemployment rates (in an era when the typical family relied on only one wage earner and women for the most part remained uninvolved in the work force) should alone identify the New Deal as a wretched, ill-conceived failure. Other measures of recovery show similarly dismal results. After the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 250 in 1930 under Hoover (it had been 343 just before the crash). By January, 1940 the market had collapsed to 151 (remaining in the low 100’s through most of Roosevelt’s terms) and didn’t return to its 1929 levels until the 1950’s. At the same time, federal spending as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product soared at an unprecedented rate: from 2.5% in 1929, to 9% in 1936 (long before the wartime spending began). In other words, the portion of the total economy controlled by Washington increased by a staggering 360% in the course of just seven years – without providing discernable benefit to the economy.
Such statistics look so disturbing, so incontrovertible, that they raise serious questions about the survival of the New-Deal-Fixed-the-Depression myth. How could reputable historians pretend that the vast expansion of government power between 1933 and 1941 somehow brought the nation out its persistent, nightmarish hard times?
Out of curiosity, I took from my shelf the college history textbook assigned to me at Yale in 1968. The relevant chapters had been written by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the most acclaimed and authoritative of all New Deal historians. To my surprise, not even this fervent liberal and stalwart admirer of FDR attempted to pretend that his hero’s policies had solved the Depression. In “The National Experience,” published in 1963 (just 18 years after FDR’s death), Schlesinger wrote: “Though the policies of the Hundred Days had ended despair, they had not produced recovery…The New Deal had done remarkable things, especially in social reform, but the formula for full recovery evidently still eluded it.” He also wrote honestly about the devastating crash of 1937 – in the midst of “the Second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s second term. “The collapse in the months after September 1937 was actually more severe than it had been in the first nine months of the depression (or, indeed, than in any other period in American history for which statistics are available). National income fell 13 per cent, payrolls 35 per cent, durable goods production 50 per cent, profits 78 per cent. The increase in unemployment reproduced scenes of the early depression and imposed new burdens on the relief agencies.”
In the view of such acknowledged economic disaster after more than five years of vaunted reform, how can fawning historians still worship at the altar of Rooseveltian idolatry? Normal depressions or recessions last between one to three years; the Great Depression continued to depress living standards and impose severe hardships for more than a decade. A growing majority of economic historians now concede that the programs of the New Deal prolonged, rather than terminated, the Depression. David Kennedy, the former President of Stanford University, wrote a 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning account called Freedom from Fear in which he concluded: “Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.” In nearly all European nations, afflicted by the worldwide economic crisis as was the United States, the depression ended more quickly than it did in Roosevelt’s America; in the words of economic historian Lester V. Chandler, “in most countries the depression was less deep and prolonged.” Even at the time, experts understood the misguided nature of FDR’s policies. In 1935, the Brookings Institution (then, as now, a left-leaning think tank) produced a 900-page report considering the impact of the New Deal’s most ambitious and controversial program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and concluded, “on the whole it retarded recovery.”
To counter the brute facts about the persistence of crippling unemployment and pervasive poverty in the face of the huge increases in governmental spending and activism, New Deal apologists cite two positive results from the feverish emergence of new programs: the restoration of “hope” in place of despair, and the implementation of needed “reforms” that planted the long-term seeds of justice even if they failed to bring economic recovery.
Concerning the notion of FDR’s alleged conquest of fear, Amity Shlaes (in her brilliant history of the Great Depression “The Forgotten Man”) points out that he achieved this change of mood through an old-fashioned vote-buying scheme in the style of the venal ward-heelers and big city bosses who still dominated the Democratic Party. She cites the nakedly political emphasis on the PWA, or Public Works Administration, under the control of Secretary of the Interior Harold I. Ickes. This federal operation laid the groundwork for the current Washington mania for “earmarks” –in which Congressional power-brokers arrange for buildings, bridges, and other facilities to gratify constituents across the country. With more than 3,000 counties in America, the PWA provided at least one project for all but 33 of them. The scale of spending startled even the responsible parties: with $3 billion in its first few years, at a time when the total federal budget in any given year was barely $6 billion. Secretary Ickes himself wrote concerning the expenditure for his program, “It helped me to estimate its size by figuring that if we had it all in currency and should load it into trucks, we could set out with it from Washington, D.C., for the Pacific Coast, shovel off one million dollars at every milepost and, at the end, still have enough left to build a fleet of battle ships.”
The other defense of Roosevelt’s programs, beyond their success in brightening the national mood (and insuring his perpetual re-election) involves their inherent justice: Schlesinger and others suggest that even if the reforms failed to bring the promised recovery, their inherent “justice” (concerning the empowerment of labor unions, the regimentation of agriculture under federal control, tighter supervision of banking, and countless other “improvements”) made them nonetheless worthwhile. Regarding this argument, no less a leftist hero than the British economist John Maynard Keynes offered a tart response. He wrote FDR a letter published on December 31, 1933 in the New York Times in which he warned that “even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action.”
In other words, he perceived at the very beginning of the New Deal its most damaging aspect: treating the nation’s capitalists as an enemy --“the unscrupulous money changers” FDR called them in his inaugural, who “have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.” With new, unpredictable government regulatory schemes and law suits and political attacks emerging every week, business leaders found it difficult to prepare the long term planning that alone could restore investment and entrepreneurial energy and put Americans back to work.
2. MAJOR RECESSIONS – BOTH BEFORE AND SINCE FDR – HAVE ENDED MORE QUICKLY WITHOUT MASSIVE GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION
The Great Depression hardly constituted the only economic collapse in US history. The nation endured major reverses and sharply increased unemployment in 1815, 1837, 1873, 1893, 1920, 1958, 1979 and many other occasions. The record shows consistently that leaders who cut government to revive the economy succeeded far more quickly and painlessly than the New Deal.
The punishing Panic of 1837 wrought havoc for American commerce and cost President Martin Van Buren his chances of re-election in 1840, but Jim Powell points out that Van Buren responded in precisely the appropriate way: he cut federal spending from $37.2 million to $24.3 million and sharply reduced taxes (mainly tariff revenue). He determined “to make government cheaper and stay out of the way of the private sector.” As a result, the young nation roared back to recovery and resumed its spectacular economic growth shortly after Van Buren left office.
Another serious downturn, the Depression of 1893, produced four million unemployed, violent strikes and a colorful march on Washington by the dispossessed of “Coxey’s Commonweal Army” who marched en masse from Ohio behind a banner with an image of Christ and the legend “HE IS RISEN!! BUT DEATH TO INTEREST ON BONDS!!!” The marchers demanded interest free advances from the government and a new program to hire the legions of unemployed to build highways across America, but the Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, refused to see them or to consider their pleas. Instead, he determined to reduce burdens on taxpayers, cutting tariffs and blocking an income tax. He even vetoed a bill (among more than 300 “relief” measures he stopped) to distribute $10,000 in seed grain to drought-stricken Texas farmers. In his veto message, the President wrote: “Federal aid in such cases encourages an expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” By the end of 1894, depressed income figures began to turn upward and the entire depression ended within two years.
Most striking of all, the reviled President Warren Harding proved himself a masterful manager of the sharp recession that followed the conclusion of World War I and which he faced when he came to power in 1921. Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman identified the decline of the money supply “as the largest percentage decline” up to that time, and the largest in American history other than the Great Depression. As the great British historian Paul Johnson (“A History of the American People”) writes: “Harding inherited from the comatose Wilson regime one of the sharpest recessions in American history." By July, 1921 it was all over, and the economy was booming again. Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon had done nothing except cut government expenditure by a huge 40 percent from Wilson’s peacetime level, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ The cuts were not ill-considered but part of a careful plan to bring the spending of the monster state which had emerged under Wilson back under control. The result of these cuts, and of even sharper tax cuts under Harding’s successor Coolidge, was the long period of growth and rising living standards associated with the “Roaring Twenties,” interrupted only by the prolonged Depression made worse by governmental meddling by both Hoover and Roosevelt.
Reagan enjoyed similar success by cutting taxes dramatically to cope with the crippling and stubborn Carter legacy of “stagflation,” and Eisenhower and both Presidents Bush managed to make other recessions short-lived without ambitious new government programs. Rather than depending on government programs to cushion us from the impact of inevitable economic downturns, the American people have benefited far more reliably by the proper instinct to cut government and stimulate the economy in times of slow or negative growth.
3. THE MOST CELEBRATED ADVOCATES FOR THE POOR IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY CALLED FOR LESS GOVERNMENT, NOT MORE
The Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, which evolved into the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson (hence the “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners” that today’s Democrats still celebrate) argued for less government involvement in the economy, not more. Their opponents, Federalists and later Whigs, favored a more activist government that would assist business interests in building prosperity. For more than a hundred years, the chief intrusion of government policy into economic activity involved tariffs and other restrictions on free trade--- generally supported by Federalists, Whigs and later Republicans – designed to benefit business interests even while increasing costs for the consumer. At least through President Cleveland (who left office in 1897) the Democrats, who claimed as they do now to represent the “working man” and “the little guy” favored small government, low taxes, low tariffs and the disentanglement of business from bureaucracy as the best way to assure that ordinary citizens escaped the destructive impact of governmental favoritism for big business.
4. THE ERA OF SMALL GOVERNMENT PROVIDED GREATER, NOT LESSER, ECONOMIC MOBILITY
Despite the absence of federal programs to “help” the poor and downtrodden, the nineteenth century in America remained an unprecedented era of social and economic mobility. The Horatio Alger stories that became bestsellers and inspired the nation reflected reality, and the unprecedented ability of American families (including those of newly arrived immigrant masses) to rise from abject poverty to middle class status (or above) in one, two or three generations. Social programs didn’t power this escalator to prosperity: economic growth did. In their 1963 book “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960,” Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz write: “The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a growth of population of over 2 percent per year, rapid extension of the railroad network, essential completion of continental settlement, and an extraordinary increase both in the acreage of land in farms and the output of farm products. The number of farms rose by nearly 50 per cent – despite the price decline. Yet at the same time, manufacturing industries were growing even more rapidly, and the Census of 1890 was the first in which the net value added by manufacturing exceeded the value of agricultural output. A feverish boom in western land swept the country during the eighties.” Meanwhile, with government consuming a smaller portion of the Gross Domestic Product than other industrial powers (Britain, Germany, France) the United States emerged as the most open and mobile society on earth, providing opportunities for the penniless that more bureaucratic nations couldn’t match.
5. ANTI-POVERTY AND GREAT SOCIETY PROGRAMS OF THE ‘60’S AND ‘70’S WORSENED, RATHER THAN IMPROVED, THE STATUS OF THE POOR
As Ronald Reagan famously declared, “We had a war on poverty. And poverty won.” Charles Murray’s ground-breaking 1984 book “Losing Ground” asks an obvious question about the era of the “Great Society” and its aftermath: what caused the obvious and painful increase in poverty, illegitimacy, crime and social dysfunction at the same time that government spending to address these pathologies vastly increased? He concluded that the well-intentioned and monumentally expensive programs of the period contributed to the problems, rather than to their solutions.
Most importantly, the programs of the Great Society went far beyond the New Deal in erasing the distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”—making all struggling citizens eligible for the same programs, regardless of the respectability or destructiveness of their behavior. This approach stemmed from the assumption that the poor bore no responsibility for their status – creating a culture of helpless victimhood and presumed powerlessness that undermined the confidence and self-discipline needed to escape poverty. An individual who bears no responsibility for his situation exerts no control over it – and must depend on outside forces (in this case the federal government) for his redemption. By removing the stigma previously associated with accepting “the dole,” anti-poverty programs encouraged a culture of dependency and discouraged self-reliance. The very concept of “Welfare Rights” (eagerly promoted in the 1970’s) worked against the old idea that the “honest poor” who refused hand-outs and insisted on toiling for their own advancement deserved special respect and encouragement.
The ultimate vindication for Murray’s arguments came with federal welfare reform in 1996 which succeeded in cutting the number of dependent individuals by more than half and corresponded with a period or rapidly declining poverty.
6. GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS CROWD OUT THE MORE EFFECTIVE WORK OF PRIVATE CHARITY
A paper by Daniel Hungerman of the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrates the precipitous decline in church-based private charity to benefit the needy as government aid expenditures increased more than six-fold from 1933 to 1939. In “Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out During the Great Depression” he shows that in 1926, congregations invested vastly more ($150 million) on these charities than federal, state and local agencies combined ($60 million at most). With the rise in New Deal expenditures, each dollar of government-relief spending in a state led to between three-and-seven cents less church spending. Since overall federal investment dwarfed the charitable investment (by a ratio of more than 10 to 1) this meant a significant reduction – an estimated 30% -- in the amount devoted by churches to helping the poor.
In “The Tragedy of American Compassion” (1992), Marvin Olasky of the University of Texas explores numerous reasons that private charities function more effectively to uplift the poor. For instance, “A century ago, when individuals applied for material assistance, charity volunteers tried first to ‘restore family ties that have been sundered’ and ‘reabsorb in social life those who for some reason have snapped the threads that bound them to other members of the community.’ Instead of immediately offering help, charities asked, ‘Who is bound to help in this case?” This approach of course discouraged the extension of poverty as a semi-permanent status passed on from one generation to another. As Olasky maintains, faith-based and private aid organizations also maintained the crucial ability to make distinctions between “deserving” and “self-destructive” poor. “Charities a century ago realized that two persons in exactly the same material circumstances, but with different values, need different treatment. One might benefit most from some material help and a pat on the back, the other might need spiritual challenge and a push.”
One of the great difficulties of all bureaucratized and governmental interventions, no matter how well intentioned, is the official difficulty in making such distinctions, or helping to repair or encourage the family relationships so essential to escape from poverty and dysfunction.
7. NOSTALGIA AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS CLOUD CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE RECENT PAST
With rapid upward mobility still a prominent factor in American life, many families feel proud to exaggerate their own past destitution and somehow prefer to identify government as the source of their progress rather than business. A few years ago I saw this principle at work when speaking to a Jewish Temple in Florida. An angry questioner denounced my conservative politics by insisting that Jews in America owed our prosperity exclusively to liberal programs: were it not for the unions and the radical organizers and for the leftists and their compassionate initiatives, we’d all still be toiling in sweat shops and living in tenements. In response to his impassioned declaration, I asked for a show of hands in the crowd of some 700 people. I asked how many came from families in which labor unions played an important role in economic advancement. A few hands shot up, proudly—at most two or three dozen. Then I asked how many people in the audience came from families who had arrived in the middle class because of federal welfare programs. Members of the crowd looked at one another nervously, but only three people raised their hands in the entire Temple. Finally, I asked the most telling question: how many in that crowd had come to their current state of comfort and opportunity because someone, a parent or a grandparent or the individual himself, had worked hard in business and achieved some measure of success? At this, the overwhelming majority of the audience lifted hands, laughed and applauded in recognition.
Whether the crowd happened to be Jewish, or Irish, or Italian, or Mexican-American, or black, the response wouldn’t have been much different. The vast expansion of the Middle Class that occurred in the 1950’s involved productive work in the private sector and only one prominent form of governmental assistance: the GI Bill, which helped countless veterans (like my father) pay for education and housing and the launching of businesses. The GI Bill – providing long-term reward for military service – hardly constituted a something-for-nothing welfare program.
America has always been a compassionate society, finding various means – mostly private but occasionally involving state and local funds – to provide help to those who required it. “Rugged individualism” never meant isolation from neighbors, family, or fellow congregants. In that context, attempts by left-leaning commentators to credit government alone for social and economic progress remain strained and unpersuasive.
Consider, for example, the argument offered by comedian, talk-show host and Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken concerning his wife, Franni. In his stump speeches, he often re-tells “Franni’s Story” in these terms:
“When she was seventeen months old, her dad – a decorated veteran of World War II – died in a car accident, leaving her mother, my mother-in-law, widowed with five kids.
“My mother-in-law worked in the produce department of a grocery store, but that family made it because of Social Security survivor benefits....Every single one of the four girls in Franni’s family went to college, thanks to Pell Grants and other scholarships… And my mother-in-law got herself a $300 GI loan to fix her roof, and used the money instead to go the University of Maine. She became a grade school teacher, teaching Title One kids- poor kids- so her loan was forgiven. “My mother-in-law and every single one of those five kids became a productive member of society. Conservatives like to say that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps – and that’s a great idea. But first, you’ve got to have the boots. And the government gave my wife’s family the boots.”
It’s a moving tale, but it’s hard to believe that without federal programs Franni’s family, with its obvious motivation and intelligence, would have found no way to become “productive members of society.” Especially as the survivors of a decorated veteran, assistance would have been available – if not through the VA, then certainly through local or private agencies. Would the University of Maine truly (or properly?) deny scholarship aid to a widow of a war hero who’s trying to raise five kids? The recent e-bay auction of an angry Senatorial letter to Rush Limbaugh has now raised more than four million dollars (with Limbaugh’s matching contribution) for a private charity that provides scholarships for the children of fallen warriors in the Marines and in law enforcement. This prominent story should serve as a reminder that acts of kindness, decency and generosity are hardly limited to the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
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That’s the problem with the underlying assumption that the poor can only advance in this nation with the assistance of the federal government: it not only dismisses (and undermines) the self-help potential of the needy, but ignores all those other sources of assistance beyond the Beltway.
In this sense, it’s instructive to go back one last time to Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address. Everyone recalls its reassuring opening: “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself…” Unfortunately, the rest of the speech includes chilling language reminiscent of the Fascist dictatorships simultaneously taking shape in Europe. “….if we are to go forward,” the new President declared, “we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.”
Was the audience at this point supposed to raise arms and shout “Sieg Heil”?
“With this pledge taken,” FDR continued, “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack on our common problems…It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.”
Is it any wonder that conservatives gravely feared a grievous suspension of Constitutional rule?
Roosevelt baldly announced: “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
In giving some indication just how he might employ that power, Roosevelt spoke (in the speech’s single most shocking (and altogether forgotten) passage of the need for a relocation program that might have pleased Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot: “Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”
Fortunately, the New Deal never included a new alphabet agency to correct “the overbalance of population in our industrial centers” by driving people by bayonet into the country, but the mere suggestion illuminates the mentality behind FDR’s initiatives and all other sweeping liberal “reforms” over the years.
Under this thinking, the government and its planners make the crucial economic decisions for the people they command --- the enlisted men in the “trained and loyal army” who are “willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline.” The very idea that bureaucrats and politicos can direct economic advancement more reliably than individuals making millions of small decisions for themselves has not only reduced liberty, but invariably threatened prosperity in the process.
Capitalism Doesn't Work, Mr. Gates?
By Lawrence Kudlow
Friday, January 25, 2008
Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a "kinder capitalism" to aid the world's poor. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it's failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who's worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion).
Don't you just love it?
A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn't work. What chutzpah.
For all his do-good preaching, Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class over the last decade. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe. (Maybe even think France under Nicolas Sarkozy.) Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.
The latest stats out of China are revealing. Here's a country that was a basket case not so long ago and today is the world's fourth largest economy -- hot on the heels of Germany, the third largest economy. China just reported 11.2 percent fourth-quarter GDP, its fastest growth rate in 13 years. Total output for China is now 24.7 trillion yuan, or $3.42 trillion at current exchange rates.
At $14 trillion, the U.S. economy is still four times the size of China's. But we've had free-market capitalism for more than 300 years. China's only had it for about 15. China is still an undemocratic, authoritarian and repressive society that lacks the benefits of political freedom. But it was the late Milton Friedman who argued that the onset of free-market capitalism was the precursor to full-fledged democratic capitalism. China's on the right track.
Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers -- like South Korea and Taiwan -- they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale.
The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.
Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.
The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It's a good thing. It's the key to unlocking a nation's prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man.
Another billionaire, George Soros, the Davos partygoer who finances near every left-wing political-action group on both sides of the Atlantic pond, recently wrote in the Financial Times that the era of capitalism is coming to an end. Soros, of course, has been predicting this for at least 20 years -- through the greatest world boom in history. And how was it that Soros made his money? Trading currencies in the technologically advanced world financial markets, the very same markets that were spawned by 20th century free-market capitalism.
So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when their buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors.
Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Bill Gates, bloviating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is issuing a clarion call for a "kinder capitalism" to aid the world's poor. Gates says he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He thinks it's failing much of the world. This, of course, from a guy who's worth around $35 billion (give or take a billion).
Don't you just love it?
A guy without a college degree who invented a new technology process in his garage that literally changed the entire world, a guy who took advantage of all the great opportunities that a free and capitalist society has to offer and got filthy rich in the process, is now trashing capitalism and telling us it doesn't work. What chutzpah.
For all his do-good preaching, Gates is ignoring the global spread of free-market capitalism that has successfully lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class over the last decade. Think China. Think India. Think Eastern Europe. (Maybe even think France under Nicolas Sarkozy.) Gates wants business leaders to dedicate more time to fighting poverty. But the reality is that economic freedom is the best path to prosperity. Period.
The latest stats out of China are revealing. Here's a country that was a basket case not so long ago and today is the world's fourth largest economy -- hot on the heels of Germany, the third largest economy. China just reported 11.2 percent fourth-quarter GDP, its fastest growth rate in 13 years. Total output for China is now 24.7 trillion yuan, or $3.42 trillion at current exchange rates.
At $14 trillion, the U.S. economy is still four times the size of China's. But we've had free-market capitalism for more than 300 years. China's only had it for about 15. China is still an undemocratic, authoritarian and repressive society that lacks the benefits of political freedom. But it was the late Milton Friedman who argued that the onset of free-market capitalism was the precursor to full-fledged democratic capitalism. China's on the right track.
Gates says he has witnessed steep income and cultural inequities in his travels around the world, in particular to Africa. But for this he should blame the absence of capitalist principles, not capitalism itself. Even the most compassionate corporate executives are not going to bring prosperity to impoverished countries with statist economies. Until Africa's nations undertake the market-oriented reforms that have boosted China and the other Asian Tigers -- like South Korea and Taiwan -- they will continue to rank at the bottom of the world prosperity scale.
The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal 2008 Index of Economic Freedom reveals how free-market economics is spreading like wildfire, while state-run socialism is on the decline. And it's no wonder why. The free-market countries are prospering mightily, while the least-free economies are mired in poverty. We're talking North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Iran. Also noteworthy is Venezuela. As the neo-socialist Hugo Chavez attempts to adopt Fidel Castro's failed economic model, he's sinking his nation toward Cuba-type poverty.
Economist Mark Perry, on his Carpe Diem blog site, reports that both the U.S. share of world GDP and its global stock market capitalization are shrinking. But this isn't a bad thing at all. It doesn't mean that America is heading downward. On the contrary, it means that newly freed economies are heading up.
The reality here is that the rising tide of global capitalism is lifting all boats that employ it. Capitalism works. It's a good thing. It's the key to unlocking a nation's prosperity. In fact, free-market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised by man.
Another billionaire, George Soros, the Davos partygoer who finances near every left-wing political-action group on both sides of the Atlantic pond, recently wrote in the Financial Times that the era of capitalism is coming to an end. Soros, of course, has been predicting this for at least 20 years -- through the greatest world boom in history. And how was it that Soros made his money? Trading currencies in the technologically advanced world financial markets, the very same markets that were spawned by 20th century free-market capitalism.
So I just have to smile when billionaires like Bill Gates and George Soros turn cold shoulders to the blessings capitalism bestows. Or when their buddy, Warren Buffett, broadcasts the importance of hiking tax rates on successful earners and investors.
Look fellas, the command-and-control, state-run economics experiment was tried. It was called the Soviet Union. If you hadn't noticed, it was a miserable failure.
Why Would Anyone Support the Death Penalty? (Part I)
By Andrew Tallman
Friday, January 25, 2008
In November, the United Nations called for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. In December, Gov. John Corzine signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in New Jersey. Now, in January, the Supreme Court has heard arguments on whether lethal injection violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So, with New Jersey and the UN on one side and Texas and Iran on the other side, the Supreme Court seems poised to pick for us all between the new morality and the old.
Granted, New Jersey hadn’t actually executed anyone in 45 years, so this was a bit like Bill Cosby announcing that he will stop using profanity in his sketches. But the official decision is still noteworthy, as is the fact that New Mexico, Montana, and Nebraska all came close to doing the same thing this year. In the face of the seemingly unstoppable modern sensibility, why would anyone continue to support executing murderers?
There are five possible objectives of any criminal justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Starting with these values, let’s explore the differences between the two alternatives: capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Incapacitation
Incapacitation is the goal of making it physically impossible for the criminal to commit further crimes against his fellow human beings.
Clearly, both capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole fully incapacitate criminals with respect to the general society. The only exception is if the prisoner escapes, but given that there is such a long delay between conviction and execution that death row becomes a de facto prison sentence until then, there is less distinction here than initially appears. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that once the two paths diverge, execution is 100 percent incapacitation and life in prison without the possibility of parole or LIPWPP (pronounced lip-whip) is 99-plus percent incapacitation. As an advocate of the death penalty, I’m not interested in quibbling about numbers, so I’ll grant that incapacitation is the same for both alternatives.
Within the prison community, however, things are not so clear. Unless LIPWPP is upgraded to permanent solitary confinement, such prisoners will still be a threat to guards and other prisoners during their confinement. This is no trivial difference given the obligations of prisons to protect prisoners from each other. Nonetheless, as long as such isolation is the form of sentencing advocated, I’m willing to grant that incapacitation is a non-issue in this debate.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation is the goal of reforming the criminal so that he can be reintegrated into society as a well-behaved, productive citizen.
Several recent studies have shown that execution is almost completely unsuccessful as a method of rehabilitating the offender. However, given permanent residence in isolation within a prison, LIPWPP isn’t really rehabilitative either. Thus, both alternatives are equal again on this value, at least in the sense of preparing a criminal for re-entry into general society.
However, if one means by rehabilitation the service done to the criminal himself of helping him have a profitable and meaningful life while incarcerated, things are not so clear. On the one hand, it is possible that a murderer would repent and dedicate himself to self-improvement. On the other hand, it is possible that a murderer would go on hating and descend into a spiral of self-destructive seething. Since quantifying these probabilities exceeds my abilities, I’ll optimistically estimate that the net chance of self-development benefits obtained during LIPWPP is offset by the equally small advantage in incapacitation certainty obtained through execution. So, rehabilitation and incapacitation taken together become moot issues.
Retribution
Retribution is the goal of restoring the scales of moral justice to balance as possible.
For instance, when someone thieves, the objective is to restore the victim to his condition prior to the loss. This requires restitution equal to the theft plus a penalty to cover the lost use of that money and the intangible damage to his confidence and security. Civil law is the easiest illustration for understanding retribution. We quantify all sorts of things in civil courts for the sake of saying what the offender owes, and the idea is to restore balance by taking from the criminal and repaying the victim.
But there are always two victims of every crime: the particular person and the moral fabric of the society itself. For every infraction against this fabric, we assess varying degrees of penance including jail time, community service, and fines. These all have their own merits, but the retributive purpose is to make the criminal pay enough to restore balance to the moral universe just as he must to the victim. Not only is this about compensating those who have lost, but it is about forcing the offender to pay his debt to society so that he may satisfy the demands of just retribution. Once paid, we are no longer owed, and he no longer owes.
What, then, is the proper retribution for murder? As death penalty opponents are so fond of saying, “Executing the murderer will not bring his victim back to life.” That, of course, is true. It’s just as true, however, that giving him LIPWTPP will also fail to accomplish a resurrection. And that’s the point. There is simply nothing the murderer can do to truly restore the social fabric to the status quo ante for the obvious reason that there is no way to replace missing people. Nonetheless, as history and the Bible so clearly have held, blood alone can atone for shed blood. By requiring his life of him, we make him pay the only correct price and force him to fully pay it. This balances both the moral fabric as well as the murderer’s personal register.
Once we comprehend this distinction between murder and all other crimes (which can be restituted for), it should be clear that retribution not only justifies execution, it requires it. Execution is the only correct penalty-in-kind for murder, and retribution is the only value so far analyzed which justifies taking this most precious of payments from someone.
In my next column, I will consider the issues of deterrence and symbolism before moving on to discuss the other issues in this complex and often difficult issue.
Friday, January 25, 2008
In November, the United Nations called for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. In December, Gov. John Corzine signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in New Jersey. Now, in January, the Supreme Court has heard arguments on whether lethal injection violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. So, with New Jersey and the UN on one side and Texas and Iran on the other side, the Supreme Court seems poised to pick for us all between the new morality and the old.
Granted, New Jersey hadn’t actually executed anyone in 45 years, so this was a bit like Bill Cosby announcing that he will stop using profanity in his sketches. But the official decision is still noteworthy, as is the fact that New Mexico, Montana, and Nebraska all came close to doing the same thing this year. In the face of the seemingly unstoppable modern sensibility, why would anyone continue to support executing murderers?
There are five possible objectives of any criminal justice system: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence, and symbolism. Starting with these values, let’s explore the differences between the two alternatives: capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Incapacitation
Incapacitation is the goal of making it physically impossible for the criminal to commit further crimes against his fellow human beings.
Clearly, both capital punishment and life in prison without the possibility of parole fully incapacitate criminals with respect to the general society. The only exception is if the prisoner escapes, but given that there is such a long delay between conviction and execution that death row becomes a de facto prison sentence until then, there is less distinction here than initially appears. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that once the two paths diverge, execution is 100 percent incapacitation and life in prison without the possibility of parole or LIPWPP (pronounced lip-whip) is 99-plus percent incapacitation. As an advocate of the death penalty, I’m not interested in quibbling about numbers, so I’ll grant that incapacitation is the same for both alternatives.
Within the prison community, however, things are not so clear. Unless LIPWPP is upgraded to permanent solitary confinement, such prisoners will still be a threat to guards and other prisoners during their confinement. This is no trivial difference given the obligations of prisons to protect prisoners from each other. Nonetheless, as long as such isolation is the form of sentencing advocated, I’m willing to grant that incapacitation is a non-issue in this debate.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation is the goal of reforming the criminal so that he can be reintegrated into society as a well-behaved, productive citizen.
Several recent studies have shown that execution is almost completely unsuccessful as a method of rehabilitating the offender. However, given permanent residence in isolation within a prison, LIPWPP isn’t really rehabilitative either. Thus, both alternatives are equal again on this value, at least in the sense of preparing a criminal for re-entry into general society.
However, if one means by rehabilitation the service done to the criminal himself of helping him have a profitable and meaningful life while incarcerated, things are not so clear. On the one hand, it is possible that a murderer would repent and dedicate himself to self-improvement. On the other hand, it is possible that a murderer would go on hating and descend into a spiral of self-destructive seething. Since quantifying these probabilities exceeds my abilities, I’ll optimistically estimate that the net chance of self-development benefits obtained during LIPWPP is offset by the equally small advantage in incapacitation certainty obtained through execution. So, rehabilitation and incapacitation taken together become moot issues.
Retribution
Retribution is the goal of restoring the scales of moral justice to balance as possible.
For instance, when someone thieves, the objective is to restore the victim to his condition prior to the loss. This requires restitution equal to the theft plus a penalty to cover the lost use of that money and the intangible damage to his confidence and security. Civil law is the easiest illustration for understanding retribution. We quantify all sorts of things in civil courts for the sake of saying what the offender owes, and the idea is to restore balance by taking from the criminal and repaying the victim.
But there are always two victims of every crime: the particular person and the moral fabric of the society itself. For every infraction against this fabric, we assess varying degrees of penance including jail time, community service, and fines. These all have their own merits, but the retributive purpose is to make the criminal pay enough to restore balance to the moral universe just as he must to the victim. Not only is this about compensating those who have lost, but it is about forcing the offender to pay his debt to society so that he may satisfy the demands of just retribution. Once paid, we are no longer owed, and he no longer owes.
What, then, is the proper retribution for murder? As death penalty opponents are so fond of saying, “Executing the murderer will not bring his victim back to life.” That, of course, is true. It’s just as true, however, that giving him LIPWTPP will also fail to accomplish a resurrection. And that’s the point. There is simply nothing the murderer can do to truly restore the social fabric to the status quo ante for the obvious reason that there is no way to replace missing people. Nonetheless, as history and the Bible so clearly have held, blood alone can atone for shed blood. By requiring his life of him, we make him pay the only correct price and force him to fully pay it. This balances both the moral fabric as well as the murderer’s personal register.
Once we comprehend this distinction between murder and all other crimes (which can be restituted for), it should be clear that retribution not only justifies execution, it requires it. Execution is the only correct penalty-in-kind for murder, and retribution is the only value so far analyzed which justifies taking this most precious of payments from someone.
In my next column, I will consider the issues of deterrence and symbolism before moving on to discuss the other issues in this complex and often difficult issue.
Raging Populist or Just Angry Hypocrite?
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 25, 2008
WASHINGTON -- There's losing. There's losing honorably. And then there's John Edwards.
Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.
Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious near-deranged ambition (aka, fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal that is today's nominating process. Political decency is not a common commodity. Thompson had it. He'd make a fine attorney general, and not just on TV.
Then there is John Edwards. He's not going to be president either. He stays in the race because, with the Democrats' proportional representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up in a very close delegate race -- perhaps allowing an also-ran with, say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the convention.
It's a prize of sorts, it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.
Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq War vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation.
-- As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.
-- As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.
-- As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it "radically overhauled."
-- As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it "a good bill ... and I am pleased to support it." He now attacks it.
-- As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.
Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.
Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle" against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.
Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my whole life."
Except for his years as senator, the only public office he's ever held. The audacity of the all-my-life trope is staggering. By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul is a farce.
A cynical farce that is particularly galling to left-liberals of real authenticity. "The one (presidential candidate) that is the most problematic is Edwards," Sen. Russ Feingold told The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., "who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq War. ... He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record."
It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for 4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?
Friday, January 25, 2008
WASHINGTON -- There's losing. There's losing honorably. And then there's John Edwards.
Mike Huckabee is not going to be president. The loss in South Carolina, one of the most highly evangelical states in the union, made that plain. With a ceiling of 14 percent among nonevangelical Republicans, Huckabee's base is simply too narrow. But his was not a rise and then a fall. He came from nowhere to establish himself as the voice of an important national constituency. Huckabee will continue to matter, and might even carry enough remaining Southern states to wield considerable influence at a fractured Republican convention.
Fred Thompson will also not be president. His campaign failed, but quite honorably. He never tacked. He never dissimulated. He refused to reinvent himself. He presented himself plainly and honestly. Too plainly. What he lacked was the ferocious near-deranged ambition (aka, fire in the belly) required to navigate the bizarre ordeal that is today's nominating process. Political decency is not a common commodity. Thompson had it. He'd make a fine attorney general, and not just on TV.
Then there is John Edwards. He's not going to be president either. He stays in the race because, with the Democrats' proportional representation system, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton might end up in a very close delegate race -- perhaps allowing an also-ran with, say, 10 percent of the delegates to act as kingmaker at the convention.
It's a prize of sorts, it might even be tradeable for a Cabinet position. But at considerable cost. His campaign has been a spectacle.
Edwards has made much of his renunciation of his Iraq War vote. But he has not stopped there. His entire campaign has been an orgy of regret and renunciation.
-- As senator, he voted in 2001 for a bankruptcy bill that he now denounces.
-- As senator, he voted for storing nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Twice. He is now fiercely opposed.
-- As senator, he voted for the Bush-Kennedy No Child Left Behind education reform. He now campaigns against it, promising to have it "radically overhauled."
-- As senator, he voted for the Patriot Act, calling it "a good bill ... and I am pleased to support it." He now attacks it.
-- As senator, he voted to give China normalized trade relations. Need I say? He now campaigns against liberalized trade with China as a sellout of the middle class to the great multinational agents of greed, etc.
Breathtaking. People can change their minds about something. But everything? The man served one term in the Senate. He left not a single substantial piece of legislation to his name, only an astonishing string of votes on trade, education, civil liberties, energy, bankruptcy and, of course, war that now he not only renounces but inveighs against.
Today he plays the avenging angel, engaged in an "epic struggle" against the great economic malefactors that "have literally," he assures us, "taken over the government." He is angry, embodying the familiar zeal of the convert, ready to immolate anyone who benightedly holds to any revelation other than the zealot's very latest.
Nothing new about a convert. Nothing new about a zealous convert. What is different about Edwards is his endlessly repeated claim that the raging populist of today is what he has always been. That this has been the "cause of my life," the very core of his being, ingrained in him on his father's knee or at the mill or wherever, depending on the anecdote he's telling. You must understand: This is not politics for him. "This fight is deeply personal to me. I've been engaged in it my whole life."
Except for his years as senator, the only public office he's ever held. The audacity of the all-my-life trope is staggering. By his own endlessly self-confessed record, his current pose is a coat of paint newly acquired. His claim that it is an expression of his inner soul is a farce.
A cynical farce that is particularly galling to left-liberals of real authenticity. "The one (presidential candidate) that is the most problematic is Edwards," Sen. Russ Feingold told The Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., "who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq War. ... He uses my voting record exactly as his platform, even though he had the opposite voting record."
It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world. But for 4 percent of the Nevada caucuses?
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