John Kerry, Israel, and Apartheid

By Michael Brown

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

After coming under intense criticism for his remarks that Israel could become an “apartheid state” if it did not embrace a two-state solution, Secretary of State John Kerry has now sought to clarify his comments, reiterating his support for Israel, which he called a “vibrant democracy.”

While AP News reports that Kerry “pointedly did not apologize for the remarks,” he “acknowledged his comments last week to a closed international forum could have been misinterpreted.”

Two days earlier, the Daily Beast reported that Kerry had said in a private meeting with world leaders that, “A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

An apartheid state? How could the Secretary of State of America use such a loaded term, one normally used by Israel’s critics and enemies?

Interestingly, when David Ben Gurion explained what he meant by a Jewish state at a meeting of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine at Lake Success New York on July 7, 1947, he made it clear that it would be anything but an apartheid state.

He explained that “. . . a Jewish State does not mean one has to be a Jew. It means merely a State-where the Jews are in the majority, otherwise all the citizens have the same status.

“. . . maybe the name of Palestine will be changed. But whatever the name of the country, every citizen of the country will be a citizen.

“This is what we mean.

“This is what we have to mean.

“We cannot conceive that in a State where we are not in a minority, where we have the main responsibilities as the majority of the country, there should be the slightest discrimination between a Jew and a non-Jew.”

But, Israel’s critics will say that it has already become an apartheid state and that Ben Gurion’s vision has failed, since the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank are treated like second-class citizens (and worse) and some even live behind an apartheid wall.

Isn’t this the constant complaint of those in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which isn’t afraid to use even more harsh terms, like “ethnic cleansing”?

What Israel’s critics miss is the fact that those Arabs (aka Palestinians) who chose to remain in Israel in 1948 demonstrate that the apartheid charges are completely false.

Consider that Arabs living in Israel today:

· Have grown grew in number from 200,000 in 1948 to 1.6 million in 2013

· They have complete religious and political freedom, far more than their colleagues under Hamas and the PA (or the surrounding Muslim nations)

· They represent 10% of the Israeli Parliament (Knesset)

· They have a seat on the Supreme Court

· Some of them are now advocating fighting in the Israeli military, although they are exempt from having to serve

· The great majority of them do not want to be under the rule of Hamas or the PA (chew on that for a moment)

· An Arab woman was even named Miss Israel in 1999

Is this what an apartheid state looks like?

As for the Arabs/Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, these remain Israel’s declared enemies, to the point that when Israel releases hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as yet another peace gesture, those prisoners who have blood on their hands – in other words, the murderers of Israeli citizens – are hailed as heroes and celebrities by the Palestinian leadership. Is this what a real peace partner does?

As for the security barrier (falsely called an apartheid wall), it absolutely does create hardships for the Palestinians living on the wrong side of the barrier. But it was erected to keep murderers out (the small parts that are actually a wall rather than a fence were especially built to thwart snipers), and so it is the Palestinian leadership that is to blame for the barrier, not the people of Israel.

This is not to whitewash Israel or to deny that there are Israelis who are hostile to the Palestinians or who have mistreated and denigrated them. Nor is it to deny that Israel had sometimes failed to treat all its Jewish citizens with equality.

But the reality is that Israel has already proven that, given the chance to live peacefully with the Palestinian population, it will be anything but an apartheid state. Its 1.6 million Arab citizens prove this point every day.

Put another way, the people of Israel have demonstrated that if you don’t try to blow them up and kill them, they will treat you fairly. In stark contrast, the Palestinian leadership has made clear that, in the event of a two-state solution no Jews would be welcome to live in their state.

So, the Palestinian Authority can advocate for a Judenrein state of its own, and there’s hardly a word of criticism. But when Israel protects itself from terrorists, it is branded an apartheid state by its critics, with even Secretary of State Kerry using the ill-advised term.

Is anyone surprised?

Of Donald Sterling's Racism and the Rise of Thoughtcrime

By Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

In November 2009, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling settled a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Sterling had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks and families without children in his rental properties. The lawsuit contained testimony that Sterling had suggested Hispanics were poor tenants because they "smoke, drink, and just hang around the building," and that "black tenants smell and attract vermin." The settlement cost him and his insurers $2.73 million.

The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing. That same year, the NAACP gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2005, Sterling signed a check for more than $5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that he had attempted to prevent non-Koreans from renting in his facilities in Koreatown.

The NBA and the national media said virtually nothing.

This week, Sterling's 31-year-old girlfriend, V. Stiviano, released a tape of the 80-year-old racist being an 80-year-old racist. Sterling apparently told Stiviano he didn't want her posting pictures of black men on her Instagram account and didn't want her bringing black men to Clippers games.

The entire media establishment suddenly went insane. Colin Cowherd of ESPN idiotically called for the league to void all of Sterling's contracts with his players and agents -- a violation of basic contract law. Magic Johnson declared that the NBA should force Sterling to sell his team -- a violation of basic contract law. President Barack Obama, determined never to let an opportunity pass to label America racist, took to the microphones to declare Sterling's racism a symptom of America's "legacy of race and slavery and segregation."

This is, at the very least, hypocrisy. Last year, Sterling signed coach Doc Rivers, who is black, to a contract worth $7 million per year. Chris Paul, who is black, is slated to make nearly $19 million this season. Blake Griffin, who is black, is slated to make $16 million. DeAndre Jordan will make $11 million. The coach, these players and their agents surely knew about Sterling's legacy. So did Cowherd, Johnson and Obama. They all said nothing.

But the big problem here isn't hypocrisy. The big problem is that the market is turning on Sterling not over action, but over words. Sterling's a pig, and that's been no secret for decades. But what triggered America's response? Sterling's thoughts. American society now considers expression of thought to be significantly more important than action. Sterling got away with actual discrimination for years. But now he is caught on tape telling his gold-digging girlfriend he doesn't like blacks, and that's when the firestorm erupts?

This is the thought police at work. Feelings matter more than action. Words matter more than harming others. That sets a radically dangerous precedent for freedom of thought and speech, particularly for those whose thought and speech we hate. Freedom of speech and thought matters especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thoughtcrime becomes a reality.

Sterling's career should have been ended by public outrage based on his established patterns of discrimination years ago. To end it based not on such disreputable action but on private musings caught on tape demonstrates America's newfound disregard for the rights of those whose thought we find despicable.

The Myth of the Wild

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The pristine natural world has been gone for a long time; get used to it.

Nearly all of the earthworms in New England and the upper Midwest were inadvertently imported from Europe. The American earthworms were wiped out by the last Ice Age. That's why when European colonists first got here, many forest floors were covered in deep drifts of wet leaves. The wild horses of the American West may be no less invasive than the Asian carp advancing on the Great Lakes. Most species of the tumbleweed, icon of the Old West, are actually from Russia or Asia.

The notion that America was "wild" when Europeans found it is more than a little racist; it assumes Indians didn't act like humans everywhere else by changing their environment. Native Americans weren't Ur-hippies taking only photos -- or I guess drawings -- and leaving only footprints. They cultivated plants, cleared forests with extensive burning to boost the population of desired animals, and otherwise altered the landscape in ways that may have seemed natural to newcomers but were nonetheless profound. As biologist Charles Kay observes, "Native Americans were the ultimate keystone species, and their removal has completely altered ecosystems ... throughout North America."

Kay goes on to note that when we set aside a "wilderness" and then let "nature take its course," we aren't preserving "some remnant of the past." We are instead creating "conditions that have not existed for the last 10,000 years."

And even then, these supposedly wild places aren't truly wild. That's because to the extent they are preserved in their seemingly natural state, it is by humanity's will. Also, the remaining wild animals in those places are often the ones we decided should live or didn't accidentally kill. And the plants and animals that ate -- or were eaten by -- those creatures have never been the same. Without humans, dogs, cows, pigs and chickens wouldn't have evolved the way they have.

The wild environment isn't just about trees and bears and other forms of charismatic mega flora and fauna. I heard Bill Gates on NPR the other day talking about the great strides his foundation has made against malaria and how we may be on the brink of actually eradicating polio forever. Diseases play a huge part of any natural ecosystem, and we've been trying to drive them to extinction for centuries.

In other words, we pick and choose what should be "wild" and what shouldn't all of the time.

Last year, the salmon catch in southeast Alaska was the largest ever recorded. It may have been because controversial scientist-businessman Russ George, under contract with the Haida tribe in British Columbia, dumped 120 tons of iron sulfate into the ocean. The idea was to create a phytoplankton bloom that would in turn create feeding grounds for zooplankton, which in turn provide food for salmon and, in turn, the critters that eat them. Supporters believe George's experiment was a win-win-win all the way up the food chain, for grizzly bears and lox-and-bagel aficionados alike. Skeptics want more data, arguing -- fairly -- that the experiment needs more study.

Geoengineering proponents hope that such techniques might one day be used to sequester large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere (though studies are mixed on this score), thus diminishing the need for wealth-crushing fossil fuel prohibitions while making food cheaper for humanity. In principle, this is no more outrageous than draining swampland to eradicate malaria and create farmland.

As Robert Zubrin recently wrote on National Review Online, George's efforts have been condemned by U.N. bureaucrats, environmentalists and many scientists. The scientists are understandably cautious; the bureaucrats claim George may have violated some treaties.

But some of the ideological responses Zubrin cited are ridiculous. Naomi Klein, writing in 2012, was excited to see so many killer whales when she was in British Columbia on vacation. But when it dawned on her that the orcas might be there to partake of George's "all you can eat seafood buffet," she was horrified. In a world of geoengineering, she lamented, "all natural events can begin to take on an unnatural tinge. ... A presence that felt like a miraculous gift suddenly feels sinister, as if all of nature were being manipulated behind the scenes."

That ship sailed at least 10,000 years ago.

Equality at the Expense of Prosperity

By Michael Barone

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on Amazon.com.

It has given a lift to economists on the left who have cheered on Barack Obama’s flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. They have hailed it as “truly superb” and “extraordinarily important.”

Others, not all on the right, have taken a jaundiced view. “All wrong” was the verdict of one critic. “The main argument is based on two (false) claims,” concluded another.

Piketty’s title echoes Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and his argument is similar: Returns on capital tend to exceed returns to labor, producing increasing income inequality and concentration of wealth. That happened in the 19th century, he says, and is likely to happen again in the 21st. The 20th century was a happy exception because of the wealth-destroying effects of two world wars and the Great Depression. Piketty goes far beyond Obama’s tepid responses (a higher minimum wage, forgiveness of college loans) to a red-hot remedy: a global tax on wealth.

That’s obviously not going to happen any time soon. But from the hosannas and harrumphs that have greeted the book — no, I haven’t read all 577 pages — certain conclusions can be drawn. There is general agreement that Piketty has compiled an impressive array of data on income inequality in multiple nations going back 200 years or more. There is agreement also that he thoughtfully states caveats and cautions about data interpretation. His thesis seems at least plausible at a time when the very top incomes have increased much more rapidly than those at the middle and bottom. Even some critics acknowledge that, as the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson writes: “the present concentration of income and wealth feels excessive. It understandably stirs resentment.”

But is his picture of current trends complete? The Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship points out that relying, as Piketty does, on tax returns for the U.S. statistics means omitting income from Social Security, food stamps, public housing, Medicare, and Medicaid. Tax returns count roommates and unmarried partners as separate units when they are part of a larger household. They don’t include employer-paid health insurance — an increasing share of employee compensation in recent decades. Including these factors, Winship notes, means that incomes below the top 10 percent have not stagnated but have risen significantly since the 1970s. Increasing inequality is compatible with increases in ordinary people’s incomes.

Economist Tyler Cowen takes issue with another of Piketty’s assumptions, that the rich can earn 4 to 5 percent on their wealth “automatically, with the mere passage of time, rather than as the result of strategic risk-taking.” The French economist, Cowen says, has “a notion of capital as a growing, homogeneous blob” when in fact “sudden reversals and retrenchments are inevitable.”

Piketty concedes this is true for people with ordinary incomes. He opposes personal investment accounts in Social Security because there is too much risk of making bad investments. His assumption that wealthy investors face no similar risks may have seemed plausible in the generation after World War II, when the Fortune 500 list of major companies remained remarkably stable. But it has made little sense in recent years, when General Motors has gone bankrupt and Google, founded in 1998, is one of the world’s most highly valued companies.

“There’s a persistent tension,” writes Bloomberg’s Clive Crook, “between the limits of the data [Piketty] presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws.” Like global-warming alarmists, he extrapolates from abstract theory and a few years’ trendlines out a century forward — and presents the results as inevitable. He also presents them as justifying the confiscation, more or less, of wealth accumulated by private individuals and putting it in the hands of mandarins guided by their supposedly superior sensitivity to public welfare. There might be less inequality in such a world, but also less economic growth and a lower, though more equal, standard of living.

“In perhaps the most revealing line of the book,” Cowen writes, “the 42-year-old Piketty writes that since the age of 25, he has not left Paris, ‘except for brief trips.’” France, where a cozy elite runs government and large corporations, has a 75 percent top-income-tax rate and essentially zero economic growth. Is that the future American liberals want?

Krugman in the 1 Percent

By Michael Tanner

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

I am outraged. The City University of New York recently announced that it is going to pay Paul Krugman $225,000 for part-time work studying income inequality. If you add in his sundry speaking fees, Professor Krugman is solidly ensconced among the hated 1 percent.

I too write about inequality, yet I am not being paid nearly as much. Of course, Professor Krugman does have that Nobel Prize thing going for him, but that hardly seems to justify such blatant inequality. So I have been waiting patiently for Professor Krugman to mail me a check to correct this unfair situation.

Or perhaps, instead, he has been busy lobbying for a taxpayer-funded program to subsidize underpaid inequality writers.

In reality, of course, Professor Krugman’s income has absolutely nothing to do with mine. Nor should it. This is not a zero-sum world. I don’t earn less because Krugman earns more.

There is no doubt that income inequality has increased in America. Even after adjusting for inflation, the income share of the top 1 percent of Americans rose by 201 percent from 1979 to 2010, compared to just 49 percent for the bottom 20 percent.

But just as Professor Krugman’s earnings are irrelevant to mine, the growing wealth of the super-rich tells us little about how the average American is really doing.

And it turns out we are doing pretty well.

First, we should recognize that, by and large, Americans at all income levels are better off than their parents were. A study by the Pew Charitable Trust and the Brookings Institution found that two-thirds of 40-year-old Americans are in households with larger incomes than their parents had at the same age, even taking into account the fact that the cost of living has risen.

In fact, the news is actually even better than that. The average household is smaller today than it was back then, meaning a household income has to cover fewer family members, leaving them better off than the bigger households of the past. A second Pew study found that when incomes are adjusted for household size, four out of five adults today are better off than their parents were at the same age.

Even the poor are doing comparatively well. As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has pointed out, the poorest of Americans today enjoys luxuries that were beyond the reach of even the wealthy not so long ago. For example, 65 percent have a DVD player, 64 percent have cable or satellite television, and 31 percent have two or more cars.

Second, the American dream of moving up the income ladder actually remains alive and well. Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and others may believe that the meritocracy is dead, replaced by a new aristocracy, but the reality is that income mobility remains strong.

For example, a study by Treasury Department economists Gerald Auten and Geoffrey Gee found that more than half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile between 1996 and 2005, roughly the same as in previous periods. True, there was slightly less mobility in the top and bottom quintiles, but even so, roughly half of those who began in the bottom quintile had moved up to a higher quintile by the end of the period.

Nor did the rich necessarily stay rich. Many of those in the top income quintile saw their incomes decline, and the top 1 percent were even more likely to drop to a lower income group. In fact, the most dramatic downward mobility was among the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

It may take some time to determine the impact of the recession and recovery on various income groups — the rich, who disproportionately hold investment wealth, both took the biggest initial hit and have recovered the most strongly — but the evidence suggests that historical levels of income mobility continue.

Likewise, despite the conventional wisdom, we can still hope that our children will do better than we.

A comprehensive study looking at children born between 1971 and 1983 found that intergenerational mobility has remained extremely stable, with roughly 8 to 9 percent of children born to parents in the bottom quintile of incomes actually reaching the top of the income distribution.

As Raj Chetty of Harvard puts it, “The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed.”

So, while Krugman enters the realm of the 1 percent, I actually see that as a very positive sign that even those who condemn the affluent and actively attempt to tax them out of existence still have the opportunity to join them. If that’s not a sign of capitalism’s mobility, I don’t know what is.