By Larry Elder
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Are we in a recession?
Half of Americans think so, at least according to the new CNN opinion poll. The poll helpfully described the recession as "marked by a significant decline in economic activity." But what the CNN article describing the poll doesn't tell is that our economy is nowhere near a recession.
The government uses the National Bureau of Economic Research to define when recessions begin and end. This nonprofit Cambridge organization defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP (Gross Domestic Product), real income, employment, industrial production and wholesale-retail sales." Most economists consider a recession two or more consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.
So, are we in a recession?
In September 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said 110,000 new jobs were created. For each of the last three months, our economy has created an average of 97,000 new jobs. Since August 2003, the economy has created more than 8.1 million new jobs in 49 consecutive months of job growth.
The national unemployment rate is at 4.7 percent -- low by historical standards.
Since President Bush took office, real after-tax per capita personal income has increased more than 12.5 percent -- an average of $3,750 per person. More than 30 percent of the country's net worth has been added since the president's 2003 tax cuts.
Real wages have increased 2.2 percent during the 12 months ending in August 2007. This is much higher than the average growth rate during the '90s, and translates into an extra $1,266 for a two wage-earner family.
Exports have increased over 14.8 percent during the 12 months ending in July 2007, and the trade deficit has been reduced by $8.3 billion.
Real GDP grew at a strong 3.8 percent annual rate in the second quarter of 2007. The U.S. economy is in its sixth year of sustained economic growth, averaging 2.7 percent a year since the turnaround in 2001.
This year tax revenues grew by $161 billion to reach $2,568 trillion, the highest level ever recorded, and an increase of 6.7 percent. And that follows the 14.5 percent and 11.8 percent increase in revenues during the two prior years.
The federal deficit declined by $250 billion in the last three years. In February, the budget deficit for 2007 was projected to be $244 billion. But by September, the deficit was just $163 billion, or 1.3 percent of the economy. As a percentage of the economy, the deficit is now lower than the average of the last 40 years.
What, then, accounts for the pessimism? Well, take a look at the mainstream media.
Two professors, John Lott, economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Kevin A. Hassett, the Institute's director of economic policy studies, looked at newspaper articles on the economy. They wrote, "We found that newspaper headlines reporting economic news on unemployment, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales and durable goods tended to be much more frequently negative when a Republican was in the White House. And this was true even after accounting for the economic numbers on which the stories were based and how those numbers were changing over time." So bad economic news becomes less bad economic news with a Democrat sitting in the White House. With a Republican in the White House, however, good economic news becomes less good, and bad becomes even worse.
The Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism surveys journalists annually. Their report, "The State of the News Media 2007," found more than one-third (34 percent) of national journalists identified themselves as liberal, as compared to one-fifth (20 percent) of the general public. Only 7 percent of the national press self-identified as conservative, compared with 33 percent of the general public. The press and the public are widely divided on social issues and values, as well. For example, while 58 percent of Americans think belief in God is necessary to be moral, only 6 percent of national journalists agree.
The Pew Center report only covers what journalists admit about themselves. And while 59 percent of this pool of national reporters couldn't think of a single news organization that was liberal, a whopping 82 percent said they could think of conservative news coverage. Even so, 64 percent of national journalists admit that criticism about the blurring of reporting and commentary is valid.
Here's a typical example of how the media shapes moods. Support for the Iraq war increased from 22 to 30 percent -- a 36 percent increase -- right before Iraq operations commander Gen. Petraeus testified before Congress. MSNBC described this as an "uptick." Meanwhile, a major paper described a 36 percent increase in home foreclosures as a "surge."
Court TV founder and media watchdog Steven Brill once said, "When it comes to arrogance, power and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good."
Thursday, October 25, 2007
What I Learned About Liberalism From Barry Manilow
By Andrew Tallman
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Barry Manilow recently gave a seminar on liberalism. Oh, not intentionally, of course. But sometimes unintentional seminars are the most instructive of all.
It all started when the singer suddenly cancelled his September 18th appearance on the television show “The View.” This statement was posted on Manilow’s Web site on the 17th:
I wanted to let you know that I will no longer be on “The View” tomorrow as scheduled. I had made a request that I be interviewed by Joy, Barbara or Whoopi, but not Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Unfortunately, the show was not willing to accommodate this simple request so I bowed out. It’s really too bad because I’ve always been a big supporter of the show, but I cannot compromise my beliefs. The good news is that I will be on a whole slew of other shows promoting the new album so I hope you can catch me on those.
Although he had appeared twice in the past year without conditions, the fuss between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell back in May changed all of that. As a close friend of Rosie’s and a large Democratic contributor, Manilow didn’t relish the idea of putting himself anywhere near the token conservative. As he told TMZ, “I strongly disagree with her views. I think she’s dangerous and offensive. I will not be on the same stage as her.” When “The View” refused his “simple” request, he declined to appear.
Or did he?
Barbara Walters discussed the event on her radio show with Bill Geddie, her co-executive producer. According to them, Manilow didn’t cancel “The View.” They cancelled him. Geddie explained it this way: “He said, ‘I’ll do Barbara and Whoopi or I’ll do Whoopi and Sherri or some combination, but I won’t sit with Elisabeth,’ and I said ‘Well, then you won’t be on the show. It’s that simple. And that was the end of it. He’s not going to call the shots. You’re not going to tell me how to produce the show.”
So what did Barry Manilow teach me about liberals through all of this?
1. Liberals are very confident in their views. In fact, Manilow is so confident that he doesn’t even feel the need to demonstrate the fact in a public discussion. He’s like the kid on the baseball team who is so much better than the other players that he doesn’t even want the coach to put him in the game. Some people think this is because he can’t really play his position, but that’s only because they don’t realize how good he is.
2. Liberals really believe in free speech. Regrettably, truth is fragile and must be protected from dangerous people like conservatives. Free speech, therefore, means letting a wide variety of liberals speak as freely as possible. This is called diversity. As a good liberal, Barry Manilow opposes all forms of censorship and wants to ensure that everyone who agrees with him has full freedom of speech.
3. Liberals think clearly. Barry said that he really supports the show, which can only mean he believes in robust debate. When he also says that appearing on “The View” with Hasselbeck would compromise his principles, we must infer that he has an even stronger personal conviction that’s it’s wrong to actually be a participant in such debates. One wonders whether Barry thinks that Barbara, Joy, and Whoopi are also compromising their values by being on stage with her. Then again, their value systems probably just aren’t as refined and contradiction-free as his.
4. Liberals are friends of the minority. Of the five people, including Barry, four of them would have been liberal or liberal-leaning. You might think Barry would champion Elisabeth in her underdog status, but you would be forgetting that minorities only count as minorities when they agree with liberals. “Conservative minority” is, by definition, a contradiction. This is confusing when the conservative is a woman, often considered a minority. But one must remember that conservative women are really gender-traitors, so it’s okay.
5. Liberals are gracious to their enemies. As Manilow told one reporter, “I will not be on the same stage as her.” Given Barry’s obvious self-confidence, he probably didn’t want to risk crushing poor Elisabeth’s fragile mind with his overpoweringly rigorous political philosophy. Since he also called her “dangerous,” you might think he’d want to stop her from harming others. He must have meant that she’s only dangerous if his glorious presence on the show entices other, less-confident liberals to watch and risk being infected by her.
6. Liberals are very good at thinking ahead. Although the spat between Rosie and Elisabeth leading to Rosie leaving “The View” happened three months ago, Manilow wisely decided to make his demands the day before his show was to air. Sure, he could have declined to book the appearance in the first place or cancelled earlier, but only people who plan poorly would do that. Then, when reporters wanted to ask Barry about his provocative comments, he became frustrated, even telling one Fox TV reporter, "Alright, stop! I'm sorry this thing had to happen. Let's just talk about the album, OK?" If only all of these developments weren’t so darned impossible to foresee!
7. Liberals are honest to a fault. “I bowed out” is virtually the same thing as “They refused my silly request.” Only a grammar-Nazi would think otherwise. Besides, we all know Barbara Walters’ terrible reputation for deception over her four decades of broadcast journalism. Anyone who says Manilow’s statements were self-serving or misleading just hasn’t plumbed the depths of his honesty yet.
8. Liberals are not their own worst enemies. Whereas Elisabeth, the lone conservative-leaning voice on “The View,” sticks it out day after day with as much grace and eloquence as she can muster, Barry writes songs, attends hair-frosting parties and throws darts from a distance at people he dislikes.
The contrast between Elisabeth’s conservatism and Barry’s liberalism is stark. With role models like Barry Manilow, it’s amazing everyone isn’t a liberal already.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Barry Manilow recently gave a seminar on liberalism. Oh, not intentionally, of course. But sometimes unintentional seminars are the most instructive of all.
It all started when the singer suddenly cancelled his September 18th appearance on the television show “The View.” This statement was posted on Manilow’s Web site on the 17th:
I wanted to let you know that I will no longer be on “The View” tomorrow as scheduled. I had made a request that I be interviewed by Joy, Barbara or Whoopi, but not Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Unfortunately, the show was not willing to accommodate this simple request so I bowed out. It’s really too bad because I’ve always been a big supporter of the show, but I cannot compromise my beliefs. The good news is that I will be on a whole slew of other shows promoting the new album so I hope you can catch me on those.
Although he had appeared twice in the past year without conditions, the fuss between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell back in May changed all of that. As a close friend of Rosie’s and a large Democratic contributor, Manilow didn’t relish the idea of putting himself anywhere near the token conservative. As he told TMZ, “I strongly disagree with her views. I think she’s dangerous and offensive. I will not be on the same stage as her.” When “The View” refused his “simple” request, he declined to appear.
Or did he?
Barbara Walters discussed the event on her radio show with Bill Geddie, her co-executive producer. According to them, Manilow didn’t cancel “The View.” They cancelled him. Geddie explained it this way: “He said, ‘I’ll do Barbara and Whoopi or I’ll do Whoopi and Sherri or some combination, but I won’t sit with Elisabeth,’ and I said ‘Well, then you won’t be on the show. It’s that simple. And that was the end of it. He’s not going to call the shots. You’re not going to tell me how to produce the show.”
So what did Barry Manilow teach me about liberals through all of this?
1. Liberals are very confident in their views. In fact, Manilow is so confident that he doesn’t even feel the need to demonstrate the fact in a public discussion. He’s like the kid on the baseball team who is so much better than the other players that he doesn’t even want the coach to put him in the game. Some people think this is because he can’t really play his position, but that’s only because they don’t realize how good he is.
2. Liberals really believe in free speech. Regrettably, truth is fragile and must be protected from dangerous people like conservatives. Free speech, therefore, means letting a wide variety of liberals speak as freely as possible. This is called diversity. As a good liberal, Barry Manilow opposes all forms of censorship and wants to ensure that everyone who agrees with him has full freedom of speech.
3. Liberals think clearly. Barry said that he really supports the show, which can only mean he believes in robust debate. When he also says that appearing on “The View” with Hasselbeck would compromise his principles, we must infer that he has an even stronger personal conviction that’s it’s wrong to actually be a participant in such debates. One wonders whether Barry thinks that Barbara, Joy, and Whoopi are also compromising their values by being on stage with her. Then again, their value systems probably just aren’t as refined and contradiction-free as his.
4. Liberals are friends of the minority. Of the five people, including Barry, four of them would have been liberal or liberal-leaning. You might think Barry would champion Elisabeth in her underdog status, but you would be forgetting that minorities only count as minorities when they agree with liberals. “Conservative minority” is, by definition, a contradiction. This is confusing when the conservative is a woman, often considered a minority. But one must remember that conservative women are really gender-traitors, so it’s okay.
5. Liberals are gracious to their enemies. As Manilow told one reporter, “I will not be on the same stage as her.” Given Barry’s obvious self-confidence, he probably didn’t want to risk crushing poor Elisabeth’s fragile mind with his overpoweringly rigorous political philosophy. Since he also called her “dangerous,” you might think he’d want to stop her from harming others. He must have meant that she’s only dangerous if his glorious presence on the show entices other, less-confident liberals to watch and risk being infected by her.
6. Liberals are very good at thinking ahead. Although the spat between Rosie and Elisabeth leading to Rosie leaving “The View” happened three months ago, Manilow wisely decided to make his demands the day before his show was to air. Sure, he could have declined to book the appearance in the first place or cancelled earlier, but only people who plan poorly would do that. Then, when reporters wanted to ask Barry about his provocative comments, he became frustrated, even telling one Fox TV reporter, "Alright, stop! I'm sorry this thing had to happen. Let's just talk about the album, OK?" If only all of these developments weren’t so darned impossible to foresee!
7. Liberals are honest to a fault. “I bowed out” is virtually the same thing as “They refused my silly request.” Only a grammar-Nazi would think otherwise. Besides, we all know Barbara Walters’ terrible reputation for deception over her four decades of broadcast journalism. Anyone who says Manilow’s statements were self-serving or misleading just hasn’t plumbed the depths of his honesty yet.
8. Liberals are not their own worst enemies. Whereas Elisabeth, the lone conservative-leaning voice on “The View,” sticks it out day after day with as much grace and eloquence as she can muster, Barry writes songs, attends hair-frosting parties and throws darts from a distance at people he dislikes.
The contrast between Elisabeth’s conservatism and Barry’s liberalism is stark. With role models like Barry Manilow, it’s amazing everyone isn’t a liberal already.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Surveillance Law That Matters
The president is bound by the Constitution, not the whims of Congress.
By Robert F. Turner
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I have never met Judge Michael Mukasey, and I have no strong feelings on who should be our next attorney general. But after four decades studying and writing about national security aspects of our Constitution, I believe Congress and the American people must understand that some of the issues raised in Mr. Mukasey's confirmation hearings are far more complex than they may initially appear.
Take, for example, Sen. Pat Leahy's question to Mr. Mukasey about whether the president has the power to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). I know that statute well, having worked in the Senate when it was enacted in 1978, and later serving as the senior White House lawyer under President Reagan charged with overseeing the implementation of FISA and other intelligence laws.
The real issue here is not whether the president is "above the law," but rather which "law" he must see "faithfully executed" when there is a conflict between the Constitution and an inconsistent statute. His highest duty, I submit, is to the Constitution itself.
In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall declared in Marbury v. Madison: "an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void." From the earliest days of our history until FISA was enacted, it was understood by all three branches that the Constitution had left the president (to quote Federalist No. 64) "able to manage the business of intelligence as prudence might suggest."
When Congress passed the first wiretap statute in 1968, it expressly declared that nothing in it would limit "the Constitutional power of the President" to collect foreign-intelligence information. Every administration from FDR to (and including) Jimmy Carter engaged in warrantless foreign-intelligence wiretapping in the belief that this was one of the "exceptions" to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Others include border searches and searches of commercial airline passengers and their luggage (not to mention the requirement, imposed by Congress, that citizens entering a congressional office building to exercise their constitutional right to petition their government for redress of grievances must submit to a warrantless search absent the slightest probable cause).
In 1978, Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell told the Senate that FISA "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution"; but he explained that the statute could nevertheless work because President Carter was "agreeing to follow the statutory procedure." That was Mr. Carter's prerogative as it is President Bush's--but neither they nor Congress may take away the constitutional power of future presidents.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (composed of federal appeals court judges) noted, in a unanimous 2002 opinion, that every federal court to decide the issue held the president has constitutional power to authorize warrantless foreign-intelligence electronic surveillance. The opinion added: "FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."
The Supreme Court has had at least six opportunities to limit presidential power in this area. In the 1967 Katz case that first required a warrant for wiretaps, the Court expressly exempted "national security" wiretaps from its holding. When it required a warrant for national security wiretaps of purely domestic targets in 1972, it exempted electronic surveillance of the "activities of foreign powers and their agents" in this country. On four other occasions it declined to hear cases on appeal where it had the opportunity to impose a warrant requirement on foreign-intelligence electronic surveillance.
Much contemporary debate over presidential claims of power to ignore "laws" fails to appreciate the modern congressional practice of enacting flagrantly unconstitutional statutes. This helps explain the increased use of presidential "signing statements" in recent decades. On June 11, 1976, Sen. Robert P. Griffin (R., Mich.) inserted a lengthy statement I'd drafted into the Congressional Record explaining why "legislative vetoes" of executive agency actions were unconstitutional. Seven years later, the Supreme Court echoed those arguments in reaching the same conclusion in the Chadha case. The congressional response? It has since enacted more than 500 new unconstitutional legislative vetoes.
Mr. Mukasey rightly promised to resign rather than violate his oath of office if the "president proposed to undertake a course of conduct that was in violation of the Constitution" and could not be dissuaded. For precisely the same reason, he was also right to refuse to be bound by unconstitutional acts of Congress like FISA that usurp presidential power. Any senator who elects to vote against him because of this issue has a duty to explain to the American people by what theory an unconstitutional statute has suddenly taken on a superior position to the Constitution itself.
By Robert F. Turner
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I have never met Judge Michael Mukasey, and I have no strong feelings on who should be our next attorney general. But after four decades studying and writing about national security aspects of our Constitution, I believe Congress and the American people must understand that some of the issues raised in Mr. Mukasey's confirmation hearings are far more complex than they may initially appear.
Take, for example, Sen. Pat Leahy's question to Mr. Mukasey about whether the president has the power to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). I know that statute well, having worked in the Senate when it was enacted in 1978, and later serving as the senior White House lawyer under President Reagan charged with overseeing the implementation of FISA and other intelligence laws.
The real issue here is not whether the president is "above the law," but rather which "law" he must see "faithfully executed" when there is a conflict between the Constitution and an inconsistent statute. His highest duty, I submit, is to the Constitution itself.
In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall declared in Marbury v. Madison: "an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void." From the earliest days of our history until FISA was enacted, it was understood by all three branches that the Constitution had left the president (to quote Federalist No. 64) "able to manage the business of intelligence as prudence might suggest."
When Congress passed the first wiretap statute in 1968, it expressly declared that nothing in it would limit "the Constitutional power of the President" to collect foreign-intelligence information. Every administration from FDR to (and including) Jimmy Carter engaged in warrantless foreign-intelligence wiretapping in the belief that this was one of the "exceptions" to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Others include border searches and searches of commercial airline passengers and their luggage (not to mention the requirement, imposed by Congress, that citizens entering a congressional office building to exercise their constitutional right to petition their government for redress of grievances must submit to a warrantless search absent the slightest probable cause).
In 1978, Carter administration Attorney General Griffin Bell told the Senate that FISA "does not take away the power of the President under the Constitution"; but he explained that the statute could nevertheless work because President Carter was "agreeing to follow the statutory procedure." That was Mr. Carter's prerogative as it is President Bush's--but neither they nor Congress may take away the constitutional power of future presidents.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (composed of federal appeals court judges) noted, in a unanimous 2002 opinion, that every federal court to decide the issue held the president has constitutional power to authorize warrantless foreign-intelligence electronic surveillance. The opinion added: "FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."
The Supreme Court has had at least six opportunities to limit presidential power in this area. In the 1967 Katz case that first required a warrant for wiretaps, the Court expressly exempted "national security" wiretaps from its holding. When it required a warrant for national security wiretaps of purely domestic targets in 1972, it exempted electronic surveillance of the "activities of foreign powers and their agents" in this country. On four other occasions it declined to hear cases on appeal where it had the opportunity to impose a warrant requirement on foreign-intelligence electronic surveillance.
Much contemporary debate over presidential claims of power to ignore "laws" fails to appreciate the modern congressional practice of enacting flagrantly unconstitutional statutes. This helps explain the increased use of presidential "signing statements" in recent decades. On June 11, 1976, Sen. Robert P. Griffin (R., Mich.) inserted a lengthy statement I'd drafted into the Congressional Record explaining why "legislative vetoes" of executive agency actions were unconstitutional. Seven years later, the Supreme Court echoed those arguments in reaching the same conclusion in the Chadha case. The congressional response? It has since enacted more than 500 new unconstitutional legislative vetoes.
Mr. Mukasey rightly promised to resign rather than violate his oath of office if the "president proposed to undertake a course of conduct that was in violation of the Constitution" and could not be dissuaded. For precisely the same reason, he was also right to refuse to be bound by unconstitutional acts of Congress like FISA that usurp presidential power. Any senator who elects to vote against him because of this issue has a duty to explain to the American people by what theory an unconstitutional statute has suddenly taken on a superior position to the Constitution itself.
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.
The Global-Warming Debate Isn't Over Until It's Over
By John Stossel
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
First he won the Oscar -- then the Nobel Peace Prize. He's being called a "prophet."
Impressive, considering that one of former Vice President Al Gore's chief contributions has been to call the debate over global warming "over" and to marginalize anyone who disagrees. Although he favors major government intervention to stop global warming, he says, "the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity".
Give me a break.
If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it's not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as "our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level," then it deserves some skeptical examination.
Everyone has heard that Earth's atmosphere is heating up, it's our fault, and it's a crisis. No wonder 86 percent of Americans think global warming is a serious problem and 70 percent want the government to do something now.
But is it a crisis? The globe is warming, but will it be catastrophic? Probably not.
In "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore says that "sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet."
But the group that shared last week's Nobel Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says in a hundred years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches .
Gore also talks about drowning polar bears. He doesn't mention that the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey say that today most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing.
And while man's greenhouse gasses may increase warming, it's not certain that man caused it. The most impressive demonstration in Gore's movie is the big graph of carbon-dioxide levels, which suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the movie doesn't tell you that the carbon increases came after temperatures rose, hundreds of years later.
There's much more. A British court ruled that U.K. teachers could show Gore's documentary to students only if they also explain nine errors in the movie.
I wanted to ask Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't talk to me. Why should he? He says "the debate is over."
"It's absurd for people to say that sort of thing," says Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute.
John Christy and Roy Spencer, who won NASA's Medal for Exceptional Achievement for figuring out how to get temperature data from satellites, agree that Earth has warmed. "The thing that we dispute is, is it because of mankind?" Spencer says.
Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun, or ocean currents, or changes in cloud cover, or other things we don't understand. If it's all man's fault, why did the Arctic go through a warm period early last century? Why did Greenland's temperatures rise 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they are rising now?
The media rarely ask such questions.
The media also treat the IPCC as impartial scientists, but Reiter and Christy, who were members of the IPCC, say it is not what the public thinks it is. Many of the people involved in writing its report "are not scientists at all," Reiter says. "They were essentially activists." Members of groups like Greenpeace were involved. Skeptics were often ignored.
Christy says, "We were not asked to look at a particular statement and sign our names to it."
Adds Reiter, "I resigned."
But the IPCC still listed him as part of the so-called consensus of scientists. He says he had to threaten to sue to get his name removed from the report, although the IPCC denies that.
Skeptics like Reiter, Christy, Spencer and Tim Ball, who studies the history of climate change and heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, are often smeared as "deniers," lumped in with Holocaust deniers and accused of being "on the take" from energy businesses." Gore impugns skeptical scientists by saying "the illusion of a debate has been purchased."
But the scientists I interviewed don't get money from business.
Some get threatened. Ball received an e-mail that said: "You will not live long enough to see global warming!"
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
First he won the Oscar -- then the Nobel Peace Prize. He's being called a "prophet."
Impressive, considering that one of former Vice President Al Gore's chief contributions has been to call the debate over global warming "over" and to marginalize anyone who disagrees. Although he favors major government intervention to stop global warming, he says, "the climate crisis is not a political issue. It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity".
Give me a break.
If you must declare a debate over, then maybe it's not. And if you have to gussy up your agenda as "our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level," then it deserves some skeptical examination.
Everyone has heard that Earth's atmosphere is heating up, it's our fault, and it's a crisis. No wonder 86 percent of Americans think global warming is a serious problem and 70 percent want the government to do something now.
But is it a crisis? The globe is warming, but will it be catastrophic? Probably not.
In "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore says that "sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet."
But the group that shared last week's Nobel Prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says in a hundred years, the oceans might rise 7 to 24 inches .
Gore also talks about drowning polar bears. He doesn't mention that the World Conservation Union and the U.S. Geological Survey say that today most populations of polar bears are stable or increasing.
And while man's greenhouse gasses may increase warming, it's not certain that man caused it. The most impressive demonstration in Gore's movie is the big graph of carbon-dioxide levels, which suggests that carbon levels control temperature. But the movie doesn't tell you that the carbon increases came after temperatures rose, hundreds of years later.
There's much more. A British court ruled that U.K. teachers could show Gore's documentary to students only if they also explain nine errors in the movie.
I wanted to ask Gore about that and other things, but he wouldn't talk to me. Why should he? He says "the debate is over."
"It's absurd for people to say that sort of thing," says Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute.
John Christy and Roy Spencer, who won NASA's Medal for Exceptional Achievement for figuring out how to get temperature data from satellites, agree that Earth has warmed. "The thing that we dispute is, is it because of mankind?" Spencer says.
Some scientists say the warming may be caused by changes in the sun, or ocean currents, or changes in cloud cover, or other things we don't understand. If it's all man's fault, why did the Arctic go through a warm period early last century? Why did Greenland's temperatures rise 50 percent faster in the 1920s than they are rising now?
The media rarely ask such questions.
The media also treat the IPCC as impartial scientists, but Reiter and Christy, who were members of the IPCC, say it is not what the public thinks it is. Many of the people involved in writing its report "are not scientists at all," Reiter says. "They were essentially activists." Members of groups like Greenpeace were involved. Skeptics were often ignored.
Christy says, "We were not asked to look at a particular statement and sign our names to it."
Adds Reiter, "I resigned."
But the IPCC still listed him as part of the so-called consensus of scientists. He says he had to threaten to sue to get his name removed from the report, although the IPCC denies that.
Skeptics like Reiter, Christy, Spencer and Tim Ball, who studies the history of climate change and heads the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, are often smeared as "deniers," lumped in with Holocaust deniers and accused of being "on the take" from energy businesses." Gore impugns skeptical scientists by saying "the illusion of a debate has been purchased."
But the scientists I interviewed don't get money from business.
Some get threatened. Ball received an e-mail that said: "You will not live long enough to see global warming!"
Who Will Stand Up For Campus Free Speech?
By John Leo
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo "mental health evaluation" before being allowed to return to school.
Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler's right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.
Scheffler, it should be said, is something of a campus gadfly, with disdain for campus diversity programs and other policies. The university said Scheffler's e-mails were threatening, but those messages, available on the FIRE web site, contain no semblance of a threat. Free speech was the core issue and still is.
Free speech has a very small constituency on the modern campus, particularly if the speaker under attack is conservative. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, is certainly no conservative, but he had run afoul of the campus left on many issues, not just the heavily publicized one of women in science (suggesting more campus respect for patriotism and the return of ROTC to Harvard, warning the "coastal elites" that they have drifted too far from the American mainstream). So when feminists managed to cancel Summers as a speaker before the University of California board of regents, there was scarcely a peep of protest. The American Association of University Professors spoke out, and so did the Harvard Crimson. But in a couple of hours of searching the internet, I found only one professor nationally who complained about the treatment of Summers.
A similar silence greeted the cancellation of a speech by Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist at Columbia University. Gilchrist and a colleague were driven off the stage at Columbia last year by angry radicals. Gilchrist was reinvited a month ago, but when the speech was announced, campus Hispanics, who consider him racist for opposing the flood of illegals into the country, pressured the relevant student authorities to ban him. The campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union thought about protesting but decided not to. Again, I was able to find only one professor willing to say that silencing Gilchrist was a bad idea. I asked Gilchrist if there were more. He said he knows of no other instructor who spoke out. The campus joke is that Gilchrist should have come out in favor killing gays and nuking Israel. Then he would have been as welcome as Mahoud Amadinejad.
The campus rule of thumb is that if someone on the liberal side is disinvited or punished for speech, the left will howl - and the right will usually howl too. This is what happened when the University of St. Thomas disinvited Archbishop Desmond Tutu for making remarks critical of Israel. After protests from across the political spectrum, he was reinvited. A better example is the hiring and almost immediate firing of liberal Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine. A huge number of conservatives protested, including professors and virtually the whole first string of nationally known conservative and libertarian bloggers. Chemerinsky was rehired.
The process doesn't work in reverse - with liberals protesting the silencing of a conservative. It's one of the most obvious flaws of the modern PC university.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo "mental health evaluation" before being allowed to return to school.
Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler's right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.
Scheffler, it should be said, is something of a campus gadfly, with disdain for campus diversity programs and other policies. The university said Scheffler's e-mails were threatening, but those messages, available on the FIRE web site, contain no semblance of a threat. Free speech was the core issue and still is.
Free speech has a very small constituency on the modern campus, particularly if the speaker under attack is conservative. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, is certainly no conservative, but he had run afoul of the campus left on many issues, not just the heavily publicized one of women in science (suggesting more campus respect for patriotism and the return of ROTC to Harvard, warning the "coastal elites" that they have drifted too far from the American mainstream). So when feminists managed to cancel Summers as a speaker before the University of California board of regents, there was scarcely a peep of protest. The American Association of University Professors spoke out, and so did the Harvard Crimson. But in a couple of hours of searching the internet, I found only one professor nationally who complained about the treatment of Summers.
A similar silence greeted the cancellation of a speech by Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist at Columbia University. Gilchrist and a colleague were driven off the stage at Columbia last year by angry radicals. Gilchrist was reinvited a month ago, but when the speech was announced, campus Hispanics, who consider him racist for opposing the flood of illegals into the country, pressured the relevant student authorities to ban him. The campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union thought about protesting but decided not to. Again, I was able to find only one professor willing to say that silencing Gilchrist was a bad idea. I asked Gilchrist if there were more. He said he knows of no other instructor who spoke out. The campus joke is that Gilchrist should have come out in favor killing gays and nuking Israel. Then he would have been as welcome as Mahoud Amadinejad.
The campus rule of thumb is that if someone on the liberal side is disinvited or punished for speech, the left will howl - and the right will usually howl too. This is what happened when the University of St. Thomas disinvited Archbishop Desmond Tutu for making remarks critical of Israel. After protests from across the political spectrum, he was reinvited. A better example is the hiring and almost immediate firing of liberal Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine. A huge number of conservatives protested, including professors and virtually the whole first string of nationally known conservative and libertarian bloggers. Chemerinsky was rehired.
The process doesn't work in reverse - with liberals protesting the silencing of a conservative. It's one of the most obvious flaws of the modern PC university.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Global Warming Delusions
The popular imagination has been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
By Daniel B. Botkin
Sunday, October 21, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life--ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.
Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming--a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age--saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.
We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.
The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food--an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.
You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I've developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life--I've used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.
I'm not a naysayer. I'm a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.
The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.
A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating--especially the author's Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn't be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.
We are told that the melting of the arctic ice will be a disaster. But during the famous medieval warming period--A.D. 750 to 1230 or so--the Vikings found the warmer northern climate to their advantage. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie addressed this in his book "Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000," perhaps the greatest book about climate change before the onset of modern concerns with global warming. He wrote that Erik the Red "took advantage of a sea relatively free of ice to sail due west from Iceland to reach Greenland. . . . Two and a half centuries later, at the height of the climatic and demographic fortunes of the northern settlers, a bishopric of Greenland was founded at Gardar in 1126."
Ladurie pointed out that "it is reasonable to think of the Vikings as unconsciously taking advantage of this [referring to the warming of the Middle Ages] to colonize the most northern and inclement of their conquests, Iceland and Greenland." Good thing that Erik the Red didn't have Al Gore or his climatologists as his advisers.
Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.
We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes--wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.
My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.
Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.
For example, right now the clearest threat to many species is habitat destruction. Take the orangutans, for instance, one of those charismatic species that people are often fascinated by and concerned about. They are endangered because of deforestation. In our fear of global warming, it would be sad if we fail to find funds to purchase those forests before they are destroyed, and thus let this species go extinct.
At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science--even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.
By Daniel B. Botkin
Sunday, October 21, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life--ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.
Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming--a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age--saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.
We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.
The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food--an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.
You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I've developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life--I've used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.
I'm not a naysayer. I'm a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.
Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.
The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.
A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating--especially the author's Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn't be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.
We are told that the melting of the arctic ice will be a disaster. But during the famous medieval warming period--A.D. 750 to 1230 or so--the Vikings found the warmer northern climate to their advantage. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie addressed this in his book "Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000," perhaps the greatest book about climate change before the onset of modern concerns with global warming. He wrote that Erik the Red "took advantage of a sea relatively free of ice to sail due west from Iceland to reach Greenland. . . . Two and a half centuries later, at the height of the climatic and demographic fortunes of the northern settlers, a bishopric of Greenland was founded at Gardar in 1126."
Ladurie pointed out that "it is reasonable to think of the Vikings as unconsciously taking advantage of this [referring to the warming of the Middle Ages] to colonize the most northern and inclement of their conquests, Iceland and Greenland." Good thing that Erik the Red didn't have Al Gore or his climatologists as his advisers.
Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.
We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes--wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.
My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.
Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.
For example, right now the clearest threat to many species is habitat destruction. Take the orangutans, for instance, one of those charismatic species that people are often fascinated by and concerned about. They are endangered because of deforestation. In our fear of global warming, it would be sad if we fail to find funds to purchase those forests before they are destroyed, and thus let this species go extinct.
At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science--even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.
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