PRESTOPUNDIT -- "must readings" says Nick Schutz

So here it is. My first guest blogging at the Libety & Power blog. I knew this would be fun.

I'll be guest blogging in the upcoming week on David Beito's Liberty & Power group blog over at the History News Network. I'm pleased especially to be blogging with some old friends from the Hayek-L email discussion list.

A new book from the CATO Institute -- Just Get Out of the Way.

UPDATE: I found this on the CATO web site:

A well-functioning private sector is the only way to increase economic growth. Yet, to improve the business environment, development experts recommend sophisticated policies that are common in rich countries but that most governments in poor countries cannot successfully implement. Former World Bank economist Robert Anderson suggests acknowledging weaknesses prevalent in poor countries: corruption, deficient rule of law, cronyism, and so on. Simpler, market-oriented policies are more likely to produce growth and improve performance in banking, corporate governance, bankruptcy, and other areas.

Something I didn't know -- America's corporate tax rate is second highest in the developed world.

InstaPundit sells out. I'm guessing that Reynolds is already pulling in at least $10,000 a year from Amazon sales alone, based on the Hayek Center Bookstore's very small but consistent stream of Amazon bookstore earnings.

Although blogospherians well know that the Blogfather does it for pleasure rather than profit, we here at the Hayek Center happily endorse Glenn's participation in the reward system of the market as it bankrolls even those who would do it for nothin'.

UPDATE: If you check out Glenn's Amazon code, it's pretty clear that his Amazon earnings accrue to his wife's charity. If he's pointed this out before, I've missed it.

Set yourself up as a Democrat party propaganda sheet rather than a serious newspaper and lose 10,000 paid subscribers -- as the LA Times now admits it lost during the California recall election.

ScrappleFace has news of a new Senate plan to bridge the unexpected $130B Medicare Drug Gap.

Not a Parody -- How to Help Your Husband Make More Money So You Can Be a Stay-At-Home Mom.

Discussed in this article, "Rachel Johnson reveals how to work at home with your children: get someone else to look after the kids". Quotable:

The only equipment you will need in your toolkit at this stage are a working husband, a home computer and a room well sound-proofed .. Then all you need to do is start tap-tap-tapping away, contributing columns for online newspaper sites, parenting websites, actual newspapers, or writing thinly fictionalised novels about your own astonishing experience of becoming a mother .. You write wry, unsentimental columns about the day your daughter�s pet bunny died and how this enabled the whole family to discuss bereavement in a healthy yet compassionate way .. You write a searingly honest piece dealing with the self-esteem issues that loom when men ask, �And what do you do? Or are you just a mum?� halfway through a dinner party, after you�ve interrogated them over two courses about their golf handicap and City job, and you start idly imagining whether they would look more attractive with an axe buried in their skull. Or you write handbooks (or run websites) for mothers just like you ..

Bush is scrapping plans to take the Iraqi oil industry out of the socialist sector and move it into the private property sector. The plan now is to stick with socialist control of the largest industry in Iraq.

UPDATE: Don't miss Robert Tagorda's commentary with additional context on this story.

The biggest news since the capture of Saddam -- the bribe list of the butcher's bought friends in France, Russian, Britian, and Indonesia, etc. Bribery reaching to the very top in many of those countries. It's a corrupt world out their, folks, and never forget it.

George W. Nixon Watch:

More and more, Bush reminds me of Nixon. He's not afraid to make the bold move in foreign policy. On domestic policy, Bush seems like he'll say or do anything, so long as it advances his short-term political advantage. If Karl Rove thought imposing wage and price controls would win Pennsylvania and Michigan for Bush, you'd see an Executive Order within 24 hours ..

-- Daniel Drezner.

More on outsourcing here.

The Wikipedia entry on Friedrich Hayek is actually rather good -- far better than any short piece I've seen on Hayek from a commercial encyclopedia company. I corrected one glitch -- "catallaxy" had been misspelled. Tyler Cowen links to this fascinating story on the strange power and hidden logic of Wiki spontaneous cooperation.

UPDATE: Here's the Wiki entry on Web Blogging, via The Modulator.

Get your bycicles, telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, and chandaleers at rock bottom prices.

Stossel's Top Ten Lies, Myths and Downright Stupidities. And here is:

Myth No. 6 � Republicans Shrink the Government

Republicans always trot out the slogan that they oppose big government and want to shrink the federal payroll. President Bush tells us that "big government is not the answer." President Reagan told us, "Our government is too big and it spends too much."

But for more than 75 years, no Republican administration has cut the size of government. Since George W. Bush became president, government spending has risen nearly 25 percent.

And the spending increase isn't just tied to the war on terrorism. The Office of Management and Budget says spending at the Environmental Protection Agency is up 12 percent, it's up 14 percent at the Agriculture Department, 30 percent at the Department of the Interior, 64 percent at the Department of Labor, and 70 percent at the Department of Education.

And the pork keeps pouring out. Even the Peanut Festival in Dothan, Ala., got $200,000. Republican congressman Terry Everett got them the money. He wouldn't talk to us about it. But the locals said they like getting your money. "I think it's a waste of money, but if they're going to waste money, I guess it's better to waste it here than anywhere else," one man told me.

Economist Stephen Moore, a Republican, says, "We fought a war against big government and you know what? Big government won."

He noted, "You look at what's happened to the government in the 10 years since the Republicans took control of Congress, the government is twice as big."

GE's Gary Reiner is bullish on America -- and outsourcing. What's good for GE is good for America, Reiner argues. Quotable:

On a personal basis, Reiner is intensely passionate about what he and GE are doing and says that when a country or company enjoys higher productivity, the benefits extend three ways: to the enterprises, which with higher profits have more to invest; to employees who get higher wages and then spend more; and/or to lower prices, which makes it easier for people to buy. So the way Reiner sees it, no matter which way the higher productivity cake is divided, community prosperity increases.

However, although Chinese manufacturing and Indian services are providing an enormous boost to US productivity, it means fewer highly paid jobs in affected sectors. But Reiner counters that the overall US community is a huge beneficiary with lower priced goods and services, lower interest rates and increasing wealth. Hence it will be able to afford better medical help for the baby-boomers, education for the young and increased rewards to those working in those areas .. (via the Mises blog).

See also "Outsourcing Is Good for America" by Douglas Irwin. (via the Volokh Conspiracy).

Robert Samuelson on the Chinese economy. Quotable:

.. we don't know China's effect on the world economy .. Until recently, it seemed a magnet. China has attracted about $500 billion of foreign investment -- mainly for new factories and mostly at the expense of other Asian nations ..

One fear is that China's recent growth spurt reflects a "bubble" of easy credit that, once popped, will curb imports and cause China to emphasize export-led job growth even more. Another danger is that China merely represents the last stage of Asia's supply chain and that Asia -- as a whole -- sells much more abroad than it buys, parking surplus earnings in U.S. Treasury securities ..

In 1980, China traded little and most of its people lived on the edge of subsistence. Now it's already the largest market for cell phones (269 million in 2003) and the second-largest for Internet users (78 million) ..

The WSJ on the conservative revolt against runaway Federal spending. Quotable:

while Messrs. Hastert and DeLay may have thought to use this [Republican Congressional] retreat to plot to pass their $72 billion energy bonanza, a group of fiscal conservatives, including California veteran Christopher Cox, has arrived to demand that the party return to its roots and start slowing the growth of government .. What would certainly help is a President who chose to lead. The Bush Administration seems to think that voters care more about tax cuts than they do spending .. But spending represents a claim on taxes, and Republicans will end up having to raise them down the road if they don't slow the growth of spending now ..

I agree with Charles Krauthammer, but this is not the case Bush made to the American people (and there's the rub). Quotable:

Until Bush got serious, threatened war and massed troops in Kuwait, the U.N. was headed toward loosening and ultimately lifting sanctions, which would have given Saddam carte blanche to regroup and rebuild his WMDs. Bush reversed that slide with his threat to go to war. But that kind of aggressive posture is impossible to maintain indefinitely. A regime of inspections, embargo, sanctions, no-fly zones and thousands of combat troops in Kuwait was an unstable equilibrium. The U.S. could have either retreated and allowed Saddam free rein -- or gone to war and removed him. Those were the only two ways to go. Under the circumstances, and given what every intelligence agency on the planet agreed was going on in Iraq, the president made the right choice, indeed the only choice.

Weintraub -- "California's high schools are still churning out college-bound graduates who can barely read, write and do math." He links to this SacBee story. Depressing.

Mark Steyn on John Kerry:

"I�d written [him] off ever since last summer when he came to the Barge Inn in Woodsville and, in the strangest political entrance I�ve ever seen, walked through the door to cheers and flags and popping cameras and worked his way through the crowd pressing the flesh until he got to the men�s room, whereupon he went in, leaving the clapping and waving to just sort of peter out as we waited for him to emerge .."

and on John Edwards:

".. all his issues are weird trial-lawyer obsessions � you should have the right to sue your health insurer; credit card companies and mortgage lenders should have to explain their interest rates in bigger print. He sounds like he�s auditioning next year�s class action suits .. after a while, you begin to notice that while he�s got policies to address the fine print on your MasterCard statement, he�s got nothing to say about the great issues of the day.. In the crush as he was leaving, I asked him what he would do about Iraq.

�We need to get the UN in there,� he said.

�But they were in there. They pulled out because it was too dangerous.�

�We need to get Nato in there,� he said.

�But 21 out of the 34 countries with troops on the ground are, in fact, Nato members.�

�Hey, that�s what I love about these town hall meetings,� he said, shaking my hand. �You get to hear from the people.�

Read the whole thing and don't miss Steyn's Kerry & ketchup shtick.

If Bush is going to to give us a massively larger goverment moral decency between generations demands that he give us the massive tax increases that must go with it. Simple economic sanity can hardly demand anything else (and I'm tired to death of Republicans spouting brain-dead Keynesian economics in the name of a bogus "supply side" economics that has no real world relevance to the tax rate system of 2004). I for one will not go along with the beggering of the next generation for no imaginable reason other than the political ambitions of Peter Pan half-wits in the Republican Party.

And make no mistake about it. There is not even the smallest thing "conservative" about tax cuts and spending increases as far as the eye can see. Republicans who pretend otherwise are selling a "free lunch" that wastes wealth, decapitalizes the country and burdens the next generation with a massive negative compound interest problem. All that is being done is a con job on public in which the people are fooled into thinking they and the country are wealthier than they really are -- and that govenment goodies are a costless "free lunch". Well, there is no free lunch. The classic "unseen" cost of this "free lunch" shell game is the cost which will be born by later generations who will be burdened with the massive weight of government debt, rather than advantaged by the wealth stream made possibly by private sector capital goods investment. And again, this cost is far, far more massive than any Peter Pan big government Republican can ever imagine -- (and God help us if they attempt to use their scientifically fraudulent Keynesian mathematics, or, worse, the fantasy mathematics of "supply side" economics. It ain't 1962 folks, and it ain't even 1982).

InstaPundit reports from the Republican party grass roots:

Bush should worry, though, because his policies are alienating the base. Some of the right-wing mailing lists that I get are turning nearly as anti-Bush as they used to be anti-Clinton .. I've followed this list (it's basically a gun-rights list) for a while. It's a pretty good weathervane for the sentiments of a chunk of the right, and it has shifted notably against Bush over the past few months. I expect that Karl Rove thinks he can hang on to these people, and maybe he will. But from here, it looks like he's got serious problems with the base.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg suspects that Bush is intentionally putting a stick in the eye of his base in order to garner increased support among those who loath conservative Republicans.

And this from Tim Green: "The Bushes seem to be missing the point that the NEA is for many fiscal conservatives Exhibit A of spending seriousness: if you can't save pennies on chocolate-smearing performance artists, where can you save? They've obviously decided that being "pro-arts" is a good move toward moderate Repubs with money, and a cheap one at that."

And a Corner reader adds, "In exchange for such a minor price, Pres Bush shows that he's got a warm spot in his heart for the Arts (probably with some advice from the beauteous Mrs Bush) and stands up to those mean, awful, artless conservatives who want to use the money to buy lug nuts for fighter planes."

Former U.S. Treasurer Rosario Marin has hit the airwaves in Southern California with radio spots touting herself as the Republican best able to bounce Barbara Boxer from the U.S. Senate. You can visit her web site here. Watch her Senate candidacy announcement here. Her radio spots are actually quite effective.

The Federal Reserve statement on interest rates. Read the last unbelievable paragraph and try to think of anything other than a bent over Jim Carrey with his hands on his ass talking out of that end of his anatomy. The Federal Reserve is something like the capstone of what has become the scientific fraud of academic macroeconomics. Simply put, using leeches to cure sick people had a great deal more sound reasoning and solid evidence behind it than does the yammerings of the Federal Reserve and its army of academic macroeconomists.

According to Mark Krikorian a Congressman lectured witnesses today during hearings on immigration that "meatpackers need alien labor because 'we can't get enough people to work for $7 or $8 dollars an hour.'" Note well -- when I worked in a meatpacking plant 20 years ago I was being paid $8.50 an hour, starting pay. Think of that. 20 years of breakneck inflation, and wages remain unchanged. Even back then a good 1/3 of the labor force was non-American. Krikorian notes that a former INS policy director, Stuart Anderson, is now head of a group promoting open borders. Unbelievable. The guy was also once director of immigration policy for the Senate Immigration Subcommittee. And he styles himself as some sort of "libertarian" (he once worked at CATO). Remind me to write some time on the unbroken stream of fallacies contained within the "libertarian" open borders ideology.

UPDATE: Krikorian fisks the WSJ editorial page on immigration, and identifies its writers as "utopian ideologues: [with] an unwillingness to acknowledge facts that are inconsistent with infallible theory." Sounds about right.

Radley Balko explains why the growth of a massive global warfare state inevitably promotes the growth of a massive centralized nanny state. Quotable:

.. the very mindset that deems it appropriate for the United States to have troops in over 120 countries, as is currently the case, is a mindset wholly inconsistent with the notion of �limited government� -- at home or abroad. It�s simply not realistic to assume that the same government which feels the need to exert its influence all over the globe will, at the same time, voluntarily restrain its influence at home.

The nation-building efforts we�ve undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and could potentially undertake elsewhere -- also give rhetorical fuel to advocates of more socialist government at home. In the coming years, expect to hear questions like,�why are we building schools in Iraq when our city schools are so dilapidated,� or, �shouldn�t we make sure all Americans have health insurance before we start paying for health care for Iraqis?�

More runaway spending -- this time its an expansion of NEA spending which is being promoted by President Bush. The country is borrowing money from China -- and billing my children at interest -- in order to subsidize entertainment favored by some government bureaucrat. How stupid is that?

Earth to Bush -- you can't continually multiply government borrowing and explode government spending without destroying the wealth of the country. This is the path every failed South American country has followed. And it's a path America will find itself trapped upon if Bush & Co. continue to pretend that the laws of economics don't apply to the United States. All I can ask is, what the hay is going on in Washington? And in George Bush's head?

UPDATE: Josh Claybourn weighs in, "#*)($&*@# ... The Bush presidency can be summed up with this fill-in-the-blank: "Bush proposes $______ increase for _____." And here's NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru, "And IT'S OFFICIAL. This president is willing to spend your money on absolutely anything--and everything: drugs at home, wars overseas, quests in space, and even the National Endowment for the Arts."

UPDATE II: So why do lefties hate him? David Berstein investigates: "Huge increases in spending on education and other domestic programs that are not even within the federal government's constitutional purview; a new prescription drug entitlement for the elderly; Wilsonian rhetoric and actions in foreign policy; Kennedyesque manned space mission boondoggles; clumsy protectionism; in its appointments to high-level positions, the most affirmative-action conscious administration in American history; a proposal to legalize the status of illegal aliens; and now, a huge proposed increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Remind me again of why liberals are so hostile to George Bush? Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals". And he concludes with this: :"it's very unlikely we would have seen the kind of domestic spending increases we've seen under Bush if Al Gore was president and had to deal with an oppositional Republican Congress. Sigh! Guess I'll enjoy my tax cuts and invest in Euro-denominated stocks as the deficit explodes and the dollar declines to Canadian status."

And more Bernstein: "Krugman and others figure that the "plan" is to starve the government in the far-off future, when spending needs will grossly exceed tax revenues, resulting in a crisis that will require the gutting of government programs, without Bush having had to pay a political price. I think the "plan" is simply to get George Bush reelected, and that Bushes advisors don't give a horse's petootie .. about the size of government, so long as they stay in power. And, contra Krugman, the odds that the huge increase in government under Bush will be undone in our lifetimes is slim, indeed--as with the Social Security crisis of the early '80s, we could simply have minor reforms with major tax increases, or, as with the current Medicare crisis, we could simply ignore it and spend even more money. "

A bit of perspective from the California Insider. Quotable:

So John Kerry has won a convincing victory in New Hampshire .. Kerry accomplished that feat on the strength of about 85,000 votes cast by Granite State Democrats -- far fewer than the 122,000 votes my local state senator received in her last reelection campaign. Howard Dean won a solid second place, with fewer votes than my assemblyman � one of 80 in the California Legislature � got last time. And then there were John Edwards and Wesley Clark, fighting it out for third place with about 26,000 votes each, about as many as it took to finish third in the most recent race for the Sacramento city school board ..

.. and the world's leading manufacturer of sombreros is -- China. Quotable:

China's trade balance is barely in surplus: it runs a deficit with some countries and may even post a trade deficit in 2004. The only country with which China enjoys a whopping trade surfeit is with America .. China's fixed exchange rate of 8.28 renminbi to one dollar has enabled its exporters to enjoy enhanced competitiveness and surging sales as the dollar has slid during the past two years. Indeed, in the year to December 2003, China's exports to the U.S. rose by 81% .. [dare we] attribute America's ballooning trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom to Washington's deficit spending or aggressive Federal Reserve monetary easing? .. Washington fails to appreciate just how important China is in underwriting its spendthrift ways .. In effect, Beijing furnishes cheap credit to finance Washington's fiscal deficit and consumer indebtedness in America ..

underwriting America's borrowing binge does not come without hazards for China itself. As the PBOC buys dollars for renminbi, it enlarges the domestic money supply, notwithstanding efforts to "sterilize" the excess liquidity by selling Chinese government bonds. As of October 2003, the annualized increase in China's broad money supply topped 21% and domestic financial institutional lending climbed by a yearly rate of 71%. Consistent with a burgeoning boom and bust sequence, property, automobile, home amenities prices, and GDP are all accelerating at a breakneck pace[vii].

Exacerbating China's economic distortions, the country's four largest state-owned banks, which together claim 61% of the country's loans and 67% of its deposits, are saddled with mounting bad debts. By some estimates, over a third of these loans are nonperforming, which is about the same for the country's financial system as a whole, meaning the nonperforming loans may amount to 45% of GDP ..

In the autumn of 2003 the PBOC tried to gently apply the brakes by lifting banks' reserve requirement to 7% from 6%. Beijing's leaders also recently injected $45 billion into two of its largest state banks to help alleviate the fetters of their numerous nonperforming loans, the third time since 1998 the Chinese state has at least partially bailed out its largest banks ..

Nonetheless, China and by extension America, are in a dire dilemma. Chinese banks will continue to lend recklessly as long as Beijing maintains its currency peg and the attendant expansion of the domestic money supply ..

With China's finances in disarray, would the country's robust purchases of American debt instruments for dollars continue at the same rapid clip? Washington may find it much more difficult to obtain cheap underwriting for its gaping fiscal deficits and rampant borrowing ..

I don't do much in the way of "war blogging", but if you are at all interested in the great WMD mudwrestle, don't miss Jonah Goldberg's Memo to the President.

With two kids under three it was time to get the Baby Jogger Twinner II-20 Alloy Stroller. Everyone I talk with strongly recommended going with the stroller made by the original Baby Jogger company based out of Yakima, WA -- and just as many recommended getting the one with the larger 20" wheels. (Huge 24" wheels are now available on the single jogger). The local bicycle shop doesn't sell them but it does do repair work on stollers and these folks recommended the Baby Jogger as incomparably the highest quality of all the jogging strollers they'd done work on. Actually, the way they put it the Baby Jogger was the only one with real quality to it.

The price of this American made product is twice that of the China made "knockoffs", and the Baby Jogger company has been bought out after running into serious financial difficulties. You can pioneer a new product category, you can produce the best product, and in today's competive marketplace you still run the risk of being put out of business by cheap foreign imports. The markup for American made innovation and quality is a markup that not everyone wishes to pay -- or, often as not, it's something the consumer doesn't know enough about. The cost of getting that information to the consumer is just too much at the margin.

I went bold this time and bought the red one. A fun color and safer too.

Paul Krugman's work is consistently full of falsehoods. This sort of thing has become so common that few take much notice. Still, it's more than a bit remarkable to witness Krugman as he reaches for the Noam Chomsky rung of loony bird crazy dishonesty.

UPDATE: Luskin gives Krugman the fisking he deserves.

Filmmaker Jim Taylor is running against the President as a "Real Republican" in the New Hampshire primary. Here's one of his TV spots. In another video Taylor speaks with a picture of Barry Goldwater in the background. Of course, this guy has also run for President as a Democrat -- a far Left Democrat. If you care you can read his bio here.

The President's top policy advisors laugh at the very idea of enforcing America's immigration laws. Quotable:

[The advisor's] dismissal of the very idea of immigration-law enforcement confirms the worst fears of observers inside and outside the immigration agencies ..

What's unique about the immigration bureaucracy is that no one in the political elite wants it to work properly

"A human wave is breaking over California, flooding freeways and schools, bloating housing costs, disrupting power and water supplies. Ignoring it hasn't worked." -- The LA Times. Quotable:

During the last half of the last century � an epoch encompassing most of the baby boom and, a generation later, all of the boom's echo � the state's population grew by more than 24 million. The next 24 million � more than the population of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nebraska combined � will arrive more quickly, inflating the total to nearly 60 million within 36 years .. California's population, currently at 36 million, likely will double within the lifetime of today's schoolchildren ..

No other state has so many residents (Texas ranks second, but with almost 40% fewer people), and no other state comes close to matching California's annual net population increase. In Los Angeles County and five surrounding counties�Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Imperial�the population now stands at more than 17 million. That's nearly 6% of the U.S. population, one in every 17 Americans, all within a four-hour drive�if you can find four hours when the traffic isn't bad. At least 20% already live in crowded housing, and poverty levels have increased steadily for three decades. Yet during the next 25 years the region is projected to grow by 6 million ...

Demographic studies after the 2000 census revealed that from 1990 to 2000, immigrants and their children accounted not for just some, or even most, of California's growth. They accounted for virtually all of it. Of the increase of 4.2 million people during those 10 years, the net gain generated by the native population was just 90,000, fewer than attend each year's Rose Bowl game.

Immigrants .. inflate the population not just by coming to California but by having children once they're here. While the combined birthrate for California's U.S. citizens and immigrants who are not Latino has dropped to replacement level, the birthrate for Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America averages more than three children per mother ..

the earth's population doubled to 5 billion in a mere 37 years (1950 to 1987) and will more than double again in this century, many countries, particularly in Europe, now have low fertility rates, relatively low immigration levels and are losing population. In sharp contrast, the U.S., at more than 292 million the world's third-most populous country behind behemoths China and India, will soon glide past 300 million en route to 400 million before mid-century. In this respect, America stands alone in the developed world. United Nations projections show just eight countries accounting for half of the planet's population increase between now and 2050. Seven of them come as no surprise: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The other country is the United States, largely because of its generous immigration policies ..

Overshadowed by the state's long-term fiscal quagmire is the less publicized neglect of aging infrastructure that wasn't designed to serve current population levels, let alone a population projected to be nearly two-thirds larger within 36 years .. To handle the anticipated yearly increase of 600,000 new residents�equal to three new cities the size of Glendale�the state must engineer and build billions of dollars of new infrastructure and facilities ..

the state also has an evolving crisis of shifting demographics as immigration expands the underclass, which pays a lesser share of the tax burden. The Southern California Assn. of Governments' 2003 State of the Region Report found that the region's position "is slipping in nearly every performance category related to socio-economic well-being, including income and educational attainment. Among 17 major metropolitan areas nationwide, the region ranks 16th or worse in ... attainment of high school degrees, per capita income, persons in poverty, and children in poverty."

Note well. This article is NOT by an LA Times staff member, and was NOT published in the news pages of the LA Times. Here's a tip. Don't be surprised if someone gets fired at the LA Times Magazine.

(hat tip to John and Ken).

A pleased alum notes that the U. of Washington gets a green light rating for allowing free speech on campus, a rating provided by SPEECHCODES.ORG. These ratings are a service of The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education. Board member Virginia Postrel explains.

It's another Carnival of Capitalists. Worth highlighting, "I'm a Liberal, Not An Idiot Unlike Steve Lopez, an L.A. Times columnist with a "progressive" tax plan that would drive down tax revenues and make The State of California's revenue base more unstable all at the same time."

An interview with liberal activist Sabine Herold, editor of Libert� j'�cris ton nom. Quotable:

when I was eighteen and still in high school, I was absolutely not interested in politics. Then I arrived at the Universit� Science-Po [Political Science University] in Paris � and when I got there I was still almost apolitical .. [however] I met many interesting people. Everyone there is very political. You have the left wing of course, but then I started talking with others and thinking, and I started reading some very interesting authors like Jean Francois Revel, Toqueville, and about six months later I discovered Hayek .. . Read the rest.

Social Scientist Robert Rector does it again, exposing the government's intellectually debilitating misuse of the word "poverty". (No, things haven't changed under Bush II). Quotable:

Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes...The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe... Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family�s essential needs.

(via EconLog)

A new sheriff is in town -- and he's aiming to reform California's corrupt penal system. Another reason we should be happy we have a new Governor.

The revolt of the Republican base against a President perceived as betraying core principles gathers steam across the blogosphere. Quotable:

Now we must ask ourselves what's best for the party in November '04. It's not necessarily electoral success ..

It's Tacitus. Read more.

Copyright law vs. free speech on the internet. (via the Mises Econ blog)

Andrew Sullivan on Bush II and human freedom at home:

There's barely a speech by President Bush that doesn't cite the glories of human freedom. It's God's gift to mankind, he believes. And in some ways this President has clearly expanded it: the people of Afghanistan and Iraq enjoy liberties unimaginable only a few years ago. But there's a strange exception to this Bush doctrine. It ends when you reach America's shores. Within the U.S., the Bush Administration has shown an unusually hostile attitude toward the exercise of personal freedom .. more.

John Stossel's Give Me a Break : How I .. Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media reviewed on NRO by Ethan Wallison. Quotable:

Stossel suggests that political bias within the profession means that liberal groups have a reliable pipeline to the top news outlets and journalists, who are prone to accepting the information they are provided uncritically. The Washington Post, among others, reports that 150,000 women die every year from the eating disorder anorexia � a number that, as Stossel points out, is absurd on its face. ("Triple the number killed in cars?") Dan Rather, citing a report, suggests that one in four American children under age 12 is "in danger of starving." (The actual source material, based on a highly misleading survey, said nothing of the sort. But either way, Stossel notes, isn't our real problem obesity?) The New York Times winds up having to correct a piece that says, erroneously, that the North Pole is melting � but not before the story is picked up by other major media who also interview the same "global warming expert" quoted in the Times story.

The fourth estate is not the real focus of this book, however. Give Me a Break is a capitalist's manifesto, a paean to the power of self-interest to regulate human affairs. Stossel makes no apologies for his faith in free markets as the surest source of wealth, justice, innovation, and efficiency. He's a crusader who comes across as a populist F. A. Hayek or Milton Friedman. "Calcutta is poor because of your stupid policies," he tells a top official of the local Socialist party, which has run that Indian city for years. Elsewhere, he corners Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who's demanding that the city government pony up for a new stadium. "Let's have a debate," Stossel says. "You're a freeloader. You're taking money from poor taxpayers to make you, a rich guy, richer." That must have been cathartic. It's no surprise that one school teacher from Kansas writes Stossel, after his interview with the Calcutta official aired, to complain that he was "rude" to his subject. Stossel's response: "I was rude. This man wrecked people's lives.... Someone ought to be rude to him."

For the Survival of Democracy : Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s by Alonzo Hamby is reviewed by Rick Perlstein in the NY Times. Quotable:

The generation that created his field [FDR studies], he writes .. ''established a tone that still dominates the study of American politics in the 1930's: a near-adulatory perspective, occasionally nagged by a sense that F.D.R. was too 'conservative' to lead us entirely into the promised land of equalitarian social democracy.'' He also notes the inconvenient fact that hobbles them: it's impossible to argue that the New Deal accomplished what it set out to do, namely, to produce a genuine economic recovery. But it is not in answering the question ''Did it work?'' that Hamby ventures his most aggressive contribution to this discussion. He's more interested in what there was to admire in Roosevelt's attempt. He concludes: not too much ..

Be the first on your block to own genetically engineered "GloFish" .

Bush vows to "freeze" government spending at "high altitude" . Quotable:

Federal expenditures on everything from the National Institutes of Health to social and research programs were so dramatically increased [in recent years] that a year of "belt-tightening" will have little adverse effect, the [Bush administration] official said.

The so-called "freeze" is a verbal promise by the President to boost discretionary spending by 1% next year. This year the President promised to "freeze" spending at a 3% growth clip, while congress has voted to "freeze" spending at a much more robust 9% growth rate. And as most are aware, the President fell in line behind the leadership of the Congress, signing up for its 9%spending growth package rather than acting to impose his own promise. ("Read my lips, no new spending", said the President).

Google News search -- "Bush spending freeze"

The latest California Bear Flag Review. Yes, I'm going to update my Bear Flag links, soon, soon.

U.S. border agents vs. Bush on Bush's open borders plan. Why should we show up to work in the morning? agents ask. Quotable:

[Border agents report] evidence that an immigration wave already had begun [in response to Bush's open borders proposal]. People recently detained along the border, the agents said, have demanded "amnesty" upon their capture ...

And this from the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Of 162 people stopped for using phony documents at San Ysidro since Bush announced his plan on Jan. 7, 94 said they were trying to enter because of the proposed new work program .. [and] Border Patrol officials have reported a 15 percent increase in the use of phony documents at the San Ysidro port compared with the same period a year ago.

Note well -- the first quote is from an LA Times news story (!), the first ever heard of on the problem of illegal immigration from a paper which is popularly know as The Left Angeles Times.

"among ideological and intellectual conservatives, emotional support for Bush is starting to ebb" reports Jonah Goldberg, just back from the New York State Conservative convention. Quotable:

.. if you pay attention to what conservatives are saying at meetings and in magazines, on the Web and at the think tanks, as well as what readers, friends, colleagues and sources say, there's a definite undercurrent of discontent with the president. For some it started with his plan to offer amnesty-lite to illegal immigrants. For others, it's his fence-sitting on gay marriage. For others, like me, it was his signing of the campaign finance reform bill even though he thought it was unconstitutional. Or maybe it was his support for steel tariffs. Or the farm bill. I forget. Anyway that doesn't matter. What unites pretty much all of these grumblers is a deep sense of, well, disgust with how much this administration is spending .. There may be good aspects to George Bush's "compassionate conservatism," though on the whole I never liked it, but it's clear that compassion doesn't come cheap at the Bush White House, on whose watch overall spending from 2001 to 2003 grew at 16 percent and discretionary spending went up 27 percent. That's double Bill Clinton's rate ..

And this:

yes, conservatives understand that the GOP is practically the only place they have a real impact in electoral politics. But I'm not sure George Bush understands how much he is asking from those who brought him to the dance.

oh, go ahead and read the whole damn thing.

James Schlesinger on the cold facts of Global Warming. Quotable:

What we know for sure is quite limited. For example, we know that since the early 1900s, the Earth's surface temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit. We also know that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has been increasing in the atmosphere. And we know that the theory that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide will lead to further warming is at least an oversimplification. It is inconsistent with the fact that satellite measurements over 35 years show no significant warming in the lower atmosphere, which is an essential part of the global-warming theory.

Much of the warming in the 20th century happened from 1900 to 1940. That warming was followed by atmospheric cooling from 1940 to around 1975. During that period, frost damaged crops in the Midwest during summer months, and glaciers in Europe advanced. This happened despite the rise in greenhouse gases. These facts, too, are not in dispute.

And that's just our recent past. Taking a longer view of climate history deepens our perspective. For example, during what's known as the Climatic Optimum of the early Middle Ages, the Earth's temperatures were 1 to 2 degrees warmer than they are today. That period was succeeded by the Little Ice Age, which lasted until the early 19th century. Neither of these climate periods had anything to do with man-made greenhouse gases.

The lessons of our recent history and of this longer history are clear: It is not possible to know now how much of the warming over the last 100 or so years was caused by human activities and how much was because of natural forces. Acknowledging that we know too little about a system as complicated as the planet's climate is not a sign of neglect by policymakers or the scientific community. Indeed, admitting that there is much we do not know is the first step to greater understanding.

Meanwhile, it is important that we not be unduly influenced by political rhetoric and scare tactics ...

Tyler Cowen takes a stab at making sense of the differences and commonalities between "conservatives" and "libertarians" over on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. But one of his central premises is false. Many libertarians do not "share the conservative emphasis on just deserts", take a look, for example at chapter 6 "Equality, Value and Merit" from Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Classic liberals and "libertarians" see the world as a place where luck or happenstance plays a ineliminable role in life's circumstance, and hence where much of what life takes on for an individual will be "undeserved" or "unmerited". And I also should think that "conservatives" like Burke or Oakeshott have taught this insight as well as anyone. So the "emphasis on just desserts" does not by necessity apply to conservatives either, contra Cowen. Where does this leave us? Well, in need of an alternative theory, of course. Mine? Well, in America, it's a matter of historical record that in contemporary times the "Religious Right" was pushed out of the Democrat party and into the Republican party by the effort of the Carter administration to tax them -- this is the background history of the founding of the "Moral Majority". There is more to the story than that I'm well aware ...

Of course, the labels "conservative" and "libertarian" are problematic in there own right, and a better question to explore is the relationship between religion and classical liberalism -- especially the dynamic interaction between historical events and ideas.

Cowen was commenting on a conversation found here.

The Federal government leaves previously convicted and deported criminal illegal aliens on the streets of America, where they have returned to prey upon U.S. citizens -- an LA cop reports:

In New York, as in Los Angeles and many other cities, locally enacted sanctuary laws prohibit police officers from inquiring into a person's immigration status except in extraordinary circumstances. In Los Angeles, this prohibition goes to the laughable extreme of protecting even those who have already been deported after being convicted of a felony and serving time in a California prison. Thus, as I have experienced, if a police officer is driving down the street and spots a man whom he has arrested in the past, and who he knows has been sent to prison and then deported, he is constrained from making an arrest or even a detention, this despite the fact that re-entry into the United States under such circumstances is a federal felony. And on those occasions when I have arrested previously deported aliens for misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies (drug dealing, for instance), immigration officials have told me they would not pursue federal charges unless the underlying local charge was more serious. In fact, it is frustratingly common for police officers to find on an arrestee's rap sheet the notation "deportation proceedings initiated," prompting the question: Well, then, why is he here? ..

Professor Bainbridge on gay marriage and the law:

The move Bush makes here is to begin shifting the terms of the debate from outcome to process. Yes, he's still focusing too much on whether the law should recognize gay marriage, but at least he has begun to shift attention to the real question, which is "who decides"? The people's elected representatives or the imperial judiciary? .. Whatever happens with the legal institution of marriage .. ought to happen as a result of democratic processes rather than by judicial fiat. The founders of our republic set up a carefully nuanced set of checks and balances, but the last couple of generations of Americans have allowed nine unelected old men and women to seize control of a vast array of deeply contentionous social and cultural issues of national import knowing that they are immune from being held accountable for their decisions. Our judges now use the law to impose elite opinion about how society should be ordered regardless of the democratic will. We have become courtroom spectators rather than participants in the democratic process. It is as the famed First Things symposium put it, The End of Democracy.

NY Times -- Republicans organize to fight President on runaway Federal spending. Polls show growing national concern over a government which is spending beyond it's means. Quotable:

"the era of small government has ended for the Republican Party."

And this:

Referring to Mr. Bush's call on Tuesday night for athletes to stop using performance-enhancing drugs, the aide said, "Unfortunately, the president's ban on steroids doesn't apply to [budget busting Congressional] appropriators."

Daniel Weintraub on Danial Weintraub -- journalist-blogger. Quotable:

I am either a pioneer working on the cutting edge of journalism or a fool wasting my time in chit-chat with a tiny and ultimately insignificant number of readers ..

(via Calblog.)

The discussion of Hayek and gay marriage has moved from the blogs, to the Boston Globe -- and is now heating up on the Hayek-L email list, where many of those involved got an early "heads up" on the debate. Hayek-Ler Paul Varnell of the Chicago Free Press flags The Independent Gay Forum as "perhaps the most comprehensive collection of commentary pieces on gay marriage" available anywhere. Worth a read -- Varnell's "Gay Rights on the Right". Quotable:

In 1960, Friedrich Hayek, an economist and social philosopher at the University of Chicago, and later a winner of the Nobel prize, published "The Constitution of Liberty." Hayek's chief aim was to set out arguments for personal liberty and explain why government coercion was harmful both to the individual and to society.

One of Hayek's key points was that just because a majority does not like something, it does not have the right to forbid it. "The most conspicuous instance of this in our society," Hayek wrote, "is that of the treatment of homosexuality." After noting that men once believed that tolerating gays would expose them to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Hayek added, "Where such factual beliefs do not prevail, private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state."

Just two years later one of Hayek's students wrote a long article, "Sin and the Criminal Law," for the libertarian quarterly "New Individualist Review." Using Hayek's framework, the article attacked all so-called "morals" legislation � e.g., laws against gambling, drug use, suicide, prostitution, voluntary euthanasia, obscenity and homosexuality.

The article dismissed all these as "imaginary offenses" and developed Hayek's argument that such laws should be repealed because the personal freedom of individuals is what creates the conditions for social progress.

Hayek's influence was pervasive among libertarians ...

Mark Steyn is running the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Presidential Candidate Dead Pool .. your chance to win an autographed copy of Steyn's The Face of the Tiger.

Peter Hitchens reviews Jean-Fran�ois Revel's Anti-Americanism. Quotable:

Living amidst [the anti-American ravings of French "intellectuals"], simultaneously pretentious and offensive to any well-tuned mind, it is easy to understand why the good Jean-Fran�ois finds it hard to accept any criticisms of the USA. Condemnation from such curdled brains and such flapping mouths almost always amounts to praise. But that is what is wrong with this otherwise excellent and lucid book. It cannot recognize that a criticism of the USA may be true even though a French leftist has made it ...

Today's Jeopardy Daily Double: One is a giant in the history of human thought. The other is a pygmy in the second-hand trade of "popular ideas" ... In a related matter, Arnold Klung takes on the topic of job outsourcing and comparative advantage, with an emphasis on the role of mathematics in thinking about such things. Quotable:

What accounts for the persistent belief that trade with poor countries will make us worse off? Recently, it occurred to me that evolutionary psychology might provide the answer. Anthropologist Alan Fiske has pointed out that there are four ways in which humans transact: on the basis of authority; on the basis of communal sharing; on the basis of equality matching; and on the basis of market pricing. In the era of small hunter-gatherer tribes in which our brains evolved, only the first three were needed. Market pricing is required once you start to interact with strangers.

My hypothesis is that people are not "hard-wired" to understand market pricing, so that they often fall back on the models of authority ranking, communal sharing, or equality matching to guide them. Thus, people interpret trade with India as if it were communal sharing with India. It certainly is true that if we share with India, we will be poorer. However, it is not true that trading with India at market prices will lower our well-being.

Play Jeopardy on the web here.

John Stossel's Give Me a Break : How I .. Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media is out. I've used Stossel videos in my philosophy classes, which have proved helpful in getting students engaged in the process of thinking for themselves, and appreciating how different people might understand things in different ways. You can read the beginning of his book here. (thanks to Liberty Lover).

How do we explain the bond market bubble.

Quotable Mark Steyn:

The legacy of this period is less musical than political: forty years ago, the self-consciously childlike �folk song� met the civil rights movement and helped permanently infantilise the left. I caught an anti-war protest in Vermont last year and the entire repertoire was from the Sixties, starting with �Where Have All The Flowers Gone?�, which as a poignant comment on soldiering was relevant in the Great War but has no useful contribution to make in a discussion on Iraq.

John Hood reports from the Republican base -- and they are not happy. Quotable:

The problem for Bush and the Republicans is that if the security issue gets muted during the 2004 campaign, a good chunk of their political base will get uncomfortable. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the limited-government, free-market faction of their coalition -- including mainstream Reagan Republicans, old-style balanced-budget moderates, and small-l libertarians-- have been dismayed by Bush's dismal record on federal spending and entitlements. Non-defense discretionary spending under Bush and a Republican Congress soared by nearly 19 percent in two years, a rate not seen in decades and one making Bill Clinton look like Calvin Coolidge.

The fallout is visible. Both sitting conservative members of Congress and candidates I've talked to in North Carolina, for example, freely express their disappointment in private and often in public forums. Radio talk shows, web sites, and other institutions that serve to channel activist energy at the grassroots exhibit significant disaffection. Even such Washington-establishment groups as the Heritage Foundation haven't shied away from savaging the president and the GOP with surprisingly blunt language. "The Republican party is simply not interested in small government now," says Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation budget analyst who has been particularly caustic. "They're worse than the Democrats they replaced."

UPDATE: Bush's speech proposed 30 new or greatly expanded programs for spending your money. And he offered not a single cut to any government program. And the Debt Clock keeps ticking. Quotable:

"[Bush] -- Giving Religion a Place at the Trough"

Reality Check. Analysts have concluded that the U.S. Government faces a 44 trillion dollar deficit in the coming years, a number derived by simply doing the math, adding up all projected obligations, then subtracting from that projected revenues. As Radley Balko points out, 44 trillion dollar is one-and-a-half times the GDP -- of the entire world.

UPDATE: Bush's budget busting State of the Union Address. Quotable:

President Bush last night proposed an ambitious package of domestic spending that will drive up discretionary expenditures far more rapidly than his recent predecessors. The State of the Union initiatives that he wants passed this year include more spending for the Department of Education, a new assistance fund to help manufacturers recover from their recession and funding for a major, long-term expansion of NASA's space budget. Early projections indicate passage of Mr. Bush's proposals will increase non-defense spending well beyond the 4 percent to 5 percent the administration has budgeted for the current fiscal year, nearly double the average annual increases of about 2.5 percent by President Clinton during his two terms. "One thing that Bush tends to do in these State of the Union speeches, which tends to be counterproductive, is that he has adopted the Clinton style of presenting this shopping list of these programs that will solve every problem that afflicts America," said Stephen Moore, who heads the Club for Growth which has cheered Mr. Bush's tax cuts while denouncing his spending increases. "That only reinforces the concern that he is a big government Republican," Mr. Moore said last night ..

"A year ago at this time, the president talked about 4 percent spending growth and we're about to finish this fiscal year with 9 percent spending growth once the omnibus spending bill passes," Mr. Riedl said .. conservative strategists here say that if he does not show some toughness on spending soon, his core conservative support is going to erode.

The White House is betting that is not going to happen because Mr. Bush has shored up his base support by delivering on several key issues of importance to conservatives .. "Our support in our conservative base remains strong because we have delivered on their issues," said a Bush campaign adviser.

Well, that seals it. I've just been read right out of the conservative "base" of the Republican party.

Oh, and there is this:

The politics of Mr. Bush's fiscal policies generally follow in the footsteps of President Reagan who also slashed taxes, sharply boosted defense spending and allowed federal spending to rise from $600 billion in 1980 to nearly $1 trillion by the end of his presidency amid soaring deficits ...

Please somebody -- anybody -- tell me what is "conservative" about any of this?

Catallarchy likens the President's State of the Union Address to a professinal wrestling event -- and concludes with a message for politicians. Call it an official SOTU reply from out of the blosphere.

UPDATE: Sullivan: "This is not Reaganism .. It's Big Government Moral Conservatism: fiscally liberal and socially conservative. It will please the hard right and the base. And it will alienate libertarians and moderates. It struck me as a speech that comes out of a political cocoon .." more.

UPDATE II: Tagorda: "Bush left no entitlement, no interest, no domestic initiative unturned. For every cause that aroused his empathy, he threw money in its direction .. as I bit into a fat sourdough burger, the President bit into my wallet with one pork-barrel project after another .. " more.

Making sense of political writer Andrew Sullivan --an interview. Quotable:

[My road toward Conservatism] began living under socialism. Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, watching the country's terminal decline, seeing the damage unions could do, and how the entire ruling elite had lost hope - all that made me a Thatcherite. I also went to a publicly-funded magnet school that selected boys at the age of 11 on the basis of IQ tests and gave them a chance to succeed.

My folks weren't rich. It was the only way I could have gotten an excellent education. I was so grateful. And then the Labour government took office and tried to abolish the school because it was deemed �elitist.� The school went private while I was there and lost its mission to educate under-privileged kids. (The school raised enough money to give me a scholarship to finish my time there). In all that, I saw that the Left was actually hostile to ordinary people, their aspirations, their achievements. The ideology of envy and equality of outcome trumped the ideas of freedom and equality of opportunity. And so I became a follower of the liberalizing right.

I wore a Reagan 80 button in high school; I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell; I became fascinated by the horrors of Soviet tyranny; I read Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman; I was so psyched when Thatcher won office that I stopped my calendar on the day - May 3, 1979 - and left it on the wall at that date. And at Oxford, I enraged my peers by celebrating the arrival of Pershing missiles with a champagne party.

But again, I was political in order to free people from being forced into politics. I wanted to ratchet back the state to let people breathe more freely, however they wanted to. I'm not interested in being ideological all the time. I love pop culture; I love gay culture; I love sex; I enjoy movies and Shakespeare and bodybuilding and my dog. I'm conservative in politics so that I can be radical in every other human activity. To me, that makes sense. But I'm aware I'm somewhat alone.

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Alex Tabarrock has an interesting post on the role Hayek and The Road to Serfdom played in the re-education of Nazi POWs at American prison camps. His remarks were prompted by this article in the Washington Post. Quotable:

Concordia's canteens and library were filled with books that had been banned by the Nazis. [Heinrich] Treichl read and reread the American bestseller The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, which detailed the flaws in socialism and contrasted it with democracy.

Treichl returned home to occupied Austria, carrying books from Getty and his beloved copy of The Road to Serfdom. He still has them. He married a Jewish woman and helped her family reclaim their publishing empire, became head of Austria's largest bank and, later, served as honorary president of the Austrian Red Cross. Now 91, Treichl is known in Austria for his generosity and his habit of speaking hard truths. "I'm very American," he says with a grin.

Trading away those smelly genes -- trading up for color genes.

It's That 70's Show all over again. See this article by Bruce Bartlett on Bush's plan to expand taxpayer subsidies for manufacturing -- i.e. it's back to the future with "industrial policy" madness. Even Carter -- and the Carter economists -- were smart enough to reject this both dangerous and idiot 1970's fad. And don't be mistaken. This thing is straight-out of-the-dictionary fascism, and we need to kill it while it's still in the crib. Quotable:

As is so often the case, the Bush administration is approaching the alleged problem of manufacturing's decline as if no one had ever noticed it before. This results from the fact that administration initiatives are never studied or analyzed carefully before being announced. This is one area where former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's criticism of the Bush administration is right on target . If anyone had bothered to check, they would have found that the federal government has been issuing detailed reports on the demise of manufacturing for more than 20 years .. The point is that the ground was already well plowed before the Bush administration decided to turn its attention to the decline of manufacturing, which it did in a new report from the Commerce Department last week. Yet at the end of this exercise, the Bush administration could do no better than propose more taxpayer money to help private businesses do their jobs. According to press reports, the 2005 budget will propose substantially increasing spending for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership -- a program it proposed phasing out just last year.

Worse than JOHNSON. Worse than NIXON. Worse than FORD. Worse than CARTER. Worse (of course) than REAGAN. Worse than BUSH I. Worse than CLINTON. GEORGE W. BUSH worst of all modern Presidents when it comes to real increases in domestic discretionary spending. The worst.

.. I had by then become something of a humor evangelist, espousing to anyone who would listen a variant of the Twelve Step philosophy: things are only as bad as the stuff you can't joke about ... more.

The editors of the LA Times are either listening to the John and Ken Show -- or they're reading blogs like this one. Well, I don't think there is much chance they're listening to John and Ken .. Anyway, I don't know how it happened, but part of this Heather Mac Donald's City Journal piece somehow showed up on the editorial pages of the LA Times today. Who would have thunk? Quotable:

Some of the most dangerous thugs preying on immigrant communities in Los Angeles are in this country illegally. Yet the Los Angeles Police Department cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status.

Dozens of gang members from Mara Salvatrucha, a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang, for example, have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country after deportation is a felony. Yet if an LAPD officer arrests an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is the officer who will be treated as a criminal for violating an LAPD rule.

That rule, Special Order 40, prohibits officers from questioning or apprehending someone only for an immigration violation or from notifying the immigration service (now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement) about an illegal alien. Only if the person has been booked for a nonimmigration felony or multiple misdemeanors may officers even inquire about his immigration status.

Such "sanctuary" rules, replicated in cities with a high number of immigrants, are a testament to the political power of immigrant lobbies. "We can't even talk about" illegal alien crime, a frustrated LAPD captain said. "People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics."

Police commanders may not want to discuss the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling: 95% of all outstanding warrants for homicide in Los Angeles (which total more than 1,200) are for illegal aliens, according to officers. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (which total 17,000) are for illegal aliens. The leadership of the Columbia Li'l Cycos gang, which has used murder and racketeering to control the drug market around MacArthur Park, was about 60% illegal aliens in 2002, says a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted them in 2002.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in "official" crime analysis. The LAPD and the Los Angeles city attorney recently obtained a preliminary injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood. The injunction targets the 18th Street gang and, as the press release puts it, "non-gang members" who sell drugs in Hollywood on behalf of the gang.

Those nongang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled in by the gang. Cops and prosecutors say that they know the immigration status of these nongang "Hollywood dealers," as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is silent on that aspect. If an officer were to arrest a dealer for his immigration status, or even notify immigration authorities, he would face discipline for violation of Special Order 40.

Likewise, although LAPD officers recognize previously deported gang members all the time, they can't touch a deported felon unless he has given them some other reason to stop him. Even then, an officer can arrest him only for the offense not related to immigration. Yet a deported gangbanger who reenters the country is already committing a federal felony � punishable by up to 20 years.

The city's ban on enforcing immigration crimes puts the community at risk by stripping the police of what may be their only immediate tool to remove a criminal from circulation. Trying to build a case for homicide, say, against an illegal alien gang member is often futile because witnesses fear retaliation. Enforcing an immigration crime would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness at risk.

The department's top brass brush off such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say. Just put them under surveillance for "real" crimes and arrest them for those. But surveillance is manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for arresting a violent felon, it is absurd to demand that the understaffed LAPD ignore it.

The stated reason for sanctuary policies is to encourage crime victims and witnesses who are illegal aliens to cooperate with the police without fear of deportation. This theory has never been tested. In any case, the official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of violators: say, deported felons whose immigration status police know.

The biggest myth about sanctuary laws is that they are immigrant-friendly. To the contrary: They leave law-abiding immigrants vulnerable to violence. Nor will it do to say that immigration enforcement is solely a federal responsibility. When it comes to fighting terrorism, the LAPD understands that it cannot rely on the feds alone to protect Los Angeles. Similarly, the department should not wait for a few of the 2,000-odd immigration agents, stretched to the breaking point nationwide, to show up and apprehend felons who are terrorizing neighborhoods.

What 20th Century Theorist are you? I'm the one with the beer bong -- and damn proud of it!

This week's Carnival Of The Capitalists takes a hop across the pond.

Prisoners lining up for roll call at Auschwitz -- part of the 5 million aerial photo collection of the WWII Aerial Reconnaissance Archives at Keele University which was supposed to go on line today here, but which has not been able to handle a tidalwave of hits. The BBC story is here.

The case against Bush's immigration plan -- Victor David Hanson, author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. Quotable:

Supporters of the proposed law say that something is needed since Americans simply refuse certain backbreaking jobs in construction, agriculture, hotels and restaurants. But such understandable pessimism rests on many questionable suppositions. It assumes, for instance, that the traditional remedies of the free market for scarce workers--mechanization and increased wages--ceased to work around 1980; that it is hard to sleep or dine out or find a cut lawn in an Iowa or Maine where there are not tens of thousands of illegal workers; that the experience of guest-workers in Germany and France provides encouraging analogies for importing cheap labor, that Californians or Texans once did not do most of their own work before the influx of industrious aliens; and that it is economically beneficial and morally sound to use foreign workers when millions of Americans remain unemployed.

We forget that there is a life cycle for the typical teenage worker from Oaxaca, whose backbreaking labor is said to be essential for the economy. For a laborer of 18, it may be a good bargain for all involved--but for too many people, after 30 years without education, English, and legality, too often these jobs turn out not to be entry-level or rite-of-passage, but remain dead-end, and thus catastrophe ensues when an aging, unskilled worker is injured, laid off, ill or the sole breadwinner of a large family. Only the public entitlement industry--health, housing, education and maintenance subsidies--can come to his rescue to provide some parity with Americans that his job or former job could not. His employer in the meantime looks for a younger, healthier, and foreign, successor. Thus the tragic cycle continues.

It is not only uneconomical in the long run to bus in impoverished laborers from Mexico, but also amoral to traffic in human capital. We praise the bracero program of the 1960s, but I remember it somewhat differently ...

UPDATE: A must read on THE BUSH PRESIDENCY from John Leo.

"[Bruce Caldwell's] Hayek's Challenge should easily gain a reputation as one of the most�and possibly the most�significant contributions to the literature of F.A. Hayek." -- Roger Garrison, author of Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure

Economist Peter Boettke: "I strongly urge readers .. to study Caldwell�s brilliant book on Hayek --- Hayek�s Challenge --- and in particular the first 1/3 of the book where he goes through the historical context within which Mises and Hayek came to intellectual maturation. Of course the book is about Hayek, so Mises while central to the story doesn�t get the focus that he will in his own biography. But Caldwell�s biography is actually an excellent role model for economic biographies --- especially in the way he mixes historical context and doctrinal issues. I would put Caldwell�s work already in the league of Skidelsky�s biographies of Keynes and Hacohen�s biography of Popper".

"The Austrian road to much of Blairism".

Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F A Hayek reviewed by
Richard D North in The Independent:

"F A Hayek's name is often linked with that of Milton Friedman, the other founder of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. That makes Hayek a hate-figure for the many whose "liberalism" was the mirror-image of his own.

Bruce Caldwell's intellectual biography of the great Austrian is a wonderful work, but an odd one. Hayek's best-known work is The Road to Serfdom (1944). Yet this receives scant attention from Caldwell. Perhaps it was too populist to be treated as seriously as Hayek's other books. But it did address his big political idea.

As Caldwell shows, Hayek had cut his economic teeth watching "statism" try to create a kindly society as Germany invented the welfare state (the model for our own Beveridge Report). He believed he had charted how benign interference descended into totalitarianism, but turned out to be wrong. After the Second World War, Western Europe became welfarist. But we arrived merely at stultification.

Was that because we avoided the full-on socialism he hated? The big argument for the past 50 years has been on Hayek's terrain. The Institute of Economic Affairs was founded in 1955 by a young idealist who had read a condensed Serfdom in the Reader's Digest, and its Hayekian agenda is now at least one half of Blairism and will surely unfold further. The state will own and do less in future.

Caldwell shows us how Hayek believed in a welfare safety-net, and was fascinated by how markets depend on institutions.

One of the oddities of Caldwell's book is it is 133 pages before we really meet the subject. Instead, we are taken back to the Austrian and German academic milieus of the 1870s, into whose legacies Hayek was born in 1899. Hayek was a child, like Wittgenstein, of the Viennese fin-de-si�cle: the spawning-ground of logical positivism and its enemies.

In economics, he was interested in whether there was a testable way of talking about the many processes of exchange. This amounts to talking about a vast proportion of human interactions. Caldwell concludes with an essay suggesting that economics has never really succeeded in answering these big questions. By that count, it's almost a saving grace that Hayek was sceptical about much economic thinking. But he triumphantly helped to frame a rebellion against the unintended oppressiveness of do-gooders. Most of his brain-work was in a tradition of inconclusiveness: wonderful, then, that he produced one work of dazzling clarity."

Lecture -- "Hayek's Challenge". Speaker: Professor Bruce Caldwell.

Thursday 19 February 2004. 6.30 pm, Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, 6pm, Old Theatre. London School of Economics. London. This event is free and open to all with no ticket required.

"This lecture will explore the development of one of the twentieth century's most important and seminal thinkers, F. A. Hayek. Drawing on his new book Hayek's Challenge: an intellectual biography of FA Hayek, Caldwell will explore the path by which Hayek gradually developed his unique perspective on not only economics but almost the whole range of social and political phenomena, and show how his economic ideas came to inform his view on these wider issues.

Bruce Caldwell is the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is past president of the History of Economics Society and general editor of The Collected Works of F A Hayek. Caldwell was the recipient of a Lachmann Fellowship at LSE in 2001-02. His new book, Hayek�s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of FA Hayek, will be published [in Great Britian] in 2004."

"The Ideas and Impact of F. A. Hayek" BOOK FORUM Monday, February 2, 2004 4:00 pm The Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001

Featuring Bruce J. Caldwell, Author, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago, 2003); and Alan Ebenstein, Author, Hayek�s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (Palgrave, 2003); with comments by Dick Armey, Former professor of economics, former House majority leader, and cochairman, Citizens for a Sound Economy.

"It is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century,� John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker. Confirming Hayek�s stature, two new books from major publishers explore the development of his thought. Biographer Alan Ebenstein discusses Hayek�s Austrian roots and his relationship to such thinkers as Mill, Marx, Keynes, and Popper. Bruce Caldwell, editor of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, traces the complex evolution of Hayek�s thought�and the evolution of Austrian economics�and places Hayek in a broader intellectual context. His book has been called �the best book in economics of 2003.� Please join us for a discussion of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

Cato book forums and receptions are free of charge. To register for this event, please fill out the form below and click submit or call Krystal Brand by 4:00 pm, Friday, January 30, 2004, at (202) 789-5229, fax her at (202) 371-0841, or e-mail to kbrand@cato.org. News media inquiries only, please call 202-789-5200. If you can't make it to the Cato Institute, watch this forum live online.

GEORGE WILL does a 180� on Schwarzenegger and California. Quotable:

Favored by sportsmen around the world, [Buck Knives] have been made in San Diego since Hoyt Buck arrived there in 1947. By next year they will be made in Idaho, where the firm's immediate savings will include $500,000 in workers' compensation costs and a 60 percent decrease in utility bills.

The owner of five Hungry Howie's Pizza franchises near Fresno scrapped plans to add five more, with up to 70 new jobs, when energy costs tripled and workers' compensation quadrupled. Multiply the businesses that do not come to, stay or expand in California and you have ... Argentina, which in 1900 had a per capita income as high as Canada's. Or sub-Saharan Africa, which In 1950 had per capita income as high as Southeast Asia's. Government -- especially bad government -- matters. In the late 1990s it helped drive roughly 200,000 Californians from the state each year.

[Finance Director Donna] Arduin's mastery of budget mechanics, which was known, in the service of Arnold Schwarzenegger's political subtlety, which is surprising, is already producing successes. Her task is to clarify the future costs of past decisions. His task is to revise some of those decisions.

Here testosterone enters the equation. Six months ago the question was: Could an intergalactically famous Hollywood hero heal California's self-inflicted wounds? Today the question is: Can only such a person do the job? On a Schwarzeneggerean scale, fame -- ``the fever of renown,'' Samuel Johnson called it -- might today be a political asset necessary for governing a state this big and broken.

Fame can help him strike separate deals with large interest groups, so he will not confront a vast unified opposition. The California Teachers Association has agreed to only modest cuts in education spending. But Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee notes that this will help the governor isolate unions representing non-teaching school employees. Those unions oppose revisions of a law that impedes outsourcing non-teaching services to private contractors.

Schwarzenegger's fame can generate public support sufficient to pressure state legislators. Because of gerrymandering by both parties to protect incumbents, most legislators have seats so safe they rarely feel threatened. And with the coin of fame Schwarzenegger can buy public mobilization to enact through referenda those reforms that the Legislature spurns.

It is irrational but actual: A movie action hero as governor may be immune to charges of being soft on criminals. Therefore he can contemplate reducing the prison population through alternative handling of parole violators. Prison guards, a powerful interest group, can contemplate revising their lucrative contracts or losing jobs.

The state began expanding in-home care for the elderly in the 1950s, when the polio vaccine threatened unemployment for caregivers for polio victims. Now the $1.4 billion program is six times larger than a decade ago. Schwarzenegger proposes to stop paying family members to care for their own relatives.

Every cost-cutting idea is met with a chorus of abuse, and the opposition's idee fixe -- taxing ``the rich.'' What is unfolding is a drama worthy of Schwarzenegger's talents, which were wasted on make-believe dramas.

Heather MacDonald, City Journal:

President Bush's proposal to legalize the country's 10 or so million illegal aliens rests on a fallacy: that immigration enforcement has failed to stem the tide of illegal aliens. Therefore, the argument goes, amnesty is the only solution to the illegal-alien crisis. But immigration enforcement has not failed � it has never been tried. Amnesty, however, has been tried, and it was a clear failure that should not be repeated again.

For decades, the country's immigration enforcement has looked like this: a largish number of Border Patrol agents clustered at the border with Mexico, then a vast empty space beyond where illegal immigrants are home free � as if a football team had placed its entire defense on the line of scrimmage.

Roughly 2,000 immigration agents have been responsible for all interior enforcement, a massive portfolio which includes checking work sites, eradicating document fraud and alien smuggling, and apprehending criminal aliens. Their numbers are dwarfed by the millions of illegal aliens, the hundreds of thousands of employers who hire them, and the tens of thousands of counterfeiters and smugglers who facilitate their passage.

This dearth of enforcement resources has had the most dire consequences in the workplace. It is the lure of jobs that draws most aliens across the border illegally. The highest priority of immigration enforcement should be to disengage that jobs magnet by penalizing employers who hire illegals. The opposite is the case: A combination of inadequate manpower and weak laws has ensured that illegal aliens and their employers enjoy near immunity from detection and prosecution.

Currently, a mere 124 immigration agents are responsible for enforcing the law against hiring illegal aliens, according to the Associated Press. Only 53 employers were fined in 2002. An employer's chance of punishment for breaking the law, therefore, was a scant one one-hundreth of a percent.

But even were immigration authorities to get adequate resources, it would have little effect on the jobs magnet, because the government's tools for prosecuting illegal employment are so weak. Under public pressure to end the illegal-alien crisis, Congress in 1986 banned the employment of illegal aliens and imposed liability on employers who did so. It was a pyrrhic victory. The 1986 law (the Immigration Reform and Control Act [IRCA]) was emasculated at its inception and has been continuously thwarted in its application.

Here's how: A ban on illegal labor can work only if employers can reliably determine a worker's employment eligibility. Business and ethnic lobbies defeated worker verification in 1986 and every time it has been proposed since then.

What we have instead is a system of playacting. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The employee merely needs to proffer, and the employer merely eyeball, any two documents from a dizzying list of 25 � all eminently counterfeitable � to establish the employer's compliance with the 1986 law. If the documents are not obvious fakes� scrawled on a matchbook with a red crayon, say � the employer must accept them.

In fact, if an employer looks too closely at a worker's papers, he may face a lawsuit for racial discrimination. Civil rights and ethnic lobbies made sure that IRCA included a whole new anti-bias bureaucracy: the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices, which sues employers who demand clear proof of worker eligibility.

Having eyeballed the worker's papers, the employer is now virtually insulated from liability. He can be penalized only if the government can prove that he knowingly hired illegal aliens � an almost impossible burden as long as the worker has proffered some reasonable set of fake work papers.

It is this workplace sham that has guaranteed the onslaught of illegals into the country.

In trying to sell his amnesty program, Bush made a vague gesture towards correcting the sham: "Employers must not hire undocumented aliens," he said. "There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for . . . any employer violating these laws." This is meaningless verbiage. Unless Bush advocates a fraud-proof method of verifying a worker's eligibility � such as electronic checks of Social Security numbers � his new amnesty and guest-worker programs will have only one effect: The flood of illegal aliens will increase exponentially.

Illegal workers will still be able to proffer counterfeit documents to get hired, and even more will cross the border than before, lured by the reasonable expectation that in a few years, the U.S. will offer another amnesty.

The last large-scale amnesty in 1986 nearly sunk the INS. The barrage of applications for work papers, many fraudulent, overwhelmed the agency. Ethnic advocacy groups sued constantly to widen the eligibility criteria for citizenship, and under political pressure, the INS penalized agents with high denial rates. The results? Several Islamic terrorists got legal papers, and a new era of high-volume illegal immigration began.

Expect a worse outcome this time around. Immigrant advocacy groups are even more powerful, the numbers of illegals even higher than in 1986, and the Department of Homeland Security, now responsible for immigration enforcement, even more overwhelmed by its paperwork obligations.

Rather than granting President Bush his election year amnesty, Congress should give immigration authorities the resources and legal tools to protect the country's borders. It would be a novel experiment.

This is really good news. Quotable:

"The Constitution gives the president the power to veto legislation, and if Congress won't act in a fiscally responsible way, the president has to step in � but he hasn't done that .. If the president doesn't take a stand on this, there's a real chance the Republicans' voter base will not be enthusiastic about turning out in November, no matter who the Democrats nominate." -- Paul Beckner, president of Citizens for a Sound Economy

Tax crusader Grover Norquist unmasked. The Washington Post profile is here.

I like Bill Jones for U.S. Senate also. Here's the Jones for California web site. I don't think I've ever heard a politician who talks so much like a normal grown-up human being, rather than a tightly wound "I want to help others" freak doing everything necessary to be the "adult" equivalent of junior class President.

PrestPundit's Funny Bone Line of the Week: ""The president is committed to maintaining fiscal restraint." -- Chad Kolton, spokesman for the White House budget office. link.

Rich Lowry:

According to WSJ today, Republicans had a 28-point lead over Democrats as party best able to �control government spending� in 1996. Now, their lead is just 2 points!

Robert Blumen on China's banking crisis:

Bloomberg reports on a bailout of the banking system in China. According to the article, they used 1/10th of their foreign exchange reserves to "boost the capital adequacy" of their two largest banks. "Boosting capital adequacy" is a euphemism for bailing the bankers out for bad loans under the fraudulent system of fractional reserve banking. The Chinese central bank has accumulated vast foreign exchange reserves ($450 billion according to the article, mostly in US$) because of their policy of pegging the exchange rate between their currency and the US$. This is part of the grand dollar game, a system that allows Americans to live beyond their means when the rest of the world loans us money to purchase their goods.

My suggestion is that you read the rest.

Has George W. Bush had you feeling lately like you've been played -- even just a pinch -- for a bit of a sucker? The Man Without Qualities senses he's about to have a Bush II SUCKER moment just as many experiended with Bush I and the "No New Taxes" pledge, and he's given a good stab at explaining why this matters. Quotable:

enervation [during the Bush I Presidency] came not just from the Administration's reversal, but from first causing supporters to personally support policies in dramatic terms, only to reverse those policies in circumstances that strongly suggested that the Administration had never cared about them other than opportunistically. SUCKER.

Read the whole thing -- and don't miss the part about "pillow talk" -- and tell me if it doesn't sound like The Man Without Qualities might be having a very interesting sex life ...

Charles Krauthammer on going to Mars. Krauthammer claims there are worse things we could be doing -- like, say, what we're doing right now.

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The share of the national debt owed by my family of four is about $100,000 -- plus interest. Thanks guys! Imagine if every American family of four owned an addition $100,000 worth of capital goods which were producing not only returns for the owners, but also goods and services for others? How frickin prosperous would the county and it's people be then? Rather than creating an additional $2.12 billion per day in capital goods, the country is going in debt an additional $2.12 billion per day -- money owed not to ourselves rich fat cats in American, but largely to people outside the country rich fat cats outside the country. This is wealth and capital which must leave the country as this debt is serviced -- and as my children grow up. Thanks Mr. President! (thanks to Joshua Claybourn for the link).

UPDATE: Don't miss the Waste Blog updated daily by Mark Carpenter or Tom Finnigan of Citizens Against Government Waste.

UPDATE II: JOHN LEO -- "Are you excited about going to the moon and Mars? Neither am I. With the nation drowning in debt and facing great peril from the Islamofascists, calling for billions to put a man on Mars can't possibly be on any plausible list of the top 500 government priorities. But politics now is mostly a matter of managing impressions. And in this game, cost-free impressions are the most highly prized. (Cost-free to the impression-maker, not to the future voters, Congresses, and presidents who would have to come up with the money.)

The president's space idea is his second questionable announcement of the week. His semi-disguised amnesty for illegal aliens will function as a strong incentive for more illegal entries. It isn't tied to any vigorous action by Mexico to slow the flow. As the nation's second broad amnesty plan, it announces, in effect, that the United States is abandoning efforts to control its borders. On the other hand, it makes a good impression, not only with Hispanic voters but also with moderate suburban white voters who tend to think of Republicans as hard-hearted immigrant-bashers.

Democrats keep saying that President Bush is governing from the right. What they mean by this is uncertain, since the Bush domestic program pretty much tramples most conservative and Republican principles. Limited government and balanced budgets, for example, are hard to square with huge tax cuts, refusal to do anything about the coming bankruptcy of Social Security, and the nearly half-a-trillion-dollar expansion of Medicare.

Vice President Dick Cheney's reported comment on deficits to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is simply hair- raising. "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Cheney said, according to O'Neill. "We won the midterms. This is our due." Under what theory of government does a narrow midterm victory create a right to dramatically expand the deficit? Was there any genuine concern about economic policy or long-term impact on the country? If so, either Cheney didn't express it or O'Neill didn't remember it. As the conversation is reported, Cheney apparently thinks deficits are just a political prize due for winning a few seats in Congress ... ". Read the rest.

A professor takes you inside the U. of Oregon -- which comes across as something like a Cuban re-education camp. You've got to read this to believe it.

Marginal Revolution looks at Deirdre McCloskey's The Secret Sins of Economists on the virtues -- and vices -- of today's economists.

They hate us because .. Those dumb and corrupt Europeans and the America rage they just can't shake. Quotable:

A large part of the European left spent a large part of the 20th century hating the United States not because it had economic inequality or Jim Crow but because it did not have show trials, labor camps and the other appurtenances of "actually existing socialism."

Steyn on Elia Kazan and Hollywood's dirty little "Gentleman's Agreement".

The road to serfdom marriage a permanent Federal "marriage encouragement" bureaucracy. Quotable:

The Bush proposal to spend zillions to supposedly improve marriages is being sold mostly in the name of "saving" the marriages of low-income Americans. It's a classic case .. of Mises's theory of interventionism: The welfare state has wrecked millions of marriages .. and high taxes and inflation have created unbearable financial pressures that have destroyed many other marriages. Therefore, the natural response is even more interventionism.

Robert Blumen: "Gerard Jackson takes on Greenspan's insane policy of encouraging debt-funded consumption instead of allowing a liquidation of mal-investments". The article is here.

Kevin is converting his excellent Truck and Barter blog into a team blog focusing on economics -- folks who might be interesting should drop him a note.

(Wash. D.C.) -- Bush Proposes $12.7 billion Program to Teach Limited Government Philosophy to School Children.

In a proposal widely seen as an effort to shore up support among limited government advocates within Bush's Republican base, the President today announced a $12.7 billion spending program aimed at teaching school children the importance of limited government. A source close to Karl Rove was quoted as saying, "This is just what the Administration needs to do in order to reach out to those voters who indentify ideologically with free markets and the original ideals of the Founding Fathers. We've got spending plans in place for everyone else in the Republican coalition. This was long over do." No reaction yet from anyone who actually believes in limited government or a free society.

UPDATE: Radley Balko responds -- Why Limited Government Republicans Should Vote Dean for President.

UPDATE 2: ScappleFace has news of another new Bush spending proposal.

UPDATE 3: Andrew Sullivan reacts to yet another Bush spending proposal: "LET THE KIDS PAY FOR IT: I'm talking about this $170 billion foray into space. After all, the next generation will be paying for a collapsed social security system, a bankrupted Medicare program, soaring interest on the public debt, as well as coughing up far higher taxes to keep some semblance of a government in operation. But, hey, the president needed another major distraction the week before the Iowa caucuses, and since he won't be around to pick up the bill, why the hell not? Deficits don't matter, after all. And what's a few hundred billion dollars over the next few decades anyway? Chickenfeed for the big and bigger government now championed by the Republicans. This space initiative is, for me, the last fiscal straw. There comes a point at which the excuses for fiscal recklessness run out. The president campaigned in favor of the responsibility ethic. He has governed - in terms of guarding the nation's finances - according to the motto: "If it feels good, do it.""

HAYEK IS HOT

My editor at the Globe says that as of this morning, my feature on Hayek was the Globe's website seventh most often accessed piece, even though the top stories are usually the morning's main news: "not bad for a mustachioed Austrian!" Keep those links coming... UPDATE: The piece is #4 as of Tuesday noon.

-- Virginia Postrel

"Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest." -- Thomas Sowell.

Tony Blankley on why the elite oppose the American people on illegal immigration.

Patterico's immigration argument is take up by Ben Shapiro. Quotable: "From 1992 to 2002, the number of companies fined for hiring illegals dropped from 1,063 to just 13."

The Road to Serfdom. Today's Amazon sales rank: 781. Not bad for a 60 year old book. The Road to Serfdom is a perennial Amazon.com bestseller, ranking usually somewhere in the range of the top 1,000 to 2,500 bestselling books. In fact, the book is dependably ranked in the top 100 in several Amazon categories, often as high as the top 10. The book sells in part because of the overwhelming outpouring of support the book has received from Amazon readers in the customer review section. The book has been reviewed over 100 times and ranks 4 1/2 stars, with strongly positive reviews outnumbering zero star reviews about 20 to 1. Not bad for a book written as "war work" as the bombs came down on London. So raise a toast this year to 60 years of The Road to Serfdom the little book that keeps on going ..

President Bush is Alfred E. Newman and America goes along saying "What, Me Worry?"-- but China and other U.S. bond holders will one day bring the MADness to a crashing halt. A well written piece on a regular PrestoPundit theme.

UPDATE: According to John O'Sullivan, George Bush is actually Mikhail Gorbachev: "Gorbachevism was a politics that "substituted daring for thought" .. George W. Bush is bidding to match [Gorbachav's record] with his proposed reforms of immigration law." Quotable:

Under this prescription hundreds of millions of workers from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East would have the legal right to emigrate to the U.S. as "temporary" workers if American employers wished to hire them.

Not all of these millions would come, to be sure. Already, however, 14 percent of the U.S. workforce is foreign-born; between eight and eleven million workers are here illegally; and some estimates suggest that as many as 20 million new arrivals might enter the U.S. over the next decade. Even a marginal increase in such immigration, however, would exert a steady downward pressure on wages and drive low-paid Americans out of jobs.

Downplaying such forecasts, the Bush people argue that immigrants, including illegals currently here, will be allowed to take only those jobs that Americans have already turned down. But how will this prohibition be enforced? Very simply: It is not going to be enforced � at least for the illegals already here. The "senior administration official" who briefed the press on the Bush proposals stated clearly that the mere fact that an illegal immigrant was employed would be sufficient proof that no American had wanted the job.

Hard to believe? Here is the money quote: "If you're asking the question as to whether the person [the employer] needs to say, okay, well, here's Mary, and she's in this spot, do we need to hold on Mary and look for some American to fill that position, the answer is, no. We assume that by virtue of Mary's employment, that marketplace test, if you will, has been met." Several other statements to the same effect � and the senior administration official advanced no clear idea of how the government would ensure that the prohibition would be enforced for new arrivals.

The administration's next line of defense is to argue that the immigrants will be temporary guest workers who will return home after three years. Yet almost all experience with such programs in several continents across several decades demonstrates that guest workers become permanent residents in due course � very often as a result of the kind of "amnesty" that the administration is again proposing here.

But we need not rely on past experience to forecast their permanence. Guest workers will be here indefinitely because (a) under the Bush rules there is no limit to the number of times their three-year work program can be extended; (b) they can bring in their families and, if they have a child while here, they become the parents of a U.S. citizen and thus undeportable; (c) they will have greater opportunities to marry U.S. citizens; and (d) if all else fails, they can blend back into the underworld of illegal work and documentation that more than eight million of them already inhabit.

In response to this last point, Bush-administration officials assure us that, on the contrary, they will deport those guest workers who fail to leave the U.S. voluntarily when their work program is finished. But this assurance is in flat contradiction to their main rationale for the entire reform program � namely, that the alternative policy of deporting the eight million illegals here now is unthinkable.

If it is unthinkable to deport eight million illegals today, why will it be easier to deport two or three times that number in a decade or so when even more businesses will be alleged to be reliant on them and even more pressure groups will be pressing their case? Not even the Bush officials believe that either many illegals or many guest workers will go home�that is one reason why they are increasing the number of "green cards" for permanent residents ...

Harvard -- Social Studies 10 -- Introduction to Social Studies:

An introduction to the classics of modern social theory. The first term focuses on the rise of commercial society. The second term focuses on the individual in modern society. Readings include Smith, Tocqueville, Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Polanyi, Hayek, Foucault, Habermas, and Strauss.

Lecture: "Hayek: Free Markets and Free Societies" -- Glyn Morgan

Readings: The Essence of Hayek, Nishiyama & Leube eds. Chapters: 5, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20.

wwwlinks: The Friedrich Hayek Scholars' Page

The Tom Tancredo for President movement gets under way. Do these folks know that write-in votes are not counted in California unless the write-in candidate is officially registered with the Secretary of State? Time to get to work, guys. Who is Tom Tancredo? He's this guy. And he writes stuff like this. Quotable: "Bringing illegal Mexican workers into the Social Security System not only rewards illegal behavior, it also further endangers the fiscal health of our Social Security System .. ".

Paul C. Roberts and his critics are hashing out the logic of the case for free trade over at Mises Economics Blog. See also this post by Daniel Drezner.

A Small Victory is looking for captions. (Thanks to Xlrq for the, er, tip.)

Price Signals and the True Cost of Illegal Immigration. Let's do the math on massive illegal immigration. The math is actually quite simple. Illegal foreigners are paid far fewer dollars than they consume from the economy. If they have kids in school and/or the family visits the emergency room a few times, very quickly the family has consumed several times paid wages.

Rich folks with illegal nannies and servants are getting services without paying the true cost of labor -- in other words, illegal immigration is providing a government subsidy for the pampered lifestyles of the well to do. It is doing the same for wealthy firms of all sorts -- from agribusiness to international hotels to Walmart. The market tells us that the value of this illegal foreign labor is no more than a pittance -- indeed at the margin a good deal of this labor would be replaced by improved capital goods or simple technological innovation, if our borders were secure .. and if the government subsidy for this labor didn't exist.

Well, much more could be said. But I'll stop here and make a simple point about price signals. Perhaps the most important thing a person can learn about economics is that prices are signals.

A well-functioning economy is one where prices communicate -- signal -- costs. In that way you are not consuming more than you receive in the process of production. You are not planting 10 bushels of wheat in the fall and harvesting 5 bushels of wheat in the spring. But just this can happen when you falsify prices through subsidies or controls -- think government subsidized ethanol production, a case where more money (and energy!) goes in during the process of production than comes out the other end when ethanol is sold on the market.

What we have in the illegal labor market is case of grossly falsified prices. The true costs of illegal labor are not reflected in the dirt cheap prices rich people and businesses pay for illegal labor. They are getting a free ride, and the true costs are borne by others. But that is a story for another day.

UPDATE: And don't miss this. (Lots of wage data on income changes since the dramatic open borders policy revolution of the last 40 years).

UPDATE 2: Another angle on the true cost of massive illegal immigration.

UPDATE 3: "Based on estimates developed by the National Academy of Sciences for immigrants by age and education at arrival, the lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average adult Mexican immigrant is a negative $55,200." And this: "This reduction in wages for the unskilled has likely reduced prices for consumers by only an estimated .08 to .2 percent in the 1990s. The impact is so small because unskilled labor accounts for only a tiny fraction of total economic output." More here.

Truck and Barter makes the Washington Times in a story on student bloggers. Cool. Here is Kevin's full interview with the WashTimes reporter.

Your weekly Carnival of Blogging Capitalists. Take a bite.

Immigration and class warfare. If the American people are against massive illegal immigration why are politicians, academics and the media for it? Answer? This is class warfare folks, and the elite classes in America are after privileges and power they can't have without the moral power they gain from paternalistically "caring for" an ever growing poverty class -- and the material privileges they can enjoy from the dirt cheap labor immigrants can provide scrubbing the floors, cleaning the pools, raising the kids, building the second homes, clearing the tables and cleaning the toilets, etc. Who else is going to do this work for dirt cheap wages? These are jobs "America's Won't Do" at illegal alien wages -- and they are also blackmarket jobs which avoid all the the burdens of income or social security taxes, OSHA regulations, ADA regulations, and government regulatory paperwork of every sort imaginable, etc.

And make no mistake. It's class warfare against their working class fellow citizens, especially working mothers competing directly with illegals and laboring at very low wage part time jobs -- jobs made necesssary by extremely high tax rates on their husbands. And why are these taxes necessary? In part these high taxes are necessary to pay for the highly paid professionals manning the hospitals, the schools, and the government agencies which are providing an ever growing set of expensive services to ... low wage immigrants. America's largest -- constantly reloading -- and ever growing poverty class.

UPDATE: John Leo: "60 percent of Americans believe current immigration levels are a �critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,� while only 14 percent of government officials, business leaders, and journalists think so." Read more. Quotable:

in 1970, foreign-born workers earned as much as American-born workers, but by 1998 male immigrants typically earned only 77 percent of what natives earned, making the gap between immigrants and native stock three times as large as it was in 1910 .. Writing when Bush first proposed his Mexican initiative in 2001, sociologist Christopher Jencks said the highest price might be paid by children of the new Latino immigrants, who will very likely earn little more than their parents, perhaps become disillusioned with their new homeland, and harden into a sizable underclass. He raises the specter of a possible Latin-American-style gap in the United States between the rich and the poor ...

UPDATE: See the 2Blowhards for information on what immigration is doing to Southern California.

"If you're one of that 83 percent of Americans who want illegal immigrants deported, you're probably wondering why it's easier for those who break U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House .. than for anybody who wants to enforce U.S. immigration law to get a job at the White House .. " Mark Steyn explains the madness. Quotable:

Remember the 1986 immigration amnesty? One of its beneficiaries was Mahmoud abu Halima, who went on to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. His friend Mohammad Salameh wasn't so fortunate. He applied for the '86 amnesty but was rejected. So he just stayed on in America, living illegally, and happily was still around to help Mahmoud and co-attack the Twin Towers. He's the guy who rented the truck, which suggests he had enough ID to get past the rental agent at Ryder.

Pop Quiz. Complete the sentence fragment: "Job's Americans won't do .. "

Patterico: "Jobs Americans won't do at the wages offered given the presence of illegals willing to do it for less."

"Taking millions of currently undocumented immigrants and routing them into bureaucratic channels to make their status legal � as President Bush is proposing � could be like trying to divert a wild river into a leaky municipal aqueduct ... " A must read from The LA Times.

And don't miss Ramirez on a slightly different topic.

"Dismissed by critics as a free-market extremist, economist Friedrich Hayek is gaining new attention as a forerunner of cognitive psychology, information theory, even postmodernism. A reintroduction to one of the most important thinkers you've barely heard of."

Hayek-Ler Virginia Postrel on "Friedrich the Great" in the Boston Globe:

AT A RECENT think-tank luncheon in Raleigh, economist Bruce J. Caldwell chatted with a local lawyer active in Democratic party circles. The man asked Caldwell what his new book was about. "It's an intellectual biography of Friedrich Hayek," replied Caldwell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He got a blank look. "He was an economist. A libertarian economist."

What an understatement.

Hayek, who died in 1992, was not just any economist. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. His 1945 article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," is a touchstone work on the role of prices in coordinating dispersed information. His 1944 bestseller "The Road to Serfdom" helped catalyze the free-market political movement in the United States and continues to sell thousands of copies a year.

Economist Milton Friedman calls him "the most important social thinker of the 20th century." Hayek's most significant contribution, he explains, "was to make clear how our present complex social structure is not the result of the intended actions of individuals but of the unintended consequences of individual interactions over a long period of time, the product of social evolution, not of deliberate planning."

Indeed, Hayek is increasingly recognized as one of the 20th century's most profound and important theorists, one whose work included political theory, philosophy of science, even cognitive psychology. Citing the "proof of time," Encyclopedia Britannica recently commissioned Caldwell to replace its formulaic 250-word Hayek profile with a nuanced discussion more than 10 times as long. Harvard has added him to the syllabus of Social Studies 10, its rigorous introductory social theory course.

Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.

Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly "irrational" customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.

But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today's rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today's fragmented and specialized markets, today's emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today's multicultural challenges.

Hayek's 1952 book, "The Sensory Order," often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. "Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals," says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. "Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names `connectionism' and `parallel distributed processing.' Remarkably, Hayek is never cited."

Hayek was "one of the last unprofessionalized economists," says Harvard political philosopher Glyn Morgan, who was instrumental in adding Hayek's writings to the Social Studies 10 syllabus three years ago. ("It was actually quite controversial," he says, adding, "This course was known as a slightly left-of-center course, and people were skeptical of Hayek.") Unlike today's increasingly professionalized social scientists, Morgan adds, Hayek was "a top-notch economist, but he wrote on the history of ideas, he wrote on a variety of things."

Born in Vienna in 1899, Hayek fought in World War I and earned degrees in law and political economy in the rich intellectual atmosphere of the University of Vienna. In the early 1930s, he was invited to join the faculty at the London School of Economics. There, he made his name as the leading intellectual opponent of John Maynard Keynes. (The two men were nonetheless friends.) Keynes believed that economic slumps could be cured by government deficit spending, while Hayek argued that those policies would only exacerbate the underlying problem of excessive production capacity.

Beyond his technical arguments with Keynes, Hayek was out of step with his contemporaries' zeal for centralized economic planning, which was widely held to be more productive and efficient than market competition. In 1930s Britain, even political moderates advocated nationalizing all major industries. During and after World War II, central planning reached levels of detail that are inconceivable today. Britain's wartime Utility scheme, for instance, dictated mass-produced furniture designs that eliminated craftsmanship and ornament. Wartime rationing treated bookcases as essential and dressing tables and upholstered easy chairs as unnecessary. Price controls and punitive taxes continued to discourage "irrational" designs until 1952.

"It is not enough to say that some of his views were unpopular," writes Caldwell in "Hayek's Challenge," just published by the University of Chicago Press. "For most of his life his economic and political positions were completely out of sync with those of the rest of the intelligentsia . . .. [F]or much of the century Hayek was a subject of ridicule, contempt, or, even worse for a man of ideas, indifference."

Hayek's most important insight, which he referred to as his "one discovery" in the social sciences, was to define the central economic and social problem as one of organizing dispersed knowledge. Different people have different purposes. They know different things about the world. Much important information is local and transitory, known only to the "man on the spot." Some of that knowledge is objective and quantifiable, but much is tacit and unarticulated. Often we only discover what we truly want as we actually make trade-offs between competing goods."

The economic problem of society," Hayek wrote in his 1945 article, "is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate `given' resources -- if `given' is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these `data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in totality."

The key to a functioning economy -- or society -- is decentralized competition. In a market economy, prices act as a "system of telecommunications," coordinating information far beyond the scope of a single mind. They permit ever-evolving order to emerge from dispersed knowledge.

"What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today?" economist Lawrence Summers said in an interview for "The Commanding Heights," Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's 1998 study of the resurgence of economic liberalism. "What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." Summers, who was then deputy treasury secretary and is now president of Harvard, recently reaffirmed those views in an e-mail.

Information technology has strengthened Hayek's legacy. At MIT's Sloan School, Erik Brynjolfsson uses Hayek to remind students that feeding data into centralized computers doesn't necessarily solve a company's information problems. In any complex operation, there is too much relevant information for a single person or small group to absorb and act on.

"As Hayek pointed out, the key thing is to have the decision rights and the information co-located," says Brynjolfsson. "There are at least two ways of achieving that. One is to move information to decision maker. The other is to move decision rights to where the information is."

This analysis, which applies as much to culture as to economics, informs Hayek's best-known work, "The Road to Serfdom," which he wrote as a wartime warning to a popular audience. Published in 1944 and dedicated "to the socialists of all parties," the book argued that the logic of socialist central planning implied the erosion of personal freedoms. Britain's well-intended socialists were headed down the same path as the National Socialists whose rise Hayek had witnessed in Austria.

The book was shocking enough in Britain, where it was respectfully, though critically, received. But in the United States, where Reader's Digest published a condensed version, "The Road to Serfdom" was a bestseller and a political lightning rod. It rallied supporters of traditional free enterprise and enraged the intelligentsia to whom it was addressed. How dare this mustachioed Austrian suggest that the ambitions of the New Deal might have anything in common with Hitler or Stalin!

Even today, the book's thesis is often misstated as what Caldwell calls "the inevitability thesis -- that if you start down the road to intervention in the economy, you're automatically going to end up in a totalitarian state." But Hayek spent much of his career arguing against the then-popular idea of historical laws. Nor did he oppose an economic safety net; a wealthy society, he believed, could provide a basic income for the poor.

Rather, he argued that to fully control the economy meant to control all aspects of life. Economic decisions are not separate from individual values or purposes. They reflect those purposes."We want money for many different things, and those things are not always, or even rarely, just to have money for its own sake," explains Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University and author of "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought" (2002). "We want money for our spouses or our children or to do something in terms of the transformation of ourselves -- for everything from plastic surgery to reading intellectual history or building a church. These are all noneconomic goals that we express through the common means of money."

Hayek argued that only in a competitive market, in which prices signal the relative values placed on different goods, can people with very different values live together peacefully. And only in such a market can they figure out how best to meet their needs and wants -- or even what those needs and wants are.

Caldwell, who is editing Hayek's collected works for the University of Chicago Press, is currently working on the project's edition of "The Road to Serfdom," a task that entails reading the largely forgotten contemporary works with which Hayek was contending. "It's almost chilling to read some of these books. They were willing to accept fairly massive interventions in the economy -- directing labor, who should be working at what jobs and that kind of thing," says Caldwell. He adds, "`The Road to Serfdom' today reads reasonably, most of it. You read these other books and you feel like you're on another planet."

Because he emphasized the pluralism of values, the limits of knowledge, and the totalitarian side of "rationalist" (or, as he would put it, "scientistic") control, some have claimed Hayek as a precursor to postmodernism. Indeed, toward the end of his life, postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault gave lectures on Hayek's work.

Nick Gillespie, editor-in-chief of the libertarian magazine Reason, says that in a broad sense Hayek anticipated many postmodern critiques. "Hayekian liberalism and postmodernism alike are not interested in total knowledge, or in the total institutions necessary to maintain such a vision," says Gillespie, who holds a doctorate in literary studies. "For Hayek, the very essence of liberalism properly understood is that it replaces the ideal of social uniformity with one of competing difference." That's why Foucault, though no Hayekian liberal, "recognized that Hayek's formulation of a private sphere was a meaningful hedge against the worst excesses of state power."

Unlike postmodernists, Hayek never rejected the idea of scientific knowledge. But in confronting the advocates of centralized economies, Hayek did take pains to distinguish between science and pseudoscience.

Beginning with "The Sensory Order," he began to differentiate between "simple" sciences like physics, which study phenomena that can be explained by only a few variables, and "complex" sciences like biology, psychology, and economics, which depend on so many variables that precise predictions are impossible. "Hayek felt that many of his opponents, all claiming the mantle of science, were but pretenders to the throne," Caldwell writes. "He constantly encountered people who thought of themselves as objective scientists, people who held ideological views different from his and who immediately felt comfortable attributing their differences to the fact that, whereas they were scientists, he was an ideologue."

Hayek and postmodern philosophers were troubled by many of the same issues, but they came to different conclusions. "I don't view him as a postmodernist in the way that some interpreters have," says Caldwell. However, he adds, "I think they had similar enemies."

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and an economics columnist for The New York Times business section.

(thanks to Robert Tagorda for the tip.)

The 2004 Index of Economic Freedom. America drops to #10, trailing Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia, United Kingdom, Denmark and Switzerland. "Socialist" Sweden ranks #12 on the list. The big story of the last decade is Ireland at #5 -- and with a bullet. Quotable:

Ireland is a modern, highly industrialized economy that has grown by 80 percent in real terms over the past decade. GDP per capita is now 122 percent of the European Union�s average. Newly re-elected Prime Minister Bertie Ahern .. seems certain to maintain Ireland�s markedly pro-business stance. Ireland has one of the world�s most pro-business environments, especially for foreign businesses and foreign investment. The Ahern government lowered the Irish corporate tax rate from 16 percent to 12.5 percent in January 2003, far below the EU average of 30 percent. Not surprisingly, Ireland has become a major center for U.S. investment in Europe, especially for the computer, software, and engineering industries. Although accounting for 1 percent of the euro-zone market, it receives nearly one-third of U.S. investment in the EU. GDP growth totaled 6.3 percent in 2002 ...

Ireland's Economic Freedom score has dropped from 2.15 to 1.74 since 1995 (lower numbers mean more freedom). It dipped as low as 1.6 in 2001.

Meanwhile, France -- just below Armenia all the way down at #44 --continues to be the sick man of Europe. Quotable:

France remains a relatively statist country. Public expenditure amounted to 52.6 percent of GDP in 2001, and the state employs 25 percent of the workforce�double the percentage in both Germany and the United Kingdom. France also remains awash in regulation. Most notoriously, since February 2000, the legal workweek has been a miniscule 35 hours for firms of 20 or more workers, and it takes twice as long to register a business in France as it does in any other country. France has striven mightily to preserve its overregulated politico-economic culture by adopting protectionist stances in global trading forums. The need for microeconomic reforms in the pensions system is becoming urgent given France�s demographic profile: At present, 10 workers support four pensioners; by 2040, those some 10 workers will be forced to support seven pensioners. Such realities are reflected in France�s persistently high unemployment rate (around 9.3 percent in March 2003) and the fact that France violated the European Union Stability Pact guideline of limiting its deficit to 3 percent of GDP in 2002, with similar violations likely in 2003 and 2004 ...

Alex Tararrok adds this to the great "free trade" debate:

Free trade in commodities tends to create factor-price equalization - i.e. the same prices for wages and capital of equal productivity everywhere in the world even when the factors themselves are immobile.

The source of the argument is here.

"Seeking Harmony in a Final Return to the Land". Is it ScrappleFace or is it The NY Times.

Paul C. Roberts replies to his critics on the necessary conditions for mutually beneficial free trade. Quotable:

Another widely made error is to assume that US labor displaced by outsourcing, off shore production or the Internet moves into US export industries to meet increased demand for US goods from countries whose labor is made more productive by the inflow of US capital and technology. This model assumes that comparative advantage reigns. The model does not work if absolute advantage reigns.

And this:

The downward adjustment in wages and salaries necessary to bring the US into equilibrium with the global labor market requires reductions that cannot be achieved. For example, try to imagine what must happen to existing mortgages and debts if US workers are to compete with Chinese and Indian workers employed by first world capital and technology. So many people forget that the reason that highly paid US workers could compete against lowly paid Asian workers is that the US workers were much more productive due to the immobility of capital and technology. The international mobility of factors of production has stripped away the productivity advantage of first world labor. Try to imagine the political instability in store for the US as the ladders of upward mobility collapse. The reality toward which we head is not a libertarian paradise.

But this is simply and grossly false:

the collapse of world socialism and the advent of the Internet have made factors of production as mobile as traded goods. Indeed, factors of production are more mobile. Capital, technology, and ideas can move today with the speed of light, whereas goods have to be shipped.

Capital goods are real stuff -- and the transfer of technology and ideas requires the complex development of substantial cultural and institutional "infrastructure". The truth is that e.g. India and China have been "growing" these for a long time now, and it has NOT happened overnight.

This review of Friedrich Hayek's The Sensory Order really nails it:

Although Hayek's influence on economics and political science has been profound, his work in psychology, of which this book is the sole product, is still relatively unknown. This is unfortunate, not only because Hayek is a great psychologist, in the same league as Helmholtz, Fechner, and Freud, but also because his more influential work is often based on the conceptual framework established in The Sensory Order. I can think of several reasons for the neglect of this book. First, it is not easy to read. Despite a lucid style, the ideas contained are so complex and expressed in so compressed a form that several readings are required to fully appreciate them. Second, the ideas are so revolutionary that we still fail to grasp their implications, though even Hayek himself, it should be said, failed to address them adequately. Hebb's Organization of Behavior, the first explicit proposal of Hebbian learning and cell assemblies, and Gallistel's Organization of Action, a compilation of classic works on motor coordination, contained similar ideas, but they are nowhere as original and profound as this book.

The only thing I'd add is that this is NOT Hayek's sole work in psychology. Just as important and just as profound are his later essays on culturally acquired patterns of human behavior, found in his now out of print collections of essays.

Schwarzenegger saves $98,000 and 12.2 metric tons of paper before any political hack even has a peak at his new state budget.

Patterico stakes out a provocative position on Bush's open borders plan:

The very second that we legalize one set of people, for humanitarian reasons, we will immediately require a new class of illegal people to take their place -- because in our increasingly socialistic economy, it is precisely the illegal status of illegal immigrants that makes them so attractive to the economy. Let me explain in more detail ...

He may even be right.

"Free trade" -- what is interesting is that we indeed do have "free trade" (essentially untaxed exchange) between America businesses and foreign workers / businesses beyond our borders, but we DO NOT have "free trade" between American businesses and American workers -- these exchanges are taxed at confiscatory rates. True "free trade" would put all exchanges on equal footing -- penalizing all exchanges at the same rate. So my call is for free trade within America between Americans -- let Americans be on an equal footing with foreign workers and foreign businesses. Americans -- American workers -- should be able to contract exchanges with American businesses at the same tax rate as foreigners. My call, in other words, is for a FLAT TAX that does not descriminate between American firms or workers and foreign firms and workers, and thus AGAINST American firms and workers. This is a tax cut for American workers and businesses that would make Bush's tax cut look like the small change that it truly is. Any takers?

EconLog: "tax cuts without spending cuts are a form of harmful economic populism".

Kling quotes an article by Ed Crane I flagged a few days ago:

The late 1980s and the 1990s also saw the rise of supply-side economics, which further undercut the GOP�s philosophical approach to governance. Don�t worry about all the nasty arguments about the proper role of government, the supplysiders argued. Just cut marginal tax rates and the economy will be spurred on to grow faster than government, thereby shrinking government as a percentage of GDP...Republicans, with a few notable exceptions, stopped talking about less government."

"President Bush's immigration reform proposal .. is a classic guest worker program on the European model ..."

The ever wonderful Oliver Sacks on Edelman, Hebb, James, Crick and the mystery of visual consciousness. I said wonderful, right?

Gerald Edelman's Wider than the Sky is due out in March. "In this direct and non-technical discussion of consciousness, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman draws on a lifetime of scientific inquiry into the workings of the brain to formulate answers to the mind-body questions that intrigue every thinking person. Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains."

In my view Edelman is the greatest mind scientist of our time, perhaps of all time. Truly and justly the Darwin of modern brain science. Of course, I'd also recommend the work of Pinker, Hayek and Wittgenstein to all of those interested in some of the larger issues involved in the whole problem of understanding the mind/brain of man and its place in the social world of language, the natural world of everyday experience, and the theoretical world of science. On a related note William Calvin's A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond is also due in March.

The WSJ comes out solidly behind Bush's open borders plan, echoing the President's claim that there are "jobs that Americans don't want". Of course there are jobs that Americans don't want and there will be more and more jobs Americans won't want -- as foreign labor continues to drive down American wages. These are jobs Americans DID WANT at one time -- before their relative pay was beaten to the pavement by the tidal wave of cheap foreign labor. The "jobs Americans don't want" meme as an excuse for open border is nothing other than a self fulfilling prophecy -- and this self fulfilling prophecy will swallow up more and more of the American economy as relative low wage pressures overtake all of the non-degreed professions.

Here's a tip -- eat wild salmon and skip the farm raised stuff. I particularly recommend Copper River sockeye salmon which run through the summer months. Sockeye, of course, is the finest tasting of all the salmon species. Washington State sockeye are just as excellent, but these are much harder to find outside of that fabulous state. Even my father -- the great King salmon fisher himself -- will head off to the grocery store to buy himself some fresh deep red sockeye salmon. And who can blame him.

KFI 640 Los Angeles -- the #1 talk radio station in America. Congratulations guys. A highlight of the station is the John and Ken Show in the afternoon. The talk hosts have been simply brilliant on the state overspending mess, immigration, Michael Jackson and about every other interesting story coming down the pike in California. These are the men who've led successful tax revolts in two major states (New Jersey and California). Their #1 target now is Bush's new open borders plan, and if this blows apart in George Jr.'s face John and Ken will be as responsible as anyone. Believe it or not The John and Ken Show now has more listeners than The LA Times has readers, and the boys are mobilizing this massive listener base against the Bush plan to flood the country with cheap illegal labor. Already Congressmen are feeling the heat go up -- and are lining up to appear on the John and Ken show to voice their stand against the President and his open borders immigration plan. Got to love it.

Citizen Smash comes out in favor of open borders with Mexico,and has links to dozens of blogosphere reactions to the Bush open borders plan.

UPDATE: SoCalLawBlog has a half-dozen good snippets from blogosphere reactions to the Bush immigration plan.

Joe Salerno -- Paul C. Roberts is half right about Ricardo and the argument for free trade. Unfortunately, Joe points out, he's also half wrong.

UPDATE: Michael Kinsley weighs in. Quotable:

Schumer and Roberts cling to the free-trade label and endorse the general principle while claiming it no longer applies because "the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive." In fact, that makes the theory even more compelling. If the factors of production become more productive, the whole world becomes richer. If there is some explanation of how a society can get richer by denying itself the fruits of this process (and most likely curtailing the whole process itself, as others misguidedly retaliate), Schumer and Roberts do not offer or even hint at it. But the real difference between traditional trade in heavy earth-bound objects and 21st-century trade in weightless electronic blips, or in sheer brainpower, is that the losers in new-style trade are more likely to be people that U.S. senators and fancy economic consultants actually know ...

(Dallas) -- U.S. President George Bush today proposed to "fully enfranchise" illegal aliens working in the United States by allowing them to vote even though they're not citizens. Critics immediately denounced the move as a political ploy to lock up the Latino vote.

However, Mr. Bush said it's just the next logical step following his proposal yesterday to grant working rights to people who came into the country illegally .. An unnamed senior administration official said that voting rights are important for illegal aliens since they have to pay sales tax and "America was created to combat the idea of taxation without representation." More.

(Washington, D.C.) -- President George Bush's new proposal to grant working privileges to illegal aliens in the United States will stem the loss of U.S. jobs to cheap manufacturers in other countries. "This new policy brings 'offshore' home," said an unnamed senior administration official. "Offshore now means California, Texas and many other states where manufacturers will legally compete with wage levels in China, Mexico and elsewhere. Why send all that work away to be done by paupers, prisoners and slaves elsewhere when we have millions of undocumented workers who will gladly do it here?" more.

PunditFilter has a blogosphere roundup on Bush's open borders immigration policy.

A senior editor at Fortune on America's massively expensive immigration problem:

Illegal immigration increased hugely in the '90s. The illegal population is apparently around eight million, increasing by a half million a year. Perversely, a trumpeted toughening of border security may have made matters worse: Border patrols apprehend more people, but more people are trying to cross, so just as many get through as before�but now they stay longer because they know that if they leave the U.S., they might never get back in.

This is big trouble for a couple of reasons, the first being simple economics. Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes but do consume government services, especially medical care and education. By law, these services cannot be denied them. In fact, it's illegal for a hospital even to inquire about a patient's citizenship or immigration status.

In parts of the country with lots of illegal immigrants�the 24 U.S. counties that border Mexico, plus much of the rest of California�the situation is becoming debilitating. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California estimates medical costs for illegal immigrants are running about $1 billion a year in her state; with superb political instincts, she's blaming no one and simply backing a bill to reimburse state and local hospitals with federal money. I spoke recently with an administrator of a Texas hospital in a border county, and he says current rules imperil his hospital and drive him nuts. And by the way, he's not allowed to call immigrants illegal. They're undocumented.

The full economic effects are much wider. Employers who hire illegals pay them cash and thus evade employment taxes. They may also not report revenue from the work the illegals do and thus evade income taxes. Companies that compete with these employers must cut their own costs, mostly by paying their own workers (regardless of status) lower cash wages under the table, and the tax evasion spreads further.

A downward spiral begins. Government revenues decline while demand for government services goes up. The burden on taxpayers grows heavier. They respond by finding their own ways to avoid taxes or simply by leaving, making the problem even worse.

Until recently this was mostly a theoretical worry, but the recent rapid increase in illegal immigrants is making it real�and not just in border states. Latest census data show illegal immigrants increasing fast in Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia.

I said this was big trouble for a couple of reasons. Economics was the first. The second is deeper. The situation we've created mocks American laws and ideals. It tells working, taxpaying citizens and other legal residents with Social Security numbers that they're chumps. Go to the emergency room, and if you can't pay your bill, the hospital can track you down and garnish your wages. But the illegal immigrant can't be tracked and doesn't pay the bill. You pay it, through your taxes. You dope.

"Jobs Americans Won't Do" -- increasingly this would seem to include just about every job I've ever had, outside of academic and think tank jobs. Why? Because wages in almost every one of these jobs has been driven down by the surplus of non-native born workers lining up at the employment office. I'm speaking here of solid factory, agricultural, retail and service industry jobs. It's a simple fact that for decades non-American born workers have been driving down wages at these various businesses. I've seen it with my own eyes on "the American street" so to speak. Here is an example. It was years ago, but a packing house I once worked in had gone out and intentionally brought in foreign workers, because they would work at lower wages (they didn't work any harder than anyone else, and certainly there were more people applying for work every day than there were jobs in the plant).

(UPDATE: From Project USA -- "Here's the real problem: In the early 60s, meatpackers in Omaha, Nebraska were paid about $6.00/hr. That's about $34.00/hr in today's money. Our guess is that you could find Americans to work as meat-packers at $34.00/hr. Instead, those jobs today pay less than $10.00 and are done mostly by immigrant and illegal labor.")

All of these jobs I'm talking about were at one time jobs that Americans would do, because I've known so many of the Americans who did these jobs, and I've been one of them. But the pay has continued to decline, as the pool of non-native born labor has continued to overwhelm the employment office of these businesses.

"Jobs Americans Won't Do" now increasingly includes one of my current part-time jobs -- a position in commissioned sales at one of America's leading retailers. Not long ago this sort of job was a classic midddle income American job. Only recently has the job category been taken over (for the most part) by foreign workers. And why is that? Because foreign workers continue to drive wages down substantially in this category -- down several dollars an hour in just the short time I've been employed.

One of the sadder stories I've witnessed is the decline of the native-born construction trades worker in Southern California. As the owner of a new home I've seen and talked to the aging "last of the breed" construction tradesmen struggling to hold on despite declining paychecks in an industry now dominated by illegals. These jobs too, are becoming "Jobs Americans Won't Do". It's not because they can't do it, or aren't good at doing it. It's because they can't support their families the way their fathers could in these industries where wages are determined by the endless supply of foreign labor, usually in the country illegally.

UPDATE: Linda Chavez defends the new Bush program, in part on the grounds that there are "Jobs Americans Won't Do". I guess you know by now what I think of that claim.

ALSO don't miss NRO's Mark Krikorian on "Jobs Americans Won't Do". (Good title!)

UPDATE 2: Great quote -- "It is often said that immigrants take jobs Americans don't want. But that's only half a sentence. The complete statement is: Illegal immigrants take jobs Americans don't want at the wages that are being offered."

Movie critic David Denby -- stock bubble joyrider and now author of the "boy was I stupid" confessional American Sucker.

Why cutting taxes without cutting spendings is no way to reduce the size of government. Michael Kinsley does the math. Although it escapes Kinsley, when we borrow rather than pay our own way what we are really doing is choping down the shade trees for a one-night bonfire rather than holding on to oaks and firs we could enjoy with increasing delight for decades. This is the material reality which necessarily lies behind the "principle" of compound interest.

Paul Krugman -- wrong again. A match up between Paul Krugman and the facts is never a pretty sight. Another train wreck not to miss.

Germany and France: they aren't allies -- Charles Krauthammer breaks the news to aging politicians still living in make-believe world of their 1950s childhood.

The Angry Clam has a message for the President. (PG-13)

Quotable:

"Those who do not learn from history may in fact never repeat it."

-- Virginia Postrel in a quite interesting piece on economic history, reviewing Joel Mokyr's Encyclopedia of Economic History. Some nuggets: in 1850 shoemaking was the leading manufacturing employer in America; American unions went on strike 50 times in a period of 35 years to stop businesses from employing blacks; and cotton was once both very expensive and rarely used.

Pondered but left unanswered -- what explains the wealth of nations? Mokyr contends that without history, especially institutional history, the question cannot be answered.

Link via Lynne Kiesling, who wrote three of the entries in the encyclopedia, including those on Adam Smith and energy regulation. Anybody want to buy a copy and donate it to the Hayek Center?

Just for the record, the Congressional Budget Office recently issued a report telling us what everyone already knows: The federal budget is drifting into a future of unprecedented tax increases, huge deficits or both. This is no secret, because the great driving force of change is the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers and their heavy claims on federal retirement programs. But in Washington, the CBO's irrefutable conclusion won't produce any noticeable reaction, because there's already a clear bipartisan policy concerning the future: Forget about it ...

-- Robert Samuelson. Read the rest.

The unmatch Mark Steyn on an earthquake, a virus and a heat wave -- in Iran, China and France. What do they all have in common? Steyn explains.

Michaelle Malkin takes on Bush's open borders plan. Quotable:

the Bush proposal .. would allow untold millions of illegal aliens from Mexico to collect full cash benefits for themselves and their families from their home country -- without having to work the required number of years that law-abiding American citizens must work to be eligible for payouts .. this raw deal may well cost overburdened U.S. taxpayers $345 billion over the next 20 years. Probably much more ..

Read it all. Unbelievable stuff.

Baby signing -- give your little one the power of language. It will be good for both of you. I recommend it from personal experience with my daughter. We didn't master many signs, but just those few helped us to understand one another. My daughter acquired spoken language so quickly that she soon was using words not so long after learning some signs. Research shows that the signing actually speeds up the process of learning spoken language. It seems to have played such a role with my little girl. Sign language learning can begin at about 8 months, quite a bit before before most babies can speak. The classic book on all this is Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk.

And toddlers can learn to read beginning at about 18 months to 2 years. The classic book on this is How to Teach Your Baby to Read. My daughter can read a handful of words, but instruction has been spotty since her little brother appeared on the scene. She recognizes and calls out the words "pizza", "milk", "nose", "hand", "daddy" and a few others, which often catch mommy and daddy by surprise (she reads labels and signs at the grocery store and in the car at surprising times).

Kids are language marvels until about the time they hit puberty, when the part of the brain which learns language begins to freeze up a bit. What I find most remarkable is how a little one can pick up the significance of a word based on so little experience with the word. Sometimes only one use of the word will -- as if by magic -- give them the word, which they will then use correctly in new applications involving very altered contexts. Unbelievable. Somehow are brains seem to have come hard wired for solving Wittgenstein's "going on together" problem. (See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). Remarkable creatures, we.

Here's an odd couple. Dem. Senator Charles Schumer and Reagan economists Paul C. Roberts attack free trade, claiming that the conditions for applying David Ricardo's principle of "comparative advantage" no longer exist in today's global economy (factors of production are "no longer" locally fixed). It's an old argument given new life by "outsourcing", the Internet, and the rise of India as a free market economy.

Wia Truck & Barter who takes up the argument and explains that there are gains from trade -- and you don't need Ricardo to show it.

How dumb are these people? Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times writes:

Religion may preach peace and tolerance, yet it's hard to think of anything that .. has been more linked to violence and malice around the world

No, Nic, it isn't hard -- think SOCIALISM. These names -- and a smack to the head -- should help Nic in that difficult think department: Stalin, Hitler, Hussein, Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, Mussolini, Ho, Lenin, etc., etc. Malicious violent killers and socialists all. Not religious fanatics. Not bible thumpers. Socialists. Can you handle the truth Nic?

John O'Sullivan on George Bush's Open Border's policy, which O'Sullivan suggests is a plan to make America once again a land of low wage sweatshops.

"Every governor proposes moving boxes around to reorganize government. I don�t want to move the boxes around. I want to blow them up."

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger in his State of the State Speech.

California Insider has top-notch instant analysis.

Zogby poll -- there are two Americas, divided by culture, politics, morality and religion. All you ever wanted to know about America's "Red State" / "Blue State" divide.

The last word on "media concentration". (via Patterico).

It's a Carnival of Capitalists!!

I was met at the door after work today with the excited announcement from my 2-year old that mommy had gotten me "surprise pants" for my birthday. When I opened my package from mommy my daughter announced "surprise pants daddy!". What a wonderful birthday it was.

It's always bizarre to find folks like those at the Washington Post paying attention to something like this:

It is a matter of grade-school civics that in American democracy laws are made by the legislative branch. Article I of the Constitution, after all, begins with the arresting statement that "All legislative powers . . . shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Yet ever since it passed the USA Patriot Act after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has stood by in an alarming silence while a fabric of new law governing the balance between liberty and security has been woven by the other two branches of government.

Well, folks, this is simply the modern post-Constitutonal executive branch dominated regulatory state which the Post has FAVORED for several generations now. For the editors of the Post to change their minds at this point is rich stuff. These people have been deeply hostile to a "grade school" understanding of the Constitution for going on 30 or 40 years, so why get exited and attempt to throw the train in reverse now?

All the way to Mars?

This pretty much looks like the view out the back of the house I grew up in as a kid. Are they really sure NASA didn't accidently crashland the Mars rover somewhere on the outskirts of Richland Washington?

The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life ...

Robert Fulford in the National Post. Read more.

Mark Steyn on Slobo Milosevic, Gen. Clark and Saddam Hussein. Quotable:

Anyone who goes goo-goo at the mention of the words ''international tribunal'' -- i.e., Clark, John Kerry, Howard Dean and the rest of the multilatte multilateralist establishment -- should look at what it boils down to in practice. Even though the court forbade Milosevic and Seselj from actively campaigning in the Serbian election, they somehow managed to. In other words, ''international law'' is unable to enforce its judgments even in its own jailhouse .. This is the justice Clark wants for Saddam Hussein. If he gets his way, Saddam seems a shoo-in for the Iraqi presidential election circa 2009 ..

[But of course] letting dictators swank around the courtroom in a 10-year dinner-theater run of ''Perry Mason'' has nothing to do with justice

George Soros -- Enemy of the Open Society.

Friedrich Hayek's banquet speech at the Nobel Prize award dinner, 1974:

Now that the Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science has been created, one can only be profoundly grateful for having been selected as one of its joint recipients, and the economists certainly have every reason for being grateful to the Swedish Riksbank for regarding their subject as worthy of this high honour.

Yet I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it ...

more.

I think this pretty much defines a broken governmental system and an essentially corrupt political class:

Total federal revenues have declined for three consecutive years .. But in those years, from 2000 to 2003, total federal spending has increased .. more than 20 percent .. .

Part of a story with the "worthy of ScrappleFace" headline Bush's Budget for 2005 Seeks to Rein In Domestic Costs. Via the indispensible DrudgeReport.

Massively expanding the central power of the Federal government in Washington, eroding the local power of the States and the people. It's what we elect Republicans to do, right? Well, it's what they are doing, no-matter why you are voting for them.

2004 is only days old and we already have a solid nominee for the "Worst of the NY Times 2004" awards -- the NY Times Book Review gives a positive review to the latest ravings of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the most dishonest academic writing today. Utterly revolting, utterly The NY Times.

SoCalLawBlog does the first Bear Flag Review of 2004. Cool.

A highlight -- Dale Franks blogs Michael Crichton's Caltech Michelin Lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming" on the topic of "consensus science" which Franks headlines "WOW! This is Important!". He's right. Don't miss it. Imagine a modern Popper or Hayek writing on the nonsense of global warming "science"/politics. Wonderful. As Franks says, "You really, really need to read the whole speech, especially if you, like me, are concerned about the increasing politicization of science."

The worst of the NY Times -- The Top 10 NY Times Lies, Deceptions, Blunders of 2003

Citizen Smash remembers New Year's Day 2003 and The Longest Year. You won't want to miss this one.

The only dark cloud is a very dark one: another massive slaughter on American soil. The terrorists don�t have to be brilliant, just lucky � as they were last time, when they wandered around sticking out like sore thumbs to gazillions of Federal and state officials sensitivity-trained not to notice behaviour that practically screamed �I�m a terrorist!� Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, says that right now al-Qaeda types are probing for weak spots at American airports. Which pre-supposes that they�re already in the country. Which confirms pretty much that the first weak spot remains the US border. On the whole, all the Federal agencies that failed so spectacularly on 9/11 are as bureaucratic, lethargic and inept as they were then. And no-one has been fired. One lucky break for a couple of Islamist boneheads, and the Dems and the media will be hammering Bush on why he let it happen all over again. It remains a melancholy fact that, for a US President, it�s easier to reform Iraq�s government agencies than America�s. I do not expect this situation to improve in 2004.

-- Mark Steyn

California Insider takes a look at Wal-Mart's health care package for employees.

The LA Times completely and utterly sucks -- Patterico gives a blow by blow review of the terrible 2003 performance of this truly horrible newspaper.