PRESTOPUNDIT -- "must readings" says Nick Schutz

California Strike. The SoCal grocery strike is over. Tens of thousands currently working in the stores will now lose their jobs. Unbelievable as this may sound, strikers were never allow a look at contract specifics by their union bosses -- and in fact it became clear over time that striking workers had agreed to strike based on completely false information from the people controlling the union.

The whole thing will likely be recorded as a complete waste of the time and money of everyone concerned. Happily, strikers were for the most part very well behaved. Only once did my wife witness a striker smashing a shopper over the head with a sign, while other strikers surrounded and verbally abused the victim. Don't know what the lady said or did to deserve that, but this was an isolated event, as far as I'm aware.

Hayek. After reading James Scott's worthwhile Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber finds an opening for an attack on "free" markets from what he calls a "Hayekian" perspective -- invoking such themes as tacit knowledge and local rules, and contrasting these with abstract universal standards. Farrell is completely open about his limited experience with Hayek's complex work on these matters, and I'd second the notion that his speculations would be much improved with solid reference to Hayek's actual thinking on such things.

Worth checking out -- the comments section features an cogent discussion of local knowledge and rules competition from Hayek-L'er Chirag Kasbekar.

"Social Justice" vs. Liberalism. "The signature of modern leftist rhetoric is the deployment of terminology that simply cannot fail to command assent. As Orwell himself recognized, even slavery could be sold if labeled "freedom." In this vein, who could ever conscientiously oppose the pursuit of "social justice," -- i.e., a just society? ..

To understand "social justice," we must contrast it with the earlier view of justice against which it was conceived -- one that arose as a revolt against political absolutism. With a government (e.g., a monarchy) that is granted absolute power, it is impossible to speak of any injustice on its part. If it can do anything, it can't do anything "wrong." Justice as a political/legal term can begin only when limitations are placed upon the sovereign, i.e., when men define what is unjust for government to do. The historical realization traces from the Roman senate to Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to the 19th century. It was now a matter of "justice" that government not arrest citizens arbitrarily, sanction their bondage by others, persecute them for their religion or speech, seize their property, or prevent their travel. This culmination of centuries of ideas and struggles became known as liberalism ..

the imperative of economic equality .. generates a striking opposition between "social justice" and its liberal rival. The equality of the latter .. is the equality of all individuals in the eyes of the law -- the protection of the political rights of each man, irrespective of "class" (or any assigned collective identity, hence the blindfold of Justice personified). However, this political equality .. spawns the difference in "class" between Smith and Jones. All this echoes Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek's observation that if "we treat them equally [politically], the result must be inequality in their actual [i.e., economic] position." The irresistable conclusion is that "the only way to place them in an equal [economic] position would be to treat them differently [politically]" -- precisely the conclusion that the advocates of "social justice" themselves have always reached .. more BARRY LOBERFELD.

The Democrat Left. "American [leftism] has grown cowardly and anti-democratic. It boldly spouts clich�s about "giving power to the people," but in reality it increasingly distrusts the people. Unable to win at the polls and unwilling to compromise on ideological objectives, [leftists]empower judges to fight their battles for them ..

We like to say that the increasingly ugly battles over judicial nominations are a sign of increasing partisanship in the culture, when in reality they are a completely rational outgrowth of the culture wars. Because from abortion to affirmative action to gay rights [leftists] have gladly ceded the unpopular choices to an imperial judiciary that is more or less immune to democratic correction. John F. Kerry says he's against gay marriage, but does anyone doubt that he would appoint precisely the sorts of judges who rubber-stamp the practice? Indeed, speaking of America's leading "multilateralist," one could say that the Democratic Party's fetishization of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and "coalition-building" generally suggests that many [leftists] would like to outsource all their losing issues to undemocratic institutions and hence absolve themselves of any responsibility for unpopular policies .. ". more JONAH GOLDBERG.

Carnival! Step right up and get your Carnival of the Capitalists.

John Edwards & the coatless girl. The drama of John Edwards' stump speech reaches its emotional peak with the heatbreaking story of a 10-year old girl "somewhere in America," who's gone to bed, "praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today, because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm."

Worth contemplating -- Presidential candidate John Edwards could personally buy a coat for ever girl in severe poverty between the ages of 0 and 18 years and he'd STILL have more than $51 million dollars to play around with. If he's really so passionate about the problem, why doesn't he solve it -- like tomorrow?

BOOK. The Coming Generational Storm : What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future by Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns. From the publisher:

"In 2030, as 77 million baby boomers hobble into old age, walkers will outnumber strollers; there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18 percent more workers. How will America handle this demographic overload? How will Social Security and Medicare function with fewer working taxpayers to support these programs? According to Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, if our government continues on the course it has set, we'll see skyrocketing tax rates, drastically lower retirement and health benefits, high inflation, a rapidly depreciating dollar, unemployment, and political instability. The government has lost its compass, say Kotlikoff and Burns, and the current administration is heading straight into the coming generational storm.

But don't panic. To solve a problem you must first understand it. Kotlikoff and Burns take us on a guided tour of our generational imbalance, first introducing us to the baby boomers-- their long retirement years and "the protracted delay in their departure to the next world." Then there's the "fiscal child abuse" that will double the taxes paid by the next generation. There's also the "deficit delusion" of the under-reported national debt. And none of this, they say, will be solved by any of the popularly touted remedies: cutting taxes, technological progress, immigration, foreign investment, or the elimination of wasteful government spending.

So how can the United States avoid this demographic/fiscal collision? Kotlikoff and Burns propose bold new policies, including meaningful reforms of Social Security, and Medicare. Their proposals are simple, straightforward, and geared to attract support from both political parties. But just in case politicians won't take the political risk to chart a new direction, Kotlikoff and Burns also offer a "life jacket"-- guidelines for individuals to protect their financial health and retirement."

What others have said about The Coming Generational Storm:

"I lie awake nights worrying about the fiscal crisis described in The Coming Generational Storm. This is by far the single most important problem in U.S. economic policy. Every American should read this fabulous book."
--George Akerlof, University of California, Berkeley, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (2001)

"Brilliant insights on the me generation versus the next generation. Better still, smart advice on equally vexing questions like whether to invest in a 401(k) or a second mortgage."
--Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind

"Among academic experts, Larry Kotlikoff has earned the title 'Mr. Generational Accounting.' His unfuzzy arithmetic decisively rebuts the Bush tax cuts, which are based on the delusion that 5 - 4 = 6, not 1. Read and judge for yourself the specter of our future: too many retirees dependent on too few working-age people. Fiscal imprudence now mandates broken promises later."
--Paul A. Samuelson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (1970)

The Coming Generational Storm : What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future by Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns.

Question for Scott Burns:

Q: Recently you wrote about Social Security and Medicare and said that, priced in today's dollars, the shortfall was $43.4 trillion in 2003 and will rise to $44.8 trillion this year. Were you summing up over a 25-year (generational accounting) span of time? It was a sobering article, and we agree with you that the silence is deafening by both politicians and retirees such as us.

A: Good question. Generational accounting considers a time period considerably longer than 25 years. Let me tell you why. When Social Security was reformed in 1983, with a major increase in the payroll tax and a future increase in the retirement age, it was based on Social Security projections for 75 years. Completed, Social Security was supposed to be fully funded for at least that long.

What happens, however, is that life expectancies change each year. We lose people who were born long ago who had shorter life spans. They are replaced by newborns with much longer life expectancies. The average life expectancy starts to creep up, year by year. As expectancies in retirement rise, so do future Social Security and Medicare liabilities.

Today, only 20 years since the last reform, Social Security is as out of balance as it was before the 1983 reform and payroll tax increase.

As a consequence, the best way to estimate the real liabilities of government programs is to use what the Social Security actuaries call ``the infinite horizon,'' a method that looks well beyond the traditional 75-year projection period.

It may seem like a trivial matter, but it's not: Unfunded liabilities more than double. Taking the shorter measure allows the politicians to make promises that buy votes. But it low-balls future costs. With elections every two years, politicians (of both parties) have no incentive to deal with the long-term future and its costs.

You can read more about this in April, when MIT Press releases The Coming Generational Storm. I co-authored the book, my first in nearly 30 years, with economist Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the prime mover in generational accounting.

The Coming Generational Storm:

Read the Prologue (pdf).
Read Chapter 1 (pdf).

Kotlikoff on Alan Greenspan's Feb. 25 Testimony on the future of Social Security

"It's nice that Alan Greenspan is finally prodding our politicians to address the nation's long-term fiscal problems. But he's using a feather, when a cattle prod is what's needed. Whether or not Greenspan knows it, our country is in worse long-term fiscal shape than Brazil. Once financial markets absorb this fact, interest and inflation rates will soar and there will be economic hell to pay. Greenspan's proposed cuts in Social Security are trivial relative to what's needed and perpetuate the myth that we can finance the baby boomers' retirement with minor fiscal adjustments.

Senators Kerry and Edwards -- along with President Bush -- are fixated on the next election and ducking their responsibilities to the next generation. Like previous politicians who've failed to address our long-term Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid problems, they are simply children masquerading as adults. What's needed are real statesmen to propose and enact the radical and extremely painful reforms required to ensure our nation's fiscal solvency."

"Going Critical" by Laurence Kotlikoff and Niall Ferguson (pdf):

"...the U.S. government [is] effectively bankrupt"

"...when rational gloom sets in, the U.S. economy will likely 'go critical.'"

"...the decline and fall of America's undeclared empire will be due not to terrorists at our gates nor to the rogue regimes that sponsor them, but to a fiscal crisis of the welfare state."

Thanks to Alex Tabarrack who comments: "I worry when intelligent people on both the right and left start to talk about the U.S. 'going critical.'"

California Senate Race. "Chaos theory suggests that the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can set in motion effects that include, in time, a tornado in Topeka. Imagine a butterfly effect from Californians' votes on Tuesday .. Suppose Republican voters [in California], half of whom a recent poll showed to be undecided, create the year's most mesmerizing Senate race by nominating Rosario Marin. She is the 45-year-old former U.S. treasurer and mayor of Huntington Park, a 95 percent Latino town of 60,000 in southeast Los Angeles County, where Democrats have a 5-to-1 registration advantage.

Today, when biography serves as political philosophy, Marin's suits this nation within the nation. At 14 she emigrated from Mexico with her parents, a janitor and a seamstress, speaking no English. She graduated near the top of her high school class, worked her way through college ..

Bill Simon, Davis's Republican gubernatorial opponent in 2002, lost by 5 percentage points, getting the votes of just 24 percent of Latinos and 37 percent of women. With 40 percent of Latinos and 2 percent more women, he would have won. Boxer's 1998 opponent won just 23 percent of Latinos. In last October's gubernatorial vote, 40 percent of the Latino vote went for Republicans ..

Marin campaigning at Bush's side this autumn -- in 2000, he lost California by 1.3 million votes, losing by 1.5 million among women and winning just 22 percent of Latinos -- would give him huge help with both Latino and women voters.

At Bush's other side will be another immigrant, Schwarzenegger .. ". more GEORGE WILL.

UPDATE: Don't miss Xrlq's investigation of Marin's Kerry-like stand on Bush's open borders plan.

Intellectual Property. "An increasingly common justification for longer and more powerful IP rights is ex post - that IP will be "managed" most efficiently if control is consolidated in a single owner. This argument is made, for example, in the prospect and rent dissipation literature in patent law, in justifications for expansive rights of publicity, and in defense of the Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Taken to an extreme, this argument justifies perpetual protection with no real exceptions. Those who rely on this theory take the idea of IP as "property" too seriously, and reason that since individual pieces of property are perpetually managed, IP should be too. But IP isn�t just like real property; indeed, it gives IP owners control over what others do with their real property. The ex post justification is strikingly anti-market. We would never say today that the market for paper clips would be "efficiently managed" if put into the hands of a single firm. We rely on competition to do that for us. But that is exactly what the ex post theory would do .. ". more MARK LEMLEY (hat tip Legal Theory Blog)

Gay Marriage, Plural Marriage. Andrew Sullivan pulls a "right to marry" quote from Hannah Arendt, the former lover of Martin Heidegger. Here's a simple question for Andrew -- what do we say to the loving Mormon plural couples in Utah, of which there are tens of thousands? This becomes an unavoidably meaningful question once the case for gay marriage is framed in terms of universal human rights and constitutional "equal protection", as it usually is by academic advocates, which is to say, tenured Democrats on the left.

The only reason Andrew and these academics so easily avoid the issue comes down simply to class and location -- they simply don't know anyone who is Mormon and from the sticks of Utah. These tens of thousands simply don't count to the academic and intellectual class, and therefore it can be pretended that they don't exist.

Law & Neuroeconomics. "This article calls for a new approach to the study of law which incorporates the findings from the emerging area of neuroeconomics .. We argue that this research can help us understand what is occurring in the brains of the individuals and knowledge gained thereby can greatly aid both in understanding the process of creation and development of law as well as its effects on human behavior. The article discusses this research and begins the analysis of applying these findings the study of law .. ". more VERNON SMITH & KEVIN MCCABE.

BOOKS. "Why [did] Hiss persisted in his lying and why [did] he managed to fool so many Americans for so long .. ?". more MAX FRANKEL -- a review of Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars by Edward White. And one more question -- why was the NY Times and the NY Times Book Review so often and long on the side of those who whitewashed Hiss?

Economics. Economists fail the folks who pay their bills when they take a pass on the vital task of eliminating public ignorance -- producing instead large piles of dust-gathering research. More on the importance of economists in public education from Thomas Sowell.

Outsourcing. "There is nothing more positive than the self-confidence, dignity and optimism that comes from a society knowing it is producing wealth by tapping its own brains � men's and women's � as opposed to one just tapping its own oil, let alone one that is so lost it can find dignity only through suicide and "martyrdom." Indeed, listening to these Indian young people, I had a d�j� vu. Five months ago, I was in Ramallah, on the West Bank, talking to three young Palestinian men, also in their 20's, one of whom was studying engineering. Their hero was Yasir Arafat. They talked about having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all "suicide bombers in waiting."

What am I saying here? That it's more important for young Indians to have jobs than Americans? Never. But I am saying that there is more to outsourcing than just economics. There's also geopolitics. It is inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs. To the extent that they go to places like India or Pakistan � where they are viewed as high-wage, high-prestige jobs � we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds .. ". more TOM FRIEDMAN.

BOOKS. The Drudge-like power of InstaPundit -- Glenn mentions a book he's blurped, and the thing rockets to the Amazon top 25. I guess it's hard to resist a book with a title like this: Hollywood, Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon -- The Case Against Celebrity.

Wealth Creation. "If the Democrats were serious about balanced budgets, they'd speak not only of tax hikes but also spending cuts. Instead, they are using the balanced-budget argument as a means of keeping money in Washington in the belief that the indefinite expansion of government, both in scope and size, is their surest way of securing and maintaining political power .. Copious tax revenues are vital to the Democrats' strategy, so they oppose any reforms that would allow Americans to keep more of what they earn. Furthermore, in an effort to disguise their true intent, they make such nonsensical assertions as the claim that raising tax rates somehow boosts economic performance.

Fact is, most Democrats are willing to sacrifice jobs and business creation in order to keep the federal government's take of the national economy large. Their income-tax policies actually aim to swell the federal treasury at the economy's expense.

An economy depends on the availability of financial capital to fund new ventures, transform ideas into reality, and raise productivity. Pumping in investment capital thus creates new jobs, boosts real wages, and ups living standards. But Washington's tax-and-spenders ignore financial capital's crucial role. They treat this money as if it can be taxed away from individuals (and corporations) with impunity .. ". MORE William Kucewicz.

GW Bush. "Time and again, on matters ranging from abortion to affirmative action to gay rights, George W. Bush has refused to play the wedge-issue game .. Bush is no culture warrior, and those who are accusing him of it are simply trying to change the focus of the discussion .. ". more JOHN PODHORETZ.

Gay Marriage. "On his website today, Andrew Sullivan proclaims his support for the concept that a same-sex marriage license issued in Massachusetts could be void in the other 49 states. That would be a welcome compromise, especially if the Massachusetts courts ever managed to persuade the voters of Massachusetts to approve their judicially imposed social experiment .. [but] I suspect that �letting the states decide� will over time gradually evolve into a demand to allow the most liberal states to impose their social values on the others through the mechanism of a million petty lawsuits on a thousand different issues. That is why it is necessary and proper to settle this issue on a national basis. And since the proponents of same-sex marriage have chosen 2004 as the year in which to bring matters to a head, they have no fair complaint if the opponents of same-sex marriage choose make their reply in that same year .. ". more DAVID FRUM

Bear Flag Review. It's a California Bear Flag Review. Enjoy.

Immigration & Health Care. "Immigrants (legal and illegal) who arrived between 1994 and 1998 and their children accounted for 59 percent of the growth in the size of the uninsured population in the last ten years .. ". more on IMMIGRATION & THE U.S. HEATHCARE SYSTEM.

Outsourcing. Why businesses flee high tax & regulate states like California.

John Kerry. "Perhaps more than any other presidential candidate in recent memory, Kerry seems to be living in another time, playing a movie of Vietnam over and over in his mind ..

Kerry told reporter Charles Sennott the oft-repeated story of the February 1969 firefight in which Kerry attacked the Viet Cong who ambushed his Swift boat. Kerry won the Silver Star, as well as a Purple Heart, for his efforts. But the story wasn�t about the firefight itself. It was also Kerry�s reaction to it. The future senator was so �focused on his future ambitions,� Sennott reported, that he bought a Super-8 movie camera, returned to the scene, and re-enacted the skirmish on film .. In John Kerry�s home entertainment center, it�s always 1969. It�s sometimes that way in his campaign, too ..

This man is living in a time warp. No wonder Kerry sees any conflict � Gulf War I, Afghanistan, Gulf War II � as a potential Vietnam. In Kerry�s world, Vietnam is running on a continuous loop on that big-screen TV � with Jimi, Kris and Peter, Paul and Mary singing in the background.

Some people become stuck in the time period in which they had their most intense experiences. Others, perhaps with more mental or emotional flexibility, move on. Kerry seems to be the former.

At 60 years old, Kerry seems to be obsessed with the past in ways that the 57-year-old George W. Bush isn�t.

And Kerry seems far older than, say, the 71-year-old Donald Rumsfeld � a man who is always moving ahead, not inclined to lecture about the way things were 30 or 40 years ago.

Kerry�s penchant for looking back would not a good trait in a president who will have to deal with a distinctly 21st century, post-Sept. 11 world .. ". More on John Kerry, stuck in a Vietnam-era time warp.

Hayek. Edwin Feulner on F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom at 60:

"Before starting a long journey, it�s important to check a road map and make sure you know the best way to get where you�re going. A good map does more than highlight a path -- it warns of pitfalls ahead and helps you avoid them.

Sixty years ago, master mapmaker Friedrich Hayek gave us his seminal work �The Road to Serfdom.� It was swiftly condensed by Reader�s Digest, and became an international best seller. Hayek�s insight would eventually earn him the 1974 Nobel Prize for economics (he�s probably the only Nobel-winning economist who�s also penned a bestseller), and because of him, we�ve been avoiding economic potholes ever since.

Hayek wrote the book at the height of World War II. At that time, virtually everyone in his adopted homeland of Britain was involved in the war movement in some way -- and Hayek saw the danger in that. At that time of national crisis, government management of the economy made sense. With millions of people carrying arms and those at home busy making the weapons, only a central government could direct the overall economy.

But Hayek feared that citizens of the western democracies would draw the wrong conclusions -- that, after the Nazis were defeated, too many people would call for continued state control of the economy. They would do so, he warned, in the mistaken belief that if they surrendered some measure of personal freedom to the government, the government would in return guarantee their personal and financial security.

Hayek correctly predicted that surrendering personal freedom to the government wouldn�t lead to greater security. It would lead merely to servitude -- what Hayek called serfdom.

After all, government can harm us much more than any employer, no matter how large, ever can. �In every real sense a badly paid unskilled workman in this country [Great Britain] has more freedom to shape his life than many an employer in Germany or a much better paid engineer or manager in Russia,� Hayek wrote.

That�s because, in a free society, your employer can merely fire you. In a totalitarian one, a government bureaucrat can arrest you, beat you or even kill you.

Sadly, after the war an Iron Curtain dropped across Europe, and people on both sides found out just how right Hayek had been. For decades, those on the eastern side of that curtain labored under totalitarian governments.

Russians starved to death on collective farms; a series of �five-year plans� promised prosperity just around the corner (while citizens stood in endless bread lines), and millions perished in concentration camps after they dared to speak out against their rulers.

The collapse of communism finally came in 1989. But in today�s world, another of Hayek�s warnings rings true. �Our generation,� he wrote, �has forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom.�

That warning is a key reason why, a decade ago, The Heritage Foundation decided to publish an �Index of Economic Freedom.� Our 10th annual edition came out this year, and our findings confirm what Hayek articulated so well: Countries with the most economic freedom have the highest rates of economic growth. On the other hand, countries where freedom is lacking struggle economically.

I was honored to get to know Friedrich Hayek, first as a member of the Mont Pelerin Society (he was the first president) and later when he became a Distinguished Fellow and served three separate times as a scholar-in-residence at The Heritage Foundation.

In print and in person, Hayek was eloquent in his explanations of why the road to prosperity is paved with freedom -- both economic freedom and personal freedom. Today, six decades after �The Road to Serfdom� first hit bookshelves, it�s still a critical roadmap for where we should go and what we must -- and must not -- do."

The Gang of Four vs. Democracy. In blunt language Charles Krauthammer take a hammer to the judicial Maoists who've chosen to give us an Anti-Democractic revolution from above, overturning the most ancient of all social insititution without any participation of the people. My thought: In America this is about as close as it gets to witnessing a cell of political thugs burning down the people's house.

Well Said:

The model [marriage] amendment has two sentences: The first restricts marriage to the union between a man and a woman; the second enjoins the courts from imposing a solution ..

There is debate about whether the amendment's language would bar states from endorsing civil unions, which Mr. Bush says they should be free to do. We think this entire issue should be decided in the states, by the people through their elected legislators. And if the voters want to alter the definition of marriage as a new social consensus develops, that should be their democratic right.

But a political debate over gay marriage is precisely what its supporters do not want. They are the ones who want to impose a national solution via the courts. What the President endorses is not a federal solution but a federalist solution. In contrast to an executive order or federal law or regulation, a constitutional amendment requires not only the endorsement of two thirds of the House and Senate but the assent of the legislatures of three-quarters of the states. Amendments are historically difficult to pass, and the odds favor skepticism about its chances. But merely by being offered it will serve as a brushback pitch to the courts that this issue should be settled by democratic means.

Our social and cultural mores are changing rapidly, and accommodations for gay partners are already common in business and other American institutions. When it comes to the legitimate rights that gay Americans say their exclusion from marriage denies them--hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.--we can think of few that most Americans would not be willing to redress.

The question is whether this must also take the form of imposing an unprecedented redefinition of marriage on the majority of Americans who oppose it. Even John Kerry and John Edwards claim they don't want gay marriage ..

We wish we could count on the courts, especially the Supreme Court, to understand the need for deference here. But anyone who has read the logic of Lawrence, or before that of Romer v. Evans, has to conclude that the current Supreme Court would all too readily impose its own views on everyone else. In the process, it would be happy to overturn not just the Defense of Marriage Act signed by Mr. Clinton, but also 50 state laws, not to mention hundreds of years of moral and legal tradition.

As we said after Lawrence, that would ignite a real culture war, roiling our society for years to come. In a better world, we could trust our judges and executives to enforce the law and trust in the process of building democratic consensus. But on the evidence of recent months, not anymore. We have reached a point where a constitutional debate may be the only thing that will guarantee Americans the right to decide such a fundamental issue as marriage in a democratic fashion .. ".

-- The Wall Street Journal.

John Kerry. "The fact is that John Kerry has demonstrated a rather ugly habit of seriously misrepresenting himself and his major choices .. There is, of course, his notorious decades-long impersonation of an Irishman .. ". more ROBERT MUSIL. Lots here on what we know about Kerry's Vietnam service -- and what has been said about it that simply isn't true.

Academia. Challenge the left, lose your job. This time at SF State U., a place where Marxist faculty actually address each other as "comrade".

Gay Marriage. "San Francisco's Winter of Love sends two messages to America. The good message is that many same-sex couples want to spend the rest of their lives together. The bad message is that if pro-gay pols have power, they will use it to break the law and the establishment -- the courts, the attorney general - - will aid and abet them .. ". more Debra Saunders.

California. Field poll -- Kerry leads Edwards 3-1.

California. Nearly 60% of California's business leaders say it is official company policy -- all job growth will be direct out of California.

Gay Marriage. Lefty professor Cass Sunstein spins like a pro with a duplicitous attack on Bush's gay marriage proposal. Sunstein key premise -- that American's value constitutional stability -- is belied by the fact that American's on the left have in fact shown no regard for constitutional stability. Instead, every lefty merely pretends to do so when anyone stands up to defend the constitution from hyper-drive amending of the constitution by the lawless judges. The reality behind the duplicity is that leftists like Sunstein have been hell bent on radical constitutional change willy-nilly for going on generations now, in complete disregard of the deep damage this lawlessness has had for the credibility of our constitutional institutions.

California. Tom McClintock explains why massive state borrowing won't correct California's overspending problem.

Science. NY Times profile of science writer Brian Greene.

Jobs. "I want to be able to huff and puff about complex issues � like outsourcing of jobs to India � without any reference to reality. Unfortunately, in this life, I'm stuck in the body of a reporter/columnist. So when I came to the 24/7 Customer call center in Bangalore .. ". MORE Tom Friedman.

Gay Marriage. Hugh Hewitt gets it. Quotable:

When courts dictate law, as has happened in Massachusetts, or when low-ranking, publicity-grabbing officials make up the law, as is happening in San Francisco and may soon happen elsewhere, then freedom is diminished because the rule of a few is substituted for the rule of elected legislatures. There is no covering up this most basic of issues: Who runs America?

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge gets it also and here as well. Anyone paying attention (and Prof B was) would have noted that the President had already tipped his hand on this one in the state of the union address:

Activist judges, however, have begun redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives. On an issue of such great consequence, the people's voice must be heard. If judges insist on forcing their arbitrary will upon the people, the only alternative left to the people would be the constitutional process.

Reminder. The comments section on this blog is now open for business.

VDH. An LA Times profile of war & immigration writer Victor Davis Hanson.

InstaPundit & Gay Marriage. InstaPundit links to this article by Glenn Reynolds. Let me say straight up that I don't believe Glenn/InstaPundit when he says he's against Bush's stand on marriage & the constitution because, "I don't believe in amending the Constitution easily, and I don't think that this is an issue that ought to be constitutionalized." Well, if truth be told, Glenn has had little objection to a constant amending of the constitution -- when judges are doing this to advance a libertarian rights agenda which secures gay intercourse rights and other libertarian freedoms. Likewise, Glenn has been in favor of constitutionalizing gay marriage to the extent that this means altering state constitutions to advance this institution. Indeed, based on his stated jurisprudence on related issues, I don't anticipate that Glenn would have any objection to having gay marriage "constitutionalized" by the Supreme Court on 14th amendment equal protection or other such "high theory" grounds -- such a position would be the one consistent with his other stated positions on constitutional interpretation concerning closely related matters.

Gay Marriage. Donald Sensing has the must read posting of the day on why it has come to this. Bottom line: it's come to this because lawless judges and officials have decided to use extra-legal means to bypass the democratic system.

Gay Marriage. "In 2000, the people of the state of California voted by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent to pass Proposition 22, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Having openly defied the overwhelming opinion of the voters of California, the city of San Francisco will now sue to overturn Proposition 22 on the grounds of the equal-protection and due-process provisions of the California State constitution. Does anyone believe that the framers of California's constitution intended these provisions to have this effect? Could there possibly be a more blatant effort to override democratically expressed public opinion? If the public stands for this, there will never be limits to judicial activism again .. ". more STANLEY KURTZ.

And this: "Newsom is using extra-legal means to bring a major national debate to resolution on his own terms. By creating "married" couples, Newsom is trying to put the cultural, political, and legal momentum inherent in "possession" behind his side of the argument. If Newsom is allowed to determine a major policy debate by resort to extra-legal means, the damage to social trust and civil comity in our divided nation will be immense .. " Read the rest.

China Money. U.S. TSec Snow -- China will pull the peg on the yuan. U.S. officials are in China this week helping prepare for the float of the yuan against the dollar. More stories here.

Terror War. "A Primer on the Future Threat" -- a classified document "used actively today" by Sec. Rumsfeld and summarized as part of the latest excerpt from Rumsfeld's War in today's Washington Times. Highlight -- bullet point classified weapons intelligence and terror predictions.

Rule of Law. " .. there is the flagrant disregard shown by judges and local officials for the rights of citizens to have a say in setting the conditions under which we live, work and raise our children .. Whether one is for, against or undecided about same-sex marriage, a decision this important ought to be made in the ordinary democratic way .. ". MORE Harvard Law Professor MARY ANN GLENDON.

Jobs. "We are having a ferocious jobs debate, most of it fraudulent .. ". MORE Robert Samuelson. Quotable:

But no one considers it dishonorable to blame a president falsely for job loss (or to credit him falsely for job gains). The dishonesty is so routine that it's respectable. The press abets the hoax because it must report what candidates say and because it favors campaign combat over substance. Admitting the truth is no fun .. MORE ".

Gay Marriage. Right Coaster Tom Smith speaks with eloquence on the topic. Damned if I know either whether this is the route to go or not -- but damned if I'm going to let unelected (and deeply illiberal) judges take the decision away from you and I, especially on the corrupt grounds of a bankrupt theory of constitutional jurisprudence. The accelerating judicial nullification of liberal constitutionalism and democratic governance is not something we should take bent over with our mouths shut and our hands tied. If you look close at what the President is actually doing this is really the substance of his argument. Simply put, what the Presidentis saying is that this society and this legal system will be hijacked by judicial outlaws no longer. And bully for him.

The Rule of Law. The President throws down the gay marriage gauntlet -- it's the people vs the judges on who controls the law of the land.

I don't see how this isn't a good thing -- if the people want to keep marriage as it is, they certainly have every right to let the judges and the academics know who is sovereign and who serves whom. It all comes down to who and what rules in this country -- the people and the liberal constitutional tradition, or the judges and their anti-liberal constitutional radicalism. Whether or not I favor gay marriage, I certainly stand with the people and the ancient liberal constitutional tradition of this country and against the judges and their intellectually brankrupt constitutional radicalism.

UPDATE: Track blogosphere reactions here.

John Kerry. To me this matters.

Sowell. "There was a time when you could legitimately contrast the idle rich and the working poor. But that time is long gone .. When it comes to full-time year-around workers, there are more heads of households who fall into that category in the top 5 percent of income earners than in the bottom 20 percent -- in absolute numbers .. ". MORE Thomas Sowell.

LA TIMES POLL. Kerry leads Edwards 2-1, Prop 56 is going down in flames, 60% oppose Bush on immigration, Schwarzenegger will knock down both pins, and Fonda Kerry leads Bush by 13 in California. MORE LA Times Poll. Here are the PDF details. Poll nugget -- Schwarzenegger's massive borrowing bond will pass due to strong GOP backing of the Governator.

Jobs vs Statistics. "We are getting a false picture of where jobs comes from 1) because the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] survey doesn't break out some of these categories 2) because these growing occupations disproportionately involve self-employment or unincorporated partners and 3) for unknown reasons, even some employees who should be picked up on the payroll surveys aren't, at surprisingly high rates that no one can explain .. " MORE Virginia Postrel.

And this:

"I know of a number of aesthetic professions where jobs are growing rapidly. I found that in every such category the BLS counts were way under or, at best, obscured in categories dominated by losses in traditional manufacturing .. Some of the undercount is accounted for by failing to count self-employed people, but not all of it. I don't, however, think that the BLS's survey errors are random and therefore unimportant if we want to understand where the economy is headed .. " Still MORE Virginia Postrel.

Steering Left. Jim Henley explains why academia lists Left -- it imagines itself the vanguard of a society managed like a ship --with academics as captains and its own trainees as the elite officer corp. Quotable:

Under communism, the ruling class has to do even the scut work of planning - running the factories, deciding where every box of pencils gets shipped and so on. In American managerialism .. the Vanguard only has to do the cool jobs. The boring stuff .. is outsourced to Republicans, Chamber of Commerce types who .. must, when the government speaks, obey.

And this:

.. departments of political science and public administration will be happiest with a world view that maximizes the amount of politics and bureaucracy. Conservatism figures we already know how society should be run. Conservatives don't need managers, they need police. Libertarians figure society can largely run itself. Libertarians need all kinds of things, but not a lot of politicians or civil servants. [The academic Left's two main] rivals lose by default .. [hat tip InstaPundit]

And on the same topic, don't miss this.

Economics. The government inspired medical mess is putting the wammy on small business and their people.

UPDATE: The medical mess is throwing the breaks on job creation in the U.S.. Gene Expression thinks all this might motivate a call from the business community for the complete and final socialization of medicine.

Science. Historians now agree. It was theory before practice -- even in the ancient world. For example, the ancient science of the catapult.

Autism. A growing understanding of autism brings with it a growing understanding of ourselves. Here are some recent scientific developments as reported by the NY Times. It's important to remember how far we have come:

The notion that autism was caused by "refrigerator" mothers and absent fathers [was] promoted by psychoanalysts in the 1950's and 1960's ..

Message? Group think among academics and intellectuals can evolve into a fully invented world -- with devastating consequences for flesh and blood folks living in a world very far from make believe. Don't think for a minute that it doesn't take place still today.. at a univesity near you.

True News. First it was Microsoft getting the patent for ones and zeros. Now the U.S. patent office has given Chef America the patent for grandma's flaky pie crust. I kid you not. But wait a minute, a lawyer's blunder may have blown the whole deal ..

Hayek. UNC economist Bruce Caldwell will be hosting a seminar on his highly regarded book Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek between Monday, March 15 and Friday, March 26 on the Hayek-L email list, hosted by The Hayek Scholars Page and the Hayek Center.

Read Chapter One of Hayek's Challenge.

Order Hayek's Challenge at 30% discount from Barnes & Noble.

Order Hayek's Challenge at discount from Amazon.

Bruce Caldwell is General editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek. He is professor of economics at UNC-Greensboro. Among Caldwell's many publications is Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century.

Capitalism. It's Monday. Here's your Carnival of the Capitalists.

Track & Kill. Inside Rumsfeld's War. Here's the book.

Kerry. Boston Globe reporters will question Kerry's war record.

Steyn. New Steyn feature -- The John Kerry Canceled Weapons System of the Day.

UPDATE: Joshua Muravchik on Kerry's Inner Dove.

Money. China banks act on anticipated re-evaluation of the yuan. Quotable:

A report two weeks ago in a financial newspaper controlled by the stockmarket authority said China would move next month from its decade-old peg of 8.28 yuan to the US dollar to a rate set against a basket of currencies, and would carry out an upward revaluation of 5 per cent. The report has been denied repeatedly, but Chinese officials have started using the term "basic stability" rather than an outright dismissal of any change ..

Gay Marriage. Lockyer to Schwarzenegger -- go pound sand. Note well how this SF Chronicle news story takes on the decided tones of an opinion piece. In fact, the law is pretty clear that Lockyer is directly responsible for acting to ensure that the laws of California are enforced. And it equally clear that Lockyer is joining hands with a judiciary which would prefer to sit on its hands as long as possible -- in effect participating with the Mayor in a rolling act of democracy nullification. Next move Schwarzenegger.

UPDATE: Interociter has a suggestion for Schwarzenegger: "Hire an outside law firm to make the state's case, intervene in the current case as the chief Consitutional officer of the state, stating that the Attorney General is derelict and refusing to uphold California law for political reasons. Then he should file ethics charges with the State Bar against the Attorney General for putting his personal political ambition before his duties to the State. Think of it as a PATCO moment."

Unemployment & Immigration. A telling piece on unemployment statistics and the black market in labor. Quotable:

"The number of people on formal payrolls remains low because new jobs tend to be ones that don't show up on payrolls. Employment gains are among the self-employed and contract workers, or in the informal "gray" and "black" labor markets. People are doing temporary day work or contracting that's kept off the books. These don't tend to be highly paid jobs or jobs with benefits like health insurance, and they are often performed by immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants .. The numbers suggest that native-born workers � particularly teenagers and young adults without college degrees � are being displaced by new immigrants. Indeed, last year the employment rate for teens reached a record low, down 9 percentage points since 2000. These are the very people who might benefit from the unskilled jobs now going to foreign workers .. Large increases in unskilled immigrant workers have helped fuel real-wage declines at the bottom of the labor market and increased earnings inequality .. The proposed guest-worker program will expand supply in an already oversupplied labor market, foster the further development of a substratum outside of existing laws and customs that regulate employment, and further diminish the chances of teens and other young adults, especially from low-income and minority communities, to get valuable work experience .. ".

Off-shoring, the black market in labor, overseas production -- all of these are measures folks in the non-government sector are taking to opt-out from taxes, regulations and lawsuits imposed by the American government sector. The folks getting screwed are the only folks without the protection of free and unregulated trade -- overtaxed, over regulated American workers. There is a 20 - 40 percent tax tariff on American workers seeking to contract with American business. The regulation and tort tariff on the American worker must add another 10-20 percent on the anti-American worker tax penalty laid upon the back of the American employee. With this huge trade wall of tariffs blockading free trade between American business and American laborers, no wonder American labor is becoming the sick man of world trade.

Quotable Steyn. "It's unlikely that any but the most partisan Democrats can stomach nine months of a candidate who is Al Gore without the personal charm .. ". MORE Steyn.

Comment Policy

I do not edit comments. All comments are the opinions of the commenter. Management takes no responsibility for the views expressed in comments. If something upsets you, move on. I reserve the right to delete comment entries at random. (Adapted from Justine at CalBlog).

Iraq. Larry Diamond on the Rise of Civil Society in Iraq. Out of Chaos, the flowering of Liberal Democracy -- it ain't always pretty, but it is beautiful. Something Diamond doesn't mention -- the marketplace is booming, and cell phone use has exploded. Good news for Liberal Democracy.

UPDATE: Tom Palmer -- a one man think tank -- bring the world of liberal ideas to Iraq. Interesting stuff. Quotable:

My remarks will focus on two themes. First, the importance of education in changing expectations .. Second, the necessity of fashioning an Iraqi historical narrative of the struggle of liberty and law against unconstrained power. Since the meeting will take place in the Gilgamesh Room of the conference center, I�ll mention the Epic of Gilgamesh (and the role of Enkidu in limiting the arbitrary power of the king), the first written expression of the idea of liberty (ama-gi in Sumerian; my tattoo was taken from a clay tablet found in the city of Lagash [contemporary Telloh] around 2300 BCE), the code of Hamurrabi, the role of the Baghdad Caliphate (destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1258), and so forth. It�s important that liberty be seen to have native roots and the story of liberty against power to be an Iraqi story. Otherwise, it�s unlikely that liberty and the rule of law will grow and flourish here.

(via The Agitator).

Gay Marriage. Pop quiz for the "equal protection" folks -- we're flying at a 100 miles an hour down the slippery slope, what is the principled argument for denying marriage to this young couple if "equal opportunity" and "state interest" are the criteria? (And whose perceptions of "the interests of the state" count anyway -- just those with a seat on the bench and/or tenure in the law school, or does the democratic majority have any say in the matter? OK, you're right, I do already know the answer to that one). And if marriage is not to be denied to these two -- who shall be denied marriage? I can see the case for allowing marriage because the parties involved love each other -- but the same can be true in all sort of other cases even farther outside of the limits of the law as it currently exists.

What I am looking for is this. I have yet to hear a principled argument for denying "equal protection" to any set of persons wishing to married any other set of persons -- but if the flying slide down the slope is to stop, there must be some principled stopping point somewhere. Well, what is it? And how do these grounds differ from the ones advocated of male-female marriage already provide -- because they do provide these, where as, as far as I've been able to determine, those who advocate flying down the slide on "equal protection" grounds do not. If they do, lets hear them. I have an email address, up there at the top on the right hand side.

I'd actually like some real answers on this. No doubt folks have given it some thought and have come up with answers to the question. I simply haven't seen these anywhere, and haven't been able to come up with the answers myself. Sometimes thinking things through is more than merely a rhetorical excercise. Of course, like everyone, I enjoy the rhetoric, but I enjoy -- and value -- the hard work of thinking things through much more. So. Any thoughts, reflections, arguments? Comments are open.

UPDATE: Julian Sanchez jumps on the equal protection bandwagon and gives three cheers for plural marriage:

I tend to watch Crossfire for laughs, but right now I'm livid. Tucker Carlson just asked Human Rights Campaign president Cheryl Jacques why, for all the reasons she advances to support gay marriage, polyamorous groupings of three or more men or women shouldn't be recognized. Her brilliant, principled answer?

"Because I don't approve of that."

Oh. Because you don't approve of that. So then why, again, is a majority's nonsensical disapproval of your lifestyle supposed to be trumped by a principle of fairness? Why should anyone now take your fine language about equality and human rights seriously?

Look, I understand that for political reasons it might be prudent, right now, anyway, for defenders of gay marriage not to publicly acknowledge what a real principle of fairness here entails. I could've even, reluctantly, swallowed a dodge like: "Well, that's not at issue right now, and it'd be have to be considered independently." But this kind of BS answer takes the wind out of your sails pretty badly. If you're going to demand the equal treatment that is your right, then you ought to have both the empathy and the cojones not to buckle when the rights of even less popular groups are at stake.

BlogLand. Xrlq declares Bill Quick a Blogtard. It all got started with an examination of Justice Scalia's interpretation of the Constitution ..

Science. The science of astronomy is suddenly getting very interesting -- Einstein's "greatest blunder" proves no blunder and the cosmos biggest objects are radically out of step with the prevailing theory. Cool.

9th Amendment. Law Prof. Lawrence Solum takes on the problem of the significance of the 9th Amendment -- with lots of blogosphere & web linkage. Warning -- some complex verbal gymnastics involved. Don't try this at home.

Scroll down for more on John Kerry. And don't miss Robert Musil on Kerry's duplicity on the topic of his so-called "military record".

Smoke This. "Mandatory [entitlement] spending [by the U.S. goverment] amounts to 11% of the gross domestic product, or $11,144 per U.S. household .. ". MORE Mark Alexander. And from the same article -- George W. Bush's "READ MY LIPS" line from his 2001 Congressional Address:

"Too much government crowds out initiative and hard work, private charity and the private economy. Our new governing vision says government should be active, but limited; engaged, but not overbearing. And my budget is based on that philosophy .. ".

Anybody want to buy a piece of ocean front property in Nebraska?

Gay Marriage. Gov. Schwarzenegger orders AG Bill Lockyer to take legal action against San Francisco. Quotable:

"Our civilized society and legal system is based upon a respect for and adherence to the rule of law. The City and County of San Francisco's unfortunate choice to disregard state law and grant marriage certificates to gay couples directly undermines this fundamental guarantee. As Attorney General, you have the authority to take legal action to require the City and County of San Francisco to comply with the laws of the State."

Republicans. Richard Viguerie has a blog targeted at the regulate and spend "Washington" Republicans -- most notably President Bush. Here's his mission statement:

"America didn�t elect Republicans to just be better Democrats. In that simple statement lies the mission of this website. We are conservatives who have watched while Republican leadership has turned from the legacy of Ronald Reagan. We are conservatives who elect conservative Republicans to represent us in Washington � and then watch while they stop being Kansas Republicans or Texas Republicans � and start being Washington Republicans. We see them turn away from the goals of shrinking government and eliminating federal agencies and embrace the liberal idea of giving every one and every group exactly what they want .. What is a Washington Republican? A Republican that uses the people�s money to bribe us for votes � one who boasts of the increased spending projects he or she was �able to secure.� A Republican that campaigns on the principle of small government, and then votes for expansions of the welfare state .. ".

Click here for Viguerie's case against Bush and the "Washington" Republicans. (Thanks to Josh Claybourn).

Gay Marriage. The author of California's domestic partner law will wed same-sex bride in San Francisco.

California. Were adding something like 600,000 bodies to the state every year. That's more than six Mission Viejos every 12 months.

Gay Marriage. Violate state marriage laws and the legal authorities will do nothing other than give you another month to continue doing it. Simply air the idea that ignoring the guns laws would be no different that ignoring the marriage laws and the authorities will send cops to your door.

Outsourcing. A detailed analysis from The Economist.

Leftist Academia. Prof. Edward Feser mixes it up with some truly nasty leftist profs. I'm not sure why Ed is wasting his time on these tenured thugs. These folks aren't in Ed's league as either scholars or gentlemen, and when you wrestle in the mud with vipers, all you'll get is bit.

But let me say that my experience at several universities provides only confirmation of Ed's example of academic bias in the classroom:

If, for example, a course in political philosophy is offered in which the readings comprise selections from the likes of the liberal philosopher John Rawls, the libertarian Robert Nozick, and various feminist and left-of-center communitarian critics of Rawls, with no conservative writers assigned at all and with Nozick treated as an easily-refuted eccentric whose views are not shared by any other contemporary philosopher worth reading, then students will -- obviously -- get the impression that the left-of-center views are the only realistic options. And this sort of thing is, I submit, extremely common in the contemporary university.

Mencken. Terry Teachout reviews the latest anthology from the Mencken vaults.

Gay Marriage. "Lots of younger conservatives think of themselves as tolerant, freedom-loving and possessing metropolitan sensibilities; but they also revere tradition and aren't comfortable with needlessly monkeying around with old institutions. The issue of same-sex marriage sits atop the intersection of these values .. " MORE Nick Schulz.

Canada. "The new revelations don't merit the term 'scandal' so much as 'sin crying to heaven for vengeance.' .. Some would have you believe that the actual theft that the program proved to involve is the only "scandal" here .. I see more like three or four: It was a bad idea, badly executed for bad reasons by despicable people .. " MORE Colby Cosh.

John Kerry. "I was in the [S. Vietnam] Delta shortly after John Kerry left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used, and I know the equipment .. Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with .. collecting that much hardware that fast, and for such pedestrian actions .. Something is fishy .. " MORE from retired Marine Master Sergeant X.

UPDATE: Here is an account of Kerry's more famous heroic action saving an overboard shipmate, for which he was given a Purple Heart:

It was in the second of these that he rescued Jim Rassmann, a member of his crew, when his P.C.F.-94 came under a hail of small-arms fire at the same moment that another P.C.F. traveling alongside Kerry's boat struck a mine.

From a NY Times review of Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty : John Kerry and the Vietnam War which the NY Times calls "a campaign book" and " less as a work of history and more as a brief for President Kerry" with "odor of salesmanship that lingers around". Brinkley, of course, is a tenured university professor. And you thought university professors weren't political hacks .. What did you think they were, objective scholars? (It's a joke, people. Of course there are non-partisan scholars in academia. I even know some.)

Gay Marriage. "Watching the lines form around the block at San Francisco City Hall, seeing couples streaming into town from all over California and beyond, many of them having been together for years or even decades, it is hard not to support their cause: marriage for all. It is also difficult to understand what frightens some people about gay marriage, why opponents think that it would somehow undermine the institution to allow same-sex couples to celebrate it, and to have their unions recognized by government. But gay marriage isn't the only issue at stake in San Francisco this week, nor the most important. What is at issue is the rule of law, and whether one public official, even if his cause is just, has the right to take the law he has been sworn to uphold into his own hands .. ". MORE Daniel Weintraub.

Gay Marriage. Will California AG Bill Lockyer enforce the law? He says he will -- but at the same time he publicly opposes the law. Lockyer in the past has eventually done the legal thing -- when immense pressure forced him to back down from earlier decisions to violate the law. That's what happened during the recall. Lockyer has once again chosen to enforce the law after being slammed up against the wall -- this time by a City of San Francisco lawsuit against the state. We'll see what happens ..

California GOP. "The [GOP] raised $18 million in 2003, compared with $6 million in the entire 2000 presidential cycle, and registered some 250,000 new voters, of whom 15% were Democrats switching parties .. ". MORE on Schwarzenegger & the California GOP.

Brain & Pain. " .. researchers .. showed that the brain was a mirror of suffering, reflecting through many of the same neural circuits the pain that others feel, much as if the sensation were its own genuine torment. Indeed, the brain's ability to share another's response to pain at such a fundamental cellular level may be the key to a sense of empathy, the personality trait that underpins so many human relationships ..". MORE on the mind and the neural creation of pain.

RIP. The LA Times' Frank del Olmo is dead. Best that I bite my tongue.

UPDATE: A journalist on del Olmo.

Be Afraid. Law Professor David Bernstein:

A classmate of mine, now a law professor, told me recently that half of my first-year class wouldn't speak to me first semester of law school, for political reasons. I thought half sounded like a lot, though I knew I was "boycotted" by some at the time. I had always been mildly curious as to why .. so I asked this classmate, who was himself quite left-wing, but always friendly. He responded, "Well, it's what you said in Contracts." "That's strange," I replied, "I don't remember Contracts class being that controversial; we didn't discuss any of the truly hot button issues for the left--such as race, abortion, gay rights--in Contracts--and, in any event, my (libertarian) views on such issues wouldn't have been so objectionable to them, anyway. So what did I say in Contracts class that led to my ostracism?" He said, and I swear he seemed at least 80% serious, "well, you kept saying that contracts should be enforced!"

This is the character and outlook of the people the universities are churning out by the thousands. And these are the folks who are filling the tenure track jobs at the law schools -- and the local, state and (recently) federal bench. These are not people who believe in sticking with principle or the rule of law -- such things are the enemy of their vision of the world (see Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty). They believe rather in whatever expediency gets them to their prefered end -- almost inevitably half-baked. Is it any wonder the rule of law has broken down in San Francisco, Chicago, and Massachusetts? No, it's not.

UPDATE: Here's an alternative view on what is happening in San Francisco.

UPDATE II: Xlrq has some specifics on the laws being broken in San Francisco.

Liberalism. A don't miss posting by Randy Barnett on the 9th Amendment with lots of links to the ongoing blogosphere debate. Barnett provides this wonderful quote from founding father Roger Sherman:

"The people have certain natural rights which are retained by them when they enter into Society, Such are the rights of Conscience in matters of religion; of acquiring property, and of pursuing happiness & Safety; of Speaking, writing and publishing their Sentiments with decency and freedom; of peaceably assembling to consult their common good, and of applying to Government by petition or remonstrance for redress of grievances. Of these rights therefore they Shall not be deprived by the Government of the united States."

Odd. This George Will piece appeared days ago in syndication around the country, and yesterday on line at Townhall. It's being published only today (Friday) at the Washington Post. What's up with that?

Krauthammer. It's Friday, here's your Krauthammer. Highlight -- Krauthammer outs a rather dirty case of anti-Bush CNN news bias. OK, their all Democrats on staff at CNN. But still ..

Quotable Steyn:

Let's go back to Triumph the dog's contention that Quebec men are mostly homosexual. In 1991, Edith Cresson made the same allegation against the British. At the time, she was the prime minister of France. In other words, she wasn't just Conan O'Brien's hand puppet; she was President Mitterrand's hand puppet. And she was flesh and blood, which was indeed the main basis of her assertion: She claimed that as a vibrant sensual woman she found more men came on to her in the streets of Paris than London and concluded from this that Englishmen were obviously gay. Instead of falling into po-faced whining like the Toronto Star, Britain's Sun ran a picture of two Frenchmen carrying those dinky little male purses they're partial to over there, under the headline: "They Don't Call It Gay Paree For Nothing." Instead of huffing and puffing about "racist filth" like Canadian Members of Parliament, one British MP attempted to introduce the following motion: "This House does not fancy elderly French women." That's the way a mature, confident society deals with such provocations--with cheap jokes and extensive lists of "Famous French Poofs"--not the reflexive cringe that cries "racism" and calls for "hate crimes" investigations .. MORE Steyn

Outsourcing. "Foreign competition now affects services as well as manufacturing. Good .. ". MORE Economist.

Books. Robert Nozick's long time friend David Gordon reviews Edward Feser's highly recommended On Nozick. Quotable:

.. to my mind the best of the many fine things in [On Nozick] is Feser's brilliant defense of the view that taxation amounts to forced labor. The programs of the welfare state entail that "the state and its beneficiaries have an entitlement or enforceable claim to, and thus a partial property right in, your labor, and thus of you. They are, in short, part-owners of you .. ".

Neo-Conservative Watch. The neo-conservative neo-leftist Weekly Standard proves once again that it favors limited government every where in the world accept here in America with its support of yet another massive GOP spending program. With friends like these ...

ThinkTanks. The Heritage foundation has a Policy Weblog tracking new Heritage policy papers and Heritage folks in the papers and on the radio. Note to the Heritage people -- the blog will take off when make it a more personalized group blog, more on the order of The Corner or the Volokh Conspiracy. Stay tuned for the Hayek Center launch of a new group blog in the very near future ..

California & Immigration. Tyler Cowen is celebrating the fact that even foreign immigrants find California a less appealing place to live. Quotable:

For the first time in thirty years, immigrants are finding California a less appealing place to settle. The 2000 census measures 24.8 percent of all new arrivals going to California, down from 37.6 percent in the 1990 tally ..

Read the whole thing for Cowen's analysis.

Foreign Aid. More aid, more poverty. Quotable: "Peter Bauer .. described foreign aid as 'taxing poor people in rich countries and passing it on to rich people in poor countries.' .. A growing body of evidence suggests that far from helping the poor countries, foreign aid slows economic reform and retards growth .. Africa, for example, has been the largest recipient of foreign aid .. As a result, Africa today accounts for a greater percentage of the world's poor than ever before. In 1970, only one in 10 poor people lived in Africa. Today that number is one in two .. Foreign aid also fuels corruption among African officials .. A study commissioned by the African Union in 2001 estimates that corruption continues to cost Africa $150 billion per year .. ".

And guess what? "The United States [has] chosen to ignore those studies .. President George W. Bush promised to spend $5 billion on a new foreign aid initiative known as the Millennium Challenge Account."

Biotechnology. Science vs. California's bio-illiterate enviro-nuts.

Money & Trade. "The U.S. dollar has now been dropping for a solid two years, declining on a broad trade-weighted basis, according to the Federal Reserve, by 13.6 percent from its February 2002 peak. Against many of the world's major currencies the buck has buckled by even more: 25 percent against the British pound, 21 percent against the Japanese yen, 32 percent against the euro. And what's happened to the U.S. trade deficit? It's got even worse, of course, jumping from $359 billion in 2001 to $418 billion in 2002 to $489 billion in 2003. That the trade gap keeps on widening despite the weak dollar is a bit of a puzzle .. ". MORE Justin Lahart.

Duke Watch. George Soros & Duke faculty denounce America's war effort.

Money. China's Renminbi offers new competition to the dollar as the international money of choice in East Asia. More bad news for America's most profitable export. (via the Mises blog).

George Will -- Thank Conservatives for the Welfare State. Quotable:

The welfare state, beginning with unemployment relief, was pioneered in part by European conservatives, Disraeli and especially Bismarck, to reconcile people to change -- to the frictions and casualties of economic dynamism on which, such enlightened conservatives saw, national greatness would depend in the industrial age. It is sound social policy, and simple justice, that the party who benefits from free trade -- the nation as a whole -- should be taxed to ameliorate the discomforts of those who pay the short-term price of progress. That is the case for education and job training for persons needing to change their skills. Such assistance is especially imperative when the casualties of change bear no responsibility for their fate .. ".

2004. "A 34-year-old flier lists speakers for an anti-Vietnam War rally at Valley Forge State Park, Pa., Sept. 7, 1970. Included were two of that era's most notorious leftist agitators, the Rev. James Bevel and Mark Lane, plus actress Jane Fonda, a symbol of extreme opposition to the war. Leading off the list was a less familiar name: John Kerry .. ". MORE Robert Novak.

Science. The Leftist Union of Concerned Scientists is accusing the Bush Administration of distorting scientific facts. For more on the Union of Concerned Scientists go here and here. Spin Watch -- the NY Times characterizes the UCS as "an independent organization" that "focuses on technical issues" rather than what it is -- a reliably Leftist anti-military & hug the trees environmentist organization with roots in Hard Left of the 1960s.

California Senate Race. Radio talk jock Hugh Hewitt has endorsed Bill Jones for U.S. Senate in the California Republican primary. Hewitt touts Jones for his political maturity -- he's less likely to slip up against Boxer during the campaign. Not a ringing endorsement, but it's never a good idea to bet against Hewitt when it comes to California Republican politics.

Gay Marriage. The judge who is permitting gay marriage to continue in San Franscisco for another month is gay.

Leftist Academia. "Nick Muzin said he did not consider himself to be particularly conservative before coming to [Yale] Law School; he said he even worked for the Gore/Lieberman Presidential Campaign in 2000. But he said he feels far to the right of the politics of many Law School students. 'I would say I'm a centrist, but when I got to law school I found myself to be conservative [by comparison],' Muzin said. 'I find that the student body here is ultra-liberal and extremely intolerant; I realized it shortly after I started here .. ' .. ". MORE.

The Left. "[Lefties] simply can't grasp the problem Lexis-Nexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty -- hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte .. ". MORE Ann Coulter.

Steyn. Give Daffy his own movie.

Money. "The Economics of International Monies" by G. Dwyer & J. Lothian. Abstract: "The authors summarize the history of international monies, from the gold solidus introduced in the fourth century to the present. They identify four common characteristics of these currencies: high unitary value; relatively low inflation rates; issuance by major economic and trading powers; and spontaneous, as opposed to planned, adoption .. Recent theories' common implication of multiple equilibria supports the importance of spontaneous adoption as developed by Menger and Hayek."

Hayek. Antoine Martin & Stacey Schreft, Fed Bank of Kansas City, "Currency Competition: A Partial Vindication of Hayek".

Hayek. Daniel Klein, "Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard".

Immigration. "Mass immigration, and its social and economic ramifications, is what has bankrupted California and why she may have reached a tipping point from which there is no return. For her taxpayers are fleeing .. the influx of immigrant poor and the exodus of the middle class means repeated hikes in tax rates and continuous cuts in social services, making life ever harsher for middle-class folks who stick it out. So they too soon head for the highways out ..". MORE Pat Buchanan.

Academic Quackery. "Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been � and still are � infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess .. ". MORE Todd Dufresne, author of Killing Freud: 20th Century Culture & the Death of Psychoanalysis.

Liberalism. Michael Novak on The Moral Case for Capitalism -- a speech delivered before the Mont Pelerin Society in Sri Lanka on January 11, 2004.

Reading Minds. "Until sometime between their third and fourth birthdays, young children seem not to understand that the relationship between a person's goals and her actions depends on the person's beliefs about the current state of the world .. ". More on Reading other Minds.

Gay Marriage. Schwarzenegger has released a statement proclaming his support for the rule of law in California, and suggests that San Francisco government officials should obey it. Quotable:

"Californians spoke on the issue of same-sex marriage when they overwhelmingly approved California's law that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. I support that law and encourage San Francisco officials to obey that law."

10 billion trillion trillion carats -- bling bling for the ages.

Cash Family Won't Let "Ring of Fire" Be Used for Hemorrhoid Ad. True News .. .

Outsourcing. "The reason American jobs and companies jump the frontier is because .. the conduct of business there gets more and more onerous, thanks to such factors as the excessive Federal regulation favoured by Kerry .. and the exposure to massive lawsuits favoured by his principal rival for the Democratic nomination, the pretty-boy trial lawyer John Edwards .. ". More -- not to be missed -- Mark Steyn.

Money. "By now, any literate investor knows there are too many dollars held by Asian central banks, but nobody can figure out what happens next. It is obvious, for example, that if they were to sell, or even stop buying, the ever-increasing supply of treasury debt, interest rates in the United States would rise substantially. The less obvious but inescapable side effects would be lower stock prices, higher inflation, and a softer economy .. It seems unlikely that Chinese bureaucrats would initiate any precipitous move away from the dollar, either in the composition of their reserves or in the manipulated peg of 8.3 renminbi/$. It is more plausible that external events will impose change. Still, financial officials in Asia are telegraphing creeping abandonment of the dollar. Stephanie Pomboy of Macromavens notes that the percentage of Chinese FX reserves recycled into Treasuries declined to 24% in the second half of 2003 from 54% for all of 2002. These signals, alone, may prove sufficient to accelerate the dollar�s slide from its perch as the global numeraire .. ". More John Hathaway.

Over Spending. Pete Du Pont on the disaster of the GOP spending binge.

Quotable Steyn: "Did you know a couple of weeks ago the president signed an $820-billion appropriations bill that, among other boondoggles, puts Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the public dime? .. If rock 'n' roll requires federal funding, we might as well give up. A government with its fingers in every pie is unlikely to have enough left over for the handful of pies it should have its fingers in. It was summed up by Americans' only glimpse of the president on the morning of September 11, 2001: the commander in chief being informed of the first attack on the American mainland in nearly 200 years while speaking to grade-schoolers in Florida. That image encapsulates everything that is wrong with both parties' approach to government ..

The president should not be the national school superintendent, the pharmacist in chief, the curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or the inspector-general of Janet Jackson's breasts. And, if neither politicians nor the electorate understands that at a time of war, then republican government is doomed .. ".

Disney. Robert Musil is all over the Disney-Comcast story. Quotable: "The real advantage Comcast enjoys is that its management comes from Disney and is familiar with Disney's problems and potentials - and knows where the bodies are buried."

Academia. A constant problem with lefty academics is that many refuse to play with an honest deck. Et, tu DeLong?.

Fundamentalism Triumphant. Three out of five Americans believe that God flooded the earth and Noah built an ark to save all the animals -- and a host of other fundamentalist touch stones of the literal truth according to the Bible. So says a new ABC News poll of Americans. Ninty-one percent evangelical Protestants believe that Moses parted the Red Sea and led the jews out of Egypt ..

More Communists, Please. Actual letter in today's Duke Chronicle:

While my take on the word freedom may be slightly different than those of the Duke Conservative Union .. I do appreciate their efforts to call to our attention the lack of diversity in party affiliation among some Duke faculty .. I also want to know, where is the diversity? Where are the Greens, Labour, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists, the Workers Party, the Black Panthers, Puerto Rican independistas, etc...? Where is the truly wide range of partisan organizing that, across the globe, offers diversity in imagining options for the future?

Diane Nelson
Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology

Duke Bias Watch. Here's a shocker. Anti-American lefty George Soros to speak at lefty dominated Duke U. The university Provost and several Democrat Party members (i.e. PoliSci department professors) will participate in the event. Don't expect a conservative, libertarian, Republican or non-Democrat on the panel. Duke, essentially, won't hire any. The Soros event is sponsored and financed by a host of Duke academic departments & centers and the Provost himself. I'm shocked, shocked.

Academia. West Texans and the students at Sul Ross State U. are "ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, . . . just plain stupid". More NY Times & Larry Sechrest.

Academia. "If your temperament favors freedom without responsibility, then there are certain occupations that are a good fit. Academic life is one of them .. ". More Arnold Kling. Quotable:

The libertarian critique of Freedom Without Responsibility is that taking away responsibility leads to taking away freedom. The only way to provide collective benefits is by taxing those who work, save, and innovate. The more you try to alter market outcomes, the more you have to take away people's freedom. Friedrich Hayek warned that this was The Road to Serfdom. What he saw was that under both Communist Socialism in Russia and National Socialism in Germany, the loss of individual responsibility was accompanied by the eradication of freedom ..

Freedom Without Responsibility does not scale up to the level of society. As government takes over more responsibility from the individual, rewards start to accrue to the most ruthless and effective political operators .. As government tries to second-guess market processes, it makes matters worse instead of better. A remote central government is not suited to playing the role of what George Lakoff calls a nurturant parent ..

Freedom Without Responsibility may feel like a natural ideology for a cloistered academic. That does not make it an intelligent approach for public policy. Academics should correct for their natural biases by broadening their understanding of alternative points of view and by understanding the larger economic system. Adherence to any ideology, including liberalism, without question or re-examination, is what is really stupid ..

It's a blogosphere Carnival of Capitalists.

Election 2004. Don't miss Alex Tabarrok on John Edwards & his Coatless Girl story, which includes this "clothing has become so cheap and plentiful (partly because of textile imports, which Mr. Edwards has proposed to limit) that there is a glut of second-hand clothing, and consequently most clothing donated to charity is shipped abroad .." -- reporter John Tierney.

California. Red Skelton on U.S. Senate candidate Rosario Marin.

California. Exit California, exit poverty.

Election 2004. Get your Kerry-Fonda bumper stickers while they're hot.

Election 2004. Mrs. John F.'n Kerry -- Bankrolling the Far Left.

Academia. Edward Feser on "The Opium of the Professors". Quotable:

One would expect .. that a curriculum designed to impart to the young a sophisticated understanding of the intellectual foundations of this civilization would emphasize, for example: Plato and Aristotle, the Old and New Testaments, Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Smith, Burke and Tocqueville, Oakeshott and Hayek. But of course, it is extremely easy to acquire a bachelor's degree from a modern university without having encountered a single one of these figures or texts. It is also extremely easy for the student's sole encounter with the issues dealt with in such serious sources to be mediated instead by a steady diet of such spiritual poison as the shrill screeds of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, works which amount to little more than vulgar political pamphlets devoid of intellectual heft, third-rate even by left-wing standards.

Over Spending. In praise of The Family Budget Protection Act.

Over Spending. Blame Clinton -- Martin Feldstein, leader of the "What, Me Worry?" school of economics.

Academia. "When is the word �diversity� not tolerated on campus? When someone tries to put the word �intellectual� in front of it .. ". MORE John Leo.

TRADE WAR. Why don't we hear more about the ongoing trade war against the American worker? Free trade means the elimination of trade tarrifs -- taxes -- between people engaging in exchange. American businesses are allowed to engage in free trade with with foreign workers (either directly or via exchanged goods) -- but American businesses don't and can't engage in free trade with American workers. Why? Because the U.S. government has a huge wall erected between American workers and American business -- a trade wall of high taxation. Indeed the American government has effectively declared war -- a trade war -- against American workers and the businesses who wish to employ them.

I say "MR. PRESIDENT -- TEAR DOWN THAT WALL ".

How can anyone argue that American business should be allowed to engage in free -- untaxed --trade with overseas workers, and not at the same time advocate the complete elimination of the trade wall which exists between American workers and American employers? All of the arguments for free trade between American businesses and foreign employees and foreign goods apply no less to American employees and American goods. BUT THERE IS NO FREE TRADE BETWEEN AMERICAN WORKERS AND AMERICAN COMPANIES. A huge trade wall of taxation stands between American firms and American workers. With every American job that is "outsourced" overseas, a huge trade wall of taxation in the order of 30% and more is immediately removed between employer and employee. It is time, America, to TEAR DOWN THAT WALL and tear it down right here at home.

UPDATE: And don't miss this one on Outsourcing, Unemployment Statistics and the Black Market for Immigrant Labor.

Quotable Steyn: "Thanks to Kerry in his Hanoi Jane period, Vietnam was a disaster for America that gave the establishment a wholly irrational fear of almost every ramshackle Third World basket case on the planet. Look at what everyone from Arthur Schlesinger to Chris Matthews wrote about the ''unconquerable'' Afghans only two years ago. That defeatism was the Kerry legacy from the '70s: a terrified, Kerrified America. If he wants to fight Campaign 2004 on Vietnam, then, as he would say, bring it on .. ". MORE Steyn.

The World. A conversation between Samuel Huntington & Anthony Giddens. Quotable:

Huntington: "The extent to which communal violence in today's world involves Muslims is striking: The Economist identified 32 major conflicts going on in the world in the year 2000, and if you look at those 32 conflicts more than two-thirds involve Muslims fighting other Muslims or Muslims fighting non-Muslims."

Giddens: "I think Max Weber .. got it right when he argued that the origin of the West is fundamentally to be traced to the rule of law, and especially the impersonal rule of law. No other cultures had the impersonal rule of law and it is from this that a great deal of civil liberties stem."

Economics. "In a world economy, firms that forgo cheaper supplies of services are doomed to lose markets, and hence production. And companies that die out, of course, do not employ people . . ". -- More Jagdish Bhagwati.

Economics. "George W. Bush has become a master at one-sided economics. He pushed his tax cuts through Congress with the one-sided argument that reduced federal tax payments leave American taxpayers with more money to spend. When Americans spend their tax savings, more American goods will be produced. Hence, more American jobs will be created.

Bush never mentions the flip side of the tax reduction: the resulting hundreds of billions of dollars in annual budget deficits will force the federal government to borrow funds that cannot then be borrowed by American investors - and hence cannot be spent by American firms and the people they employ. The decline in demand for goods caused by the deficits can offset the rise in demand for goods brought about by the tax cuts. The net effect? Any job-creation effects of the fiscal policy will be largely, if not totally, neutralized .. ". -- Economist Richard McKenzie in today's OC Register.

Krauthammer on Global Freedom as American Foreign Policy -- the 2004 AEI Irving Kristol Lecture. Quotable:

Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan�s �evil empire� speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil .. ".

And this:

democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors, and generally more inclined to peace ..

Academia. Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left? by Edward Feser, Loyola Marymount U. Quotable:

The hegemony of the Left over the universities is so overwhelming that not even Leftists deny it. Whether the institution is public or private, a community college or an Ivy League campus, you can with absolute confidence predict .. the [leftist] curriculum .. What is surprising is how little attention is paid to the question of why the university has come to be so dominated by the Left .. There have been various theories presented, and many of them no doubt contain part of the answer. But none has gotten to the nub of the matter .. The present essay will survey the theories that have been proposed so far ..

1. The "survival of the left-est" theory ..

2. The "society as classroom" theory ..

3. The resentment theory ..

4. The "philosopher kings" theory .. As F.A. Hayek suggests in his essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism," for the average intellectual, it just stands to reason that the most intelligent people ought to be the ones running things. Of course, this assumes they are in general capable of running things better than others are, an assumption many of these purportedly always-questioning minds seem surprisingly unwilling to question. Yet there are very good reasons for questioning it, some of which are related to the failure of socialism discussed above. As Hayek himself has famously argued, large-scale social institutions are simply too complex for any human mind, however intelligent, to grasp in the amount of detail necessary to create them from scratch or redesign them from top to bottom in the manner of the socialist economic planner or political or cultural revolutionary. The collapse of the French Revolution into bloody chaos, its immediate Napoleonic sequel, the long decay and sudden collapse of the Soviet empire, and the institutionalized lunacy that was communism in general are only the most vivid and undeniable confirmations of this basic insight. Still, the intellectual is forever a sucker for the idea that things would be much better if only everyone would just go along with the vision of the world he and his colleagues have hashed out over coffee in the faculty lounge and in the pages of the academic journals. As Hayek put it in The Fatal Conceit, "intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence," and they will even find it scandalous to suggest that intelligence is the sort of thing that can be overvalued. But of course it can be, as long as it has limits, which even the most brilliant human being's intelligence does. To see this requires nothing more, though also nothing less, than simple humility -- something intellectuals tend to have in short supply, especially if their intellectual accomplishments are great.

5. The "head in the clouds" theory ..

6. The "class interest" theory ..

.. these theories .. seem to me to fail, even when taken collectively, to tell the whole story. For none of them accounts for a noteworthy fact about the views often taken by left-of-center intellectuals: the sheer perversity of those views -- the manner in which they not only differ from common sense, but positively thumb their nose at it with contempt.

And this:

Suffice it for now to note that there are clear counterexamples to the claim that academic opinion is a reliable guide to the truth -- the most glaring of which is the popularity of socialism, as an economic doctrine, among intellectuals for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Socialism as a vague kind of moral vision is, to be sure, very much alive among contemporary intellectuals; but, outside of the lightweight academic "disciplines," and particularly those completely innocent of empirical testing or theoretical rigor (contemporary literary theory, huge swaths of sociology, and much of what is done in highly politicized ethnic- and women's studies departments), no one takes socialist economics seriously anymore. The reason is not that intellectuals have gotten smarter, but rather that cold hard empirical reality has so decisively falsified socialism as an economic doctrine that even the otherworldly inhabitants of the Ivory Tower have had to take notice.

But -- and this is the point -- it shouldn't have taken a nightmarish seventy-year experiment in real-world socialism to break its grip over the intelligentsia. For it is not as if the theoretical arguments for the socialist economy were ever anywhere close to decisive in the first place: as a worked-out theoretical edifice, socialism never had much to be said for it, and was always more sentiment and bluff than serious, rigorous analysis, a way of expressing one's disapproval of capitalism rather than a realistic alternative.

Moreover, critics of socialism had always predicted the tyranny and economic incompetence that it turned out to exhibit when implemented, on the basis not only of common sense (which should have been enough) but also of sophisticated theory -- including the arguments of Mises and Hayek, who had, beginning in the 1920's, presented objections so powerful that it is difficult to see how any honest man could thereafter take socialism to be the rational default position in economics and politics.

In short, had neutral, dispassionately evaluated intellectual considerations alone ever been most intellectuals' motivation for adopting socialism, it would have been a minority view at best decades before the fall of communism. Here we have a vivid example of how emotion and fashion can, to the detriment of cool analysis, have as much of a hold over the mind of the intellectual as over that of the "ordinary" man -- albeit that, in this case, we are dealing with emotions and fashions that have .. more of a pull on intellectuals than on others.

Bias in Academia. "Robert Munger, chairman of the [Duke U.] political science department .. recalled a recent meeting in which he heard a fellow department chairman say it was Duke's job to confront conservative students with their hypocrisies and that they didn't need to say much to liberal students because they already understood the world.

"There was no big protest [at the meeting], and that was wrong," Munger said. Munger said the history department's political makeup surprised him, however. "Thirty-five Democrats and no Republicans? If you flip a coin 35 times, and it ends up heads every time, that's not a fair coin," he said. The people who say, 'I don't think ideology is appropriate in hiring would have to look at the process that provides such a skewed outcome," he said . . ". MORE.

Academia. "It would be good .. to have systematic evidence [of bais against conservatives in universities]. Gathering it, though, strikes me as a difficult proposition, because there is an unusually large amount of noise in the system. The problem is that although academics may be vicious and spiteful towards other academics with the wrong politics, there are so many other reasons for that sort of behavior .. ". -- MORE Atlantic Blog.

Bias -- at NBC News. Bob Arnot is fired by NBC, perhaps the best reporter working the war beat for any broadcast network. A huge loss for journalism and America.

The War. "The single most puzzling -- and arguably most important -- question of the day is the one no one raises in public: Why have we not been attacked again? .. ". -- MORE Charles Krauthammer.

Bias -- at the LA Times. Who would have guessed? Patterico reports on the spiking & spinning of the Kerry-Fonda photos.

Richard Lamm on immigration -- the ultimate environmental issue.

When it comes to social evolution and judge made law the slippery slope is not a fallacy but something on the order of a law of physics. Friedrich Blowhard explains Unintended Consequences As The Foundation of Constitutional Rights.

An interview with Philip Kitcher, philosopher of science.

War & Deceit. "The Democrats� personal attack on the President over the war is not only imprudent; it is also unprecedented .. It is a campaign that apparently knows no limits, adopting tactics that are as unscrupulous as they are reckless .. ". MORE David Horowitz.

U.S.A. Decay?. "The one thing you learn from history is that inattention to national finances is the surest sign of decay in global power. No one can be for long-term deficits and the war on terror. They negate each other. When people tell me to forget the debt because the war on terror trumps everything else, they are missing the fact that the deficit will kill this war sooner than any Baathist insurgent. The struggle abroad desperately requires reform and sacrifice at home .. " -- MORE Andrew Sullivan

Over Spending Crisis. "In the past two years, the united states has rediscovered the world. We've seen large increases in funding for all the instruments of American policy�military, political, economic and cultural. Spending on AIDS/HIV, tuberculosis and malaria initiatives has gone from $840 million in 2001 to a projected $2 billion in 2004. Whether you like or dislike specific aspects of George Bush's foreign policy, there's no denying he has outlined an ambitious role for America in the world. Except that within a few years this policy is likely to collapse .. ". -- MORE Fareed Zakaria

Economics. "The fact is that economic forecasting is not very good in general, and all administration forecasts tend to be fairly far off. For example, the last forecast made by Bill Clinton's CEA in January 2001 confidently predicted that there would be no recession. "Let me be clear," said CEA Chairman Martin Baily, "we don't think that we're going into a recession .. ". -- MORE Bruce Bartlett

Over Spending. "During his two terms in office, Clinton increased domestic discretionary spending by 10 percent. Bush, in not quite one full presidential term, has already increased domestic discretionary spending by 25 percent." -- Tim Noah fisks Bush's MTP claims on "discretionary" spending.

Bias -- at the LA Times. Who knew?

Choice Theory. "I enjoy teaching statistics in high school even more than I enjoy teaching economics. Part of the reason is that the Advanced Placement exam in statistics is so much better than the exam in economics. You can pass the economics AP just by memorizing some verbal jargon and graphical tricks. For statistics, you really need to understand the subject. Last year's statistics exam, for example, had an excellent question about decision-making under uncertainty .." MORE Arnold Kling.

Academia. The fight to restore academic freedom on America's one-party campuses. And here is David Horowitz on academic diversity and the fight for academic freedom. Important stuff folks.

Over Spending. "The most revealing factoid about the Bush administration's budget is this: After scouring the entire $2.4 trillion of federal spending, the White House found 65 programs that it deemed so unneeded or ineffective that they should be eliminated. How much do these programs cost? About $4.9 billion. Although that's a lot of money, it's only 0.2 percent of federal spending -- two-tenths of 1 percent. This qualifies as an aggressive assault on government spending?

There's the budget problem in a nutshell: Government programs are virtually immortal. Because nothing can ever be revoked, the budget becomes a perpetual motion machine for higher spending .. It will be said that Bush's budget is "irresponsible." But the irresponsibility does not lie in today's deficits .. The irresponsibility lies in the administration's unwillingness to look beyond the business cycle and present a balanced budget -- ever. It won't say: "Here's a desirable level of spending; the public benefits justify the taxes." Democrats commit the same sin." -- Robert Samuelson

Williams-Sonoma founder Chuck Williams profiled.

When it comes to drugs George Bush is all about subsidizing big business and harming the market -- Bruce Bartlett. Quotable:

The worst example of subverting conservatism to aid business is the recently enacted Medicare drug benefit, which the Bush administration rammed through Congress with unprecedented pressure. This legislation will cost trillions of dollars. A key reason for the high cost is that it applies to all elderly, including those who already have drug coverage from their employers or private insurance. It would have cost a fraction as much to aid only those without drug coverage.

The incredibly more expensive option was chosen exclusively to benefit big businesses. The universal option justified the inclusion of large business subsidies in the legislation in order to keep companies from simply dropping their retiree drug coverage and dumping it all on the taxpayer. Some large companies are anticipating hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government in coming years -- funds that go straight to their bottom lines because it relieves them of a liability they already have.

A Feb. 3 report in The Wall Street Journal notes that Delphi, an auto parts manufacturer, expects to reduce its future retiree health care costs by $500 million as a result of the drug legislation. And it has only 14,000 retirees and dependents to cover. Much bigger companies like General Motors and Lucent Technologies will save vastly more. The former has 440,000 retirees and dependents to cover, and the latter has 240,000.

I predict that when the federal government starts mailing checks for tens of millions of dollars to big corporations to subsidize them for keeping health coverage they have already promised their retirees, the excrement will hit the fan ..

Another reason to hate Microsoft.

Academia. "Democrats outnumber Republicans in the departments of History, Literature, Sociology, and English [at Duke U.] by 32-to-0, 11-to-0, 9-to-0, and 18-to-1 margins." MORE.

Federal Spending Spree �- By the Numbers.

Steyn on the Default Democrat. Quotable:

The Seventies - the Kerry decade - was the only point in the Cold War in which the eventual result seemed in doubt. The Communists seized real estate all over the globe, in part because they calculated that the post-Vietnam, Kerrified America would never respond. In the final indignity, when the proto-Islamist regime in Teheran seized the embassy hostages, they too shrewdly understood how thoroughly Kerrified America was. It took Mrs Thatcher's Falklands war and Reagan's liberation of Grenada to reverse the demoralisation of the West that Kerry did so much to advance.

How cold is cold? The science of wind chill.

The Wall Street Journal -- "the [Republican] party is morphing into what it once sought to unseat--big-spending politicians, interested only in holding onto power."

TheStreet's Peter Eavis -- "Bush drives the nation towards bankruptcy". Note well. Federal spending has increased $500 billion per year since 2000 -- and the country is currently running a $500 billion per year deficit. No spending increase, no deficit. It's as simple as that. But the President and the GOP Congress have been doubling and tripling budgets throughout the government -- and on top of that they've created several gigantic new spending programs.

Let be honest folks -- can we handle honesty? -- the true job killers are the politicians -- the far left tax and regulate politicians who dominate many state governments. Want to talk about outsourcing? Think about how many companies are doing all things possible to get jobs out of California -- the tax and regulate madhouse of the Left coast. (The Governator has basically been rolled by the far Left California legislature). Quotable:

Every year, CFO magazine asks financial executives to assess the business-friendliness tax policy of their respective states, which the magazine then compiles and ranks. Ranking in the bottom ten? California, New York, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Massachusetts -- the very states that seem to be bleeding jobs. The most recent unemployment figures from the Labor Department put California, Texas, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan all in the bottom ten there, too, all with unemployment rates at 7.0% or higher.

The Small Business Survival Committee also puts out a report ranking the states on business-friendly public policy. In the SBSC report, Ohio ranks 39th, New York 45th and California 46th. Oregon, also with one of the country's highest unemployment rates, ranks 41st. A 2003 ranking by the Tax Foundation focusing mainly on tax policy and business tells the same story. It puts California 49th, Ohio 47th, and New York 44th.

Outsourcing? You better believe it.

American business journalism is being offshored to India. As Daniel Drezner points out, expect this issue to become a much, much bigger story now that it touches the financial wellbeing of the journalists who generate the news.

John Fund asks "Is Congress's GOP majority becoming as corrupt as the Democrats were?". Quotable:

Republicans should view .. the [$2.5 million] bidding war for [Rep. Billy] Tauzin on K Street as warning signs of ideological dry rot. No matter how well gerrymandered their districts, the GOP majority could be in jeopardy if it develops the same reputation for ruthlessness and selfishness that burdened the Democrats in the early 1990s. If Republicans consolidate their control over Washington while failing to reduce the size of government, they will inevitably be caught up in the care and feeding of the state. Industries that want favors or protection from government will seek out and hire powerful people to move the levers of power. F.A. Hayek warned decades ago against the dangers of a creeping corporate welfare state: "As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of the directing power."

"They were all over Karl [Rove] on immigration and spending" -- Congressman Tom Tancredo, describing Republican Congressmen at a GOP Congressional retreat. Article: "GOP slams Bush policies at retreat". More: "Republicans at the retreat said immigration and overspending had emerged as the top two issues in their home districts. 'I just got the results of a poll in our district, and it's 2-to-1 against the president's immigration plan,' a House member said confidentially." Heh.

"Two economists, Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois, and Stephen Ziliak of Roosevelt University, think their colleagues do a lousy job of making sense of figures, often falling prey to elementary errors. But their biggest gripe is that, blinded by statistical wizardry, many economists fail to think about the way in which the world really works .. " MORE. (via the Mises Blog). Quotable:

In medieval Holland, it was noted that there was a correlation between the number of storks living on the roof of a house and the number of children born within it. The relationship was so striking that, according to the rules of maths that govern such things, you could say with great confidence that the results were very unlikely to be merely random. Such a relationship is said to be �statistically significant�. But the Dutch folklore of the time that storks somehow increased human fertility was clearly wrong .. A failure to separate statistical significance from plausible explanation is all too common in economics .. Ms McCloskey and Mr Ziliak looked at all the AER articles in the 1990s, and found that more than four-fifths of them are guilty of the same sin. Indeed, so pervasive is the cult of statistical significance, say the authors, that ever more economists dispense altogether with the awkward question of whether the patterns they uncover have anything meaningful to say about the real world ..

Read an earlier version of the McCloskey & Ziliak paper here (pdf).

Economist Steven Horwitz turn 40 and takes a look back. Quotable:

But here I am at age 40, and almost everything we worried about has not come to pass .. Libertarian and related ideas have spread beyond their early narrow life in economics, political science, and philosophy to the other social sciences and humanities, as well as the arts and sciences. There is a virtual tidal wave of work on Hayek that's coming from all over the intellectual map. These are amazing developments that have exceeded what were my most optimistic expectations as an undergrad and grad student ..

When I look at my own career to this point, I actually have the same feeling of having exceeded my own expectations, but I think that success is at least as much about very good changes in the world that have made that success possible. I am by nature an unrelenting optimist, about both people and the future. I'm also convinced that we live in the best of times right now. We are, I would argue, freer, more prosperous, and more secure than any time in human history ..

Forty, shmorty. There's no time for moping when there's a world to enjoy and more progress to be made ..

Bush. George Will hits a home run. Just go read it.

Taking Hayek Seriously. Economists Barry Eichengreen & Kris Mitchener are taking Hayek seriously in their working paper "The Great Depression as a Credit Boom Gone Wrong" (pdf). Major empirical finding: those nations with the biggest credit expansions in the 1920s were hit with the largest economic contractions in the 1930s.

Eichengreen & Mitchener also echo "Austrian" macro econs like Roger Garrison and Friedrich Hayek in emphasizing that the full depth and length of the 1930s depression is best explained by a multiplicity of factors, and certainly isn't solely explained by the height of the antecedent credit expansion of the 1920s.

Chemical weapons found. Quotable:

The female of one firefly species that doesn't naturally produce toxic substances lures males of a species that does by faking the frequency of its mating signal and then, when a male shows up with romance in mind, quickly kills and eats him, acquiring both dinner and immunity from attack.

A review of For Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner.

Howard Dean picks up another big endorsement.

A Hayekian Wakeup Call for the Federal Reserve. Quotable:

With the recovery well along, however, it's time to reevaluate the Administration's economic policy. In my view, Bush's tax cut policy should be made a permanent part of the economic landscape .. Federal Reserve policy is another matter entirely. Economists generally maintain that interest rates must decrease and the Fed must provide additional liquidity when the economy is in recession. Fine, the Fed has done just that. The recession officially ended more than 20 months ago, and today the overall economy is remarkably robust. Clearly, monetary stimulus is no longer necessary; indeed, if continued, it is likely to be harmful.

Real interest rates (interest rates adjusted for inflation) are at a 30-year low and the real federal funds rate (the bank-to-bank interest rate) is nearly negative. This is now spectacularly incorrect monetary policy given the current economic reality. To see why this is so it must be understood that the Fed creates low interest rates by purchasing government securities from financial institutions ("open market operations") the effect of which is to increase liquidity (credit) throughout the financial system. The "new" money created by the Fed is then lent out or invested by these financial institutions and finds its way into the economy.

As an example, here in Southeastern Florida the effects of the Fed's excess liquidity are all around us in the form of a housing "boom." Easy credit allows developers to purchase and clear land and allows builders (and their customers) to borrow and build, borrow and build. Now some home building is, of course, appropriate, but the recent vast expansion in residential housing (and the increase in prices) mostly has been fueled by "easy money" from the Federal Reserve. Absent the Fed expansion, homebuilders and developers would only be able to borrow what others had saved in savings, and interest rates would be far higher. It is time for the Fed to wean the economy back to levels of economic investment that are sustainable without Federal Reserve credit.

Higher rates will serve two purposes. First, as already argued, they will slow the pace of investment in areas where investment has been too rapid and where inflationary problems are already apparent. Second, they will increase the private savings by providing increased incentives to save. Home building will not "collapse" as the Fed withdraws liquidity; higher interest rates will encourage private savers to increase their savings, which will then fund an appropriate and sustainable amount of new investment. Further, since rates on CD's and other fixed income assets will increase, savers will be rewarded with high incomes, which they can spend or invest.

Unfortunately the Federal Reserve has pledged publicly to maintain low rates (that is, easy money) into the foreseeable future (or at least until the next national election). Bad idea. The real estate price bubble and the weakening dollar against gold and the Euro are signaling that real interest rates must increase. By continuing its anti-recession monetary policy into the recovery phase of the business cycle, the Fed risks sowing the seeds of the next business cycle downturn.

Economist Dom Armentano speaking truth to "idiot savants"1 -- the 3rd rate economists mathematician-"scientists" at the Federal Reserve.

1Anne Krueger et. al. "Report of the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics," The Journal of Economic Literature, volume XXIX Number 3, September 1991, pp. 1035-1053.

I've added the (mostly English language Laissez-faire Blog put out by the Liberanimus Institute in Bologna Italy to my blogroll. You'll find there a tasty sampling of classical true liberal views and events from Italy, American and around the world. Take a peek.

PRI's Lance Izumi on NRO -- "Bush should listen to Friedman and Hayek". Quotable:

The president seems not to fully realize that taxation and spending policies are more than just fiscal tools to improve economic performance or address group demands. In addition, these policies determine the extent of individual liberty in our society. In this regard, Bush should heed the advice of two Nobel Prize-winning economists and conservative icons, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek ..

Government spending on noble causes, even those staked out by Bush, still adversely affect the individual liberty of Americans. In his famed book Road to Serfdom, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, Hayek warned that when government seeks to impose specific effects on people, "It must, of necessity, take sides, impose its valuations upon people and, instead of assisting them in the advancement of their own ends, choose the ends for them." The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, has certainly been guilty of imposing the government's values on people in its choice of art projects to fund.

Hayek further observed "that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people." Although it may take generations, "even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine that spirit."

One can see such a transformation occurring in the American people. A people who once demanded "give me liberty or give me death," now say "give me a government program" as an answer to any perceived problem.

An expansionist government, even in the pursuit of noble causes, reduces freedom. That's why the current federal spending spree isn't just a budget issue, but a freedom issue. Given the unrest among his conservative base, President Bush must rediscover the importance of limited government to the maintenance of a free people and the promotion of a free society.

CBFL blogger Dale Franks brings you the latest Bear Flag League Roundup. Yeehaa!

If you haven't taken a peak lately, Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog is chock full of interesting stuff -- on copyright, constitutional liberty, judicial salaries, cost-benefit analysis and much more. Recommended.

Why are there so few non-left professors on campus? Here's one reason:

Every day, she used the classroom as a sounding board and she insulted the president whose policies are those of Republican lawmakers. One day she got up in front of the class and told us that the president could not be an historian and be a Republican. This hurt me very much because I am a conservative and I want to be a historian. Another time, she got up in front of the class and said that President Bush started the Iraqi war because he got a hard-on. I thought this was a very inappropriate way to be talking about the president. Instead of spending on history, my professor spends a significant amount of time lecturing on current programs of the Republicans and the president. When my peers or I tried arguing and tried to question or argue against her ideas, she ridiculed them, leaving the person feeling humiliated in front of the class. One of my more outspoken conservative peers began skipping classes because as she told the teacher, she was afraid to come to class ..

I am deeply discouraged about the idea of becoming a college professor because of what I see on campus. The severe lack of conservative faculty at my college and the way the conservative faculty is treated have led me to believe that I will have a hard time finding a position if I do decide to become a college professor. I have given serious thought about teaching at the collegiate level, but currently I do not see this as a realistic possibility until hiring and firing practices is free from discrimination.

And this:

My name is Kelly Wiest. I am an adjunct instructor in the political science department at Metro State .. I am finding that there are many students at our colleges, especially at my college, who are made to feel isolated and intimidated regarding their political opinions .. more

UPDATE: Patterico reacts: "The part that amazed me was a student describing required reading at his school: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Michael Moore."

Bush wants bigger Social Security checks for non-Americans who didn't put a penny in the system. You work, they spend .. and spend .. and spend. Now, go work some more please.

George W. Nixon Watch. Mickey�Kaus:

I recently talked with an old friend who is employed by the federal government at one of the important agencies. I asked how things were going at work. My friend said:

"I've never seen an administration spend money like this since the days of CETA. The money's flying out the door. I can barely keep up with it. ... They give money away on telephone calls! No documents. No budget. It's the worst I've ever seen it."

According to my friend, all this spending is designed to build political support. ... I've instinctively doubted that Bush is as guilty of excessive spending as the administration's critics (right and left) claim. Mainly, I figured, it was a matter of failing to restrain a congenitally spendthrift Congress. If what my friend says is true, I was wrong. We really are in a Nixonian situation--a president spending irreesponsibly in large part to buy support for a war. (Remember that the silliest excesses of big government, including the double indexation of Social Security benefits, occurred not under a Democratic president but under Nixon.) ...

"Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out .. ". more. Well, state of the union speeches would be very different .. and what would become of Michael Moore?

Got to love this:

Researchers at Oxford spent 10 years studying homing pigeons using GPS and were stunned to find the birds often don't navigate by taking bearing from the sun. Instead they fly along motorways, turn at junctions and even go around roundabouts, adding miles to their journeys ..

Everything you ever wanted to know about John Kerry as told by a Boston Herald columist.

NAS report -- don't believe the hydrogen car hype. Government hydro car programs promise only to waste taxpayer billions on a high pollution car which simply isn't economical. But you already knew that, didn't you?

It's Friday, here's your weekly Krauthammer. Quotable:

.. upon returning to a world of mortal conflict with people who really want you destroyed, you instinctively want someone not new to the idea of war. There is far more instinct than logic at play here. After all, the two greatest wartime presidents in American history were Lincoln, who served at most four months in the Illinois militia, and FDR, who served not at all. Moreover, there are a lot of impressive warriors you would not want near the presidency. Douglas MacArthur, for one. Wesley Clark, for another ..

It looks to me like the U.S beef industry is too dumb to understand that they have a serious public relations problem on their hands, with the continued practice of cycling slaughtered cow proteins back to cattle as feed. Simply from standpoint of public relations this looks like an industry set on putting a gun to its own head.

Bush Credibility Crisis. Truly disturbing analysis from Bruce Bartlett. Quotable:

Today, Congress can get all the budgetary detail it wants from CBO. Moreover, it is required by law only to use CBO estimates of the cost of budgetary proposals when considering them. Sadly, this became a loophole that the Bush administration was able to exploit to get its ill-conceived Medicare drug bill passed.

The administration knew that Congress' budget resolution provided only $400 billion over 10 years to pay for the drug benefit. Even a penny higher and theoretically the bill would have been subject to a point of order that would have delayed its passage. Any figure much larger than $400 billion would have killed it entirely.

Therefore, it was very disturbing when The New York Times reported on Jan. 30 that the Bush administration's internal estimate was that the drug bill passed by Congress would actually cost $534 billion over 10 years. There is absolutely no question that if Congress had known this figure, the bill would have gone down to defeat ..

And this:

This brings us to the most important chapter in President Bush's budget, one titled "Stewardship." Buried in an appendix volume where reporters are unlikely to notice, it paints a chilling picture of long-term budgetary trends. It shows federal spending rising from about 20 percent of the gross domestic product this year to 53 percent in 2080.

U.S. Senate Candidate Rosario Marin on immigration, extradition and U.S.-Mexican relations.

Hayek on C-SPAN II cable network.

Saturday, Feb. 7 at 8:00 pm EST & Sunday, Feb. 8 at 11:00 pm EST

Hayek's Challenge & Hayek's Journey

with Bruce Caldwell and Alan Ebenstein.

Description -- From the Cato Institute, Bruce Caldwell, author of "Hayek's Challenge," and Alan Ebenstein, author of "Hayek's Journey," discuss their biographies of Austrain economist Friedrich A. Hayek.

Alan Ebenstein talks about Hayek's views on such topics as freedom of association, legalization of drugs, and limited government. Bruce Caldwell discusses Hayek's economic philosophy and describes how it developed. Commentary is provided by former House majority leader Dick Armey. All three panelists answer questions from the audience following their remarks.

UPDATE: Or watch it right now on the internet here (RealVideo) or listen here (RealAudio).

GMU economics Professor Peter Boettke on where to go to grad school if you'd like to study economics. Quotable:

If you want to be a major academic go to the best school you can go to that will pay your full way and hope that means Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, MIT --- the next 5 are good, and the next 10 are ok, and then after that all programs are equally suspect in a certain sense.

.. the key issue isn't whether I go to Clemson or Florida State or Georgia or Claremont McKenna or GMU. The key issue is whether I get into Harvard, MIT, Stanford or Chicago, and if I don't, then what niche market school best fits my needs that will pay the full way for me to go to school.

.. [George Mason University's] strength --- [is simply that it's] the best weird place to study economics in the world. If your interest is in public choice, we are a leading center for that (with a Nobel Prize to prove it and one that should have been given that we are waiting for justice to Tullock -- but not with our breaths held). If you are interested in experimental economics, well we have that too (and a Nobel to prove it). If your interest is in Law and Economics, well our law school program is great (ranked in the top tier of American law schools) and our law and economics program according to one ranking had us in the top 5 programs. And we are now estabilishing a new program in religion and economics, and of course we have the Austrian program as well.

.. the proof of the strength of the GMU program is scene in the placement of our students in good quality jobs. I define a good quality job as a tenure track appointment at a school that requires 3-3 teaching and less, average SATs around 1200, and pay at or above the national average for assistant professors in economics. Our best students consistently beat this standard and usually have multiple offers to consider for university professorships. I believe that outcompete many of our rivals in terms of student placement. There is a simple formula that must be followed to achieve this success:

PhD in hand (or close to it) + refereed publication(s) + good teaching evaluations + you are not a lunch tax == good job

Too often students fail to meet this formula and they cannot get a job and then they complain about the school they went to when in reality it is their inability to meet the standard by which the market judges you.

Bottom line --- got to the best school you can get into that will pay your full way. Getting into a top school where you pay your own way will not pan out (it is like being a walk on at a major college for sports -- sometimes it works, but it is rare. Absent that, think about law school rather than economics. If you still need to get a PhD in economics, got to the school that will pay you that you are more comfortable with and then once there work hard --- you can overachieve (e.g., John List is a great example of an overachiever in the field of experimental economics). Publish, publish, publish, when you teach be responsible and do a high quality job, and when you meet with people be decent and not a jerk. It is pretty much common sense and it works.

I should add that George Mason University has the very best representation of economists in the world who understand Friedrich Hayek, classical liberalism and the economics of the real world. Better than Harvard, better than Stanford, better than the U. of Chicago. Much better, if truth be told.

The latest by Steve Horwitz on same sex marriage.

"Thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly from Central and South America, are being released into the USA almost immediately after they are picked up by the Border Patrol ... " -- USA Today. And this: "U.S. officials acknowledge [that the catch and release policy] represents a significant gap in homeland security."

David Bernstein has some cranky -- but true -- remarks on Bush, voting and the (rationally) ignorant boobs who elect our leaders.

Michael Rappaport of The Right Coast has co-authored a constitutional solution to the federal overspending problem.

My own view has long been that an institutional solution to the overspending problem is the only one which has any possibility of working -- having good people in office isn't enough. Even good people working collectively within the current institutional structure can hardly do else but produce bad government. And framework we have now is system where usually the less than best get to the top -- indeed, only the less than best are motivated to participate. Bravo Michael! Poving once again that the (classical) liberals are the smart party.

Anne Applebaum -- Auschwitz Under Our Noses.

Virginia Postel is right. Marginal Revolution is on a roll.

Daniel Drezner -- are we reliving 1984?

Have a degree in economics? Want to go to grad school? Like the work of Hayek? Sympathetic with classical liberalism? Where the hell to go to grad school then? -- well, Walter Block has some suggestions. Be sure to scroll all of the way down to reader comments.

Brad DeLong

1. The Bush budget number for 2009 omits about $160 billion in costs for programs that the administration wants enacted.

2. The Bush budget limits itself to five years--to 2009--rather than the ten years of Clinton budgets because the Bush administration doesn't want journalists to pay attention to the effects of its policies in 2010-2014, and thinks that the press is so gullible and lazy that if it doesn't report 2010-2014 effects the press won't write about them.

3. Extending the Bush tax cuts would blow an annual $250 billion hole in the budget in the 2009-2012 presidential term.

4. $400 billion in 2009 and $700 billion by 2014 are better forecasts of the deficit that would be produced by the policies the Bush administration advocates.

5. Long-run budget projections show clearly that the [federal] budget is on an unsustainable path.

Drezner has an interesting piece on grad school dropouts which references this Chicago Tribune story. Research indicates that most grad students drop out because faculty advisors have little involvement with them. Tenured faculty bring in grad students to teach their classes and do their research -- but commonly their interest in grad students doesn't extend much beyond that. The drop out rate for grad students is 50 percent.

See also this and this. Then, of course, there's this factor:

[Marge, Bart, and Lisa go to their local "Bookaccino" superbookstore.]
LISA: I'm going up to the fourth floor, where the books are!
BART: I'm going to taunt the Ph.Ds!
[Bart approaches the three workers at the espresso bar, all of whom wear glasses and bored expressions.]
BART: Hey guys! I heard a new assistant professorship just opened up!
[Ph.D'd baristas gasp and lean forward eagerly.]
BART: Yes, that's right. At the University of ... PSYCH!

-- The Simpsons.

Virginia Postrel:

It's amazing how much damage those Bushes can do by being nice.

Immigration. Memo to Tyler Cowen -- all of these things are already evident in Southern California. Cowen writes:

Let us think about immigration policy in general terms. Here are some basic options: 1. Let everyone in. ... Start with #1 .. which to my mind won't work in today's world. I do favor increased levels of immigration, but not laissez-faire. What are the problems?

a. American cities and suburbs would become ringed with shantytowns
b. American hospitals and medical facilities would become overburdened
c. Some immigrants would pose threats to public order
d. Assimilation might become more difficult, as the numbers of immigrants from each region increase
e. The political backlash would be enormous

In fact, (1) the borders are pretty much open to unlimited immigration along the California-Mexico border. (a) The San Diego Union-Tribune and other papers have documented a large population of immigrants living in canyons, open fields, and elsewhere. (b) The LA Times has an article about every other week on our hospital system in crisis. The problem is widely evident to everyone. You can't go to an emergency room anywhere in Southern California and not wait for hours to see a doctor. (c) The prisons in Southern California are stuffed to the gills with non-native Americans. Soon the non-native prison population will pass 50 percent. And it is against LA police department policy to pick up a convicted and deported felon loitering on the street -- nasty known criminals organized in street gangs. This is the daily topic of KFI radio hosts John and Ken, who have an audience larger than the circulation of the LA Times.(d) Finally, the political backlash in California has been enormous -- we just turned out a governor, as much because of the budget busting cost of illegals and because of his signing of a drivers licences bill for illegals as for any other reason.

So folks living outside of California are just not living in reality when it comes to the future American crisis of continued overwhelming and ever accelerating immigration. I do, however, agree with Cowen when he writes:

If America becomes too much like the dark side of Brazil, our broader freedoms might erode. Healthy societies require a certain degree of consilience between cultural, economic, and political power.

Some perspective on Bush's budget trial ballon from David Bernstein:

Bush's "Radical" Budget: Bush's latest budget apparently isn't as profligate as his first three, but the way the Times and Post are going on, you would think we were seeing the second coming of Grover Cleveland (whose portrait proudly hangs in my office). Here is the money quote from the Post: "In all, Bolten said, the budget would kill 65 federal programs and significantly trim 63 others. That would save $4.9 billion in the next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1." Remember, that's $4.9 billion out of a $2.4 trillion budget; after a 20%+ real increase over three years; and after adding a new budget-busting Medicare entitlement. That Bush is really taking an axe to the budget!

Mark Steyn does a truth exam on John Kerry.

The rise of modern conspiracy theorizing during the age of Reason.

Here is an outline of Bush's budget proposal. Note well. This is only a proposal. What gets promised and what gets done haven't been the same thing. Note that there are actual proposed spending cuts. Proposed.

Stephen Moore weighs in. Quotable:

The president will predictably boast that this is a lean budget that spends money judiciously on top national priorities like homeland security and not a penny more. He will try to assure conservatives that this budget limits the growth of federal non-defense, non-security spending (social programs) to less than 2 percent. His Democratic rivals will complain that this is a penny-pinching budget that under-funds education, health care, the environment, and on down the line.

They are both wrong. A federal budget that will spend more money in a single year than the entire GDP of France and three times what it cost to fight World War II can hardly be disparaged as inadequate or celebrated as tight-fisted. Uncle Sam, Inc., will spend more money in just this year than it spent combined between 1787 and 1900 � even after adjusting for inflation. Ironically enough, we are now celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Newt Gingrich's bold declaration that "we Republicans will make government smaller and smarter." It didn't exactly turn out that way ..

If you took all our government spent and divided it evenly among all families of four in America, each family would be more than $50,000 richer. This is double the level of spending in 1960 and fourteen times the amount government spent in 1900 ..

In 1940 there were 4 million Americans working for government and 11 million working in manufacturing. Today, there are 7 million more Americans working for government (21.5 million) than in all manufacturing industries (14.5 million). We have shifted from an economy of people who make things, to an economy of people who tax, regulate, subsidize, and outlaw things ..

President Bush has allowed the budget to grow by 8 percent per year after inflation in his first three budgets .. In his bloated budget for 2005, the president seeks funds to keep marriages intact, to prevent overeating, to encourage teenagers not to have sex, and to help give Americans the willpower to stop smoking ..

UPDATE: Dean's Worldprovides a critique of Moore.

Once there were giants -- huge insects dominating the earth. Why then and not now? How can you not love science?

"Look, if balancing the budget is called liberal in America, let's go.''

-- Presidential Candidate John Kerry.

The WSJ:

For the first time in his Presidency --and the first time in Washington since 1995 -- Mr. Bush is requesting that domestic, non-defense spending be restrained. This is only a proposal, and we won't know if the President means it ..

Think about that. This is Bush's biggest cheer leader in the press -- and they don't know if they trust him. This is a bellwether of the President's growing credibility problem. And it's not like the issue of credibility is one that comes out of nowhere with Bush. Unfortunately, even going into the Presidency Mr. Bush had a serious built in credibility problem with the American people -- one inherited directly from his father ("read my lips") and from his own history of -- shall we say -- lack of seriousness. Call him a man with a recovering case of trust-fund-itis. This background credibility problem pops out most dramatically when Bush is compared to Sen. Kerry. As Robert Novak puts it:

Most worrisome to Republicans is Kerry's war hero image while, in the words of one prominent Bush supporter, ''our guy was drinking beer in Alabama''.

For some, Bush's history during the Vietnam period gives him a lack of credibility on the issue of putting your life where your mouth is. It is this sort of background credibility problem which is feeding all of Bush's current political troubles. More Novak:

Bush may be facing the bane of incumbents: lack of credibility. That caused Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson not to seek another term and helped defeat Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush for re-election [Novak should have mentioned that Nixon's credibility problem finished off Ford, when Ford got the stick of Nixon all over himself with the Nixon pardon. -- ed.] .. Bush is reeling from a double blow to his credibility. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq .. [and] the White House revelation that the new Medicare plan will cost one-third more than the president predicted ..

But the issue is much bigger than this. It's the issue of the whole fate of the country. No one has been fired or even reprimanded for the security and intelligence failures of 9/11 -- and ditto those concerning Iraq and Afghanistan. Over time when the expected doesn't happen, you begin to look for answers in personality and character of the President. Is he just not paying attention? Is he in a bubble (the current line of Klein, Sullivan and others in the press). Is he looking out for himself and not the country? Is he not smart enough? Is he spending too much time playing with the dog and fishing at the lake. Why no action?

And, talking about the fate of the nation, a bigger issue -- even if you can't imagine it yet -- is the seemingly unstoppable fiscal meteor impact of federal spending accelerating at the speed of sound -- with boomer retirements on the way -- an impending explosion of wasted capital and wealth draining debt which could cripple the working people of the country for generations to come.

And where is Bush's credibility on this one? On fiscal responsibility and free market economics his rhetoric has been utterly belied by his deeds. It's been "read my lips" all the way to the pig trough, and Joe and Sue Taxpayers have been played as suckers all the way. President Bush must be the only Republican President is known history who hasn't vetoed a dozen or more irresponsible spending bills sent to him by Congress. In fact, Bush seems to have lost his pen -- at least his veto pen. He's never vetoed any new proposal for massive spending increases coming out of Congress -- he's signed them all, with the spending pen, which never seems to get misplaced.

Here's Krugman on Bush's credibility problem:

Well, whaddya know. Even as the Republican leadership strong-armed the Medicare drug bill through Congress, the administration was sitting on estimates showing that the plan would cost at least $134 billion more than it let on. But let's not make too much of the incident. After all, it's not as if our leaders make a habit of faking their budget projections. Oh, wait. The budget released yesterday, which projects a $521 billion deficit for fiscal 2004, is no more credible than its predecessors. When the administration promises much lower deficits in future years, remember this: two years ago it projected a fiscal 2004 deficit of only $14 billion ..

This is going to be an issue that won't go away folks.

Your weekly Carnival of the Capitalists.

Major News. Somehow the NY Times managed to bury the lede:

And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

cross posted at Liberty & Power.

The Ideas and Impact of F. A. Hayek -- a live event today (Monday) at the CATO Institute, broadcast in streaming video or audio. Click on these links at 4 p.m. Eastern or 1 p.m. Pacific to catch the event -- which features Bruce J. Caldwell, author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek and Alan Ebenstein, author of Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek -- with comments by Dick Armey, Former professor of economics, former House majority leader, and cochairman, Citizens for a Sound Economy.

More on gay marriage from Steven Horwitz.

Catallarchy fisks an anti-free market article by a BusinessWeek columnist. Don't you just love those anti-market folks in the business press? These have got to be some of the most unhappy J-school grads in journalism.

A NE Patriots fan sounds off -- In your face, Red-Staters! .. "Go back to your NASCAR, ya gap-toothed hillbillies! .. "

More reaction to George Will's "conservative" defense of a massive and expanding federal government -- Paul Mirengoff at Powerline argues that the correct conclusion is that George Bush simply isn't a conservative, a position Mirengoff has staked out before. See the posting for links. Mirengoff links to an article by Daniel Casse in Commentary (!) making the case for thinking that Bush is too a conservative. Well you don't say ..

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean�neither more or less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master�that�s all."

So, the question for the day is, "Do the neoconservatives own the language?"

You can track blogosphere reactions to the George Will's "Freedom vs. Equality" piece right here.

Will is likely writing in response to Andrew Sullivan's "Bush vs. Freedom".

Howard Bashman has 20 questions for Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt. This one is definitely worth a read, if you're at all interested in the law.

Here is my latest post at the Liberty & Power blog:

War, Murder, History

Ten years ago Harold Ransom was a physicist, sportsman, government bureaucrat. Today he's an historian. No one is more surprised than his family.

Dad got the history bug after his parents died. He wasn't much of a book reader, but he did like puzzles and projects. "Where did we come from" became his new leading puzzle and hobby. And there were some mysteries here. He knew that his grandfather had murdered a man, and his great grandfather on the other side of the family had come alone from German -- then changed his name.

In fact, dad soon learned that men on both sides of the family had changed their names. One name change is still a mystery -- the other soon was explained by the facts surrounding the murder. But just what those facts were wasn't at all immediately clear.

It was known that the man's original name had been Boon -- changed to Brown -- and that he'd come from North Carolina. The murder had involved a bar fight and some ill-chosen words about Boon's mother. So, at least, the official record indicates. Murder, escape, cross-country journey, a new wife, a new child, a new identity in Oregon.

Boon. With that name, an some letters indicating a wife and children left behind in a small town in North Carolina, dad set about reconstructing the history of the paternal side of his mother's family. It wasn't long before folks in North Carolina confirmed that the Boons were part of a family which sometimes went by the name Boone. Boone. Hmm. But North Carolina, not Tennessee. And then came one of dad's significant discoveries, made the old fashioned way with research in church and government archives. These Boone's were directly related to the most famous of all American Boone's -- Daniel Boone. In fact, dad discovered that he was a direct descendent of Daniel Boone's father. Indeed, Daniel Boone had raised the children of dad's ancestors when Daniel Boone's older brother and wife were killed by TB.

By chance and hard work dad had anchored his little story of family drama into one of the great iconographic stories of American history. Not bad for a man once better know for leaving most books unread ..

I'll pick up this thread in a later post.

George Will gives three cheers for an ever expanding federal government. Is it just me, or does George Will sound here about as well connected in reality as a high flying Michael Jackson? And aren't we all tired of this bait and switch "liberal" and "conservative" wordplay? As Lincoln liked to say, "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Calling Bush's massive expansion of federal power amd spending "conservative" no more makes it conservative than does calling a dogs tail a 'leg' make the thing a leg. Reagan Republicans continue to get their rear section handed to them by former Democrats in "neoconservative" bow ties. What's a libertarian? A Reagan Republican mugged by a gang of "neoconservatives" -- i.e. one-time Stevenson Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans, and Stom Thurmond Dixiecrats.

Finally, it's an "elephant in the livingroom" lie to interpret the inevitable outcome of a screw-your-neighbor political system as "public opinion" or "the will of the people". What people want and what the logic of the system produces are two very different things. And George Will (and Glenn Reynolds) don't have to be any smarter than the paperboy to know it. It's been obvious for a long time that Madison's Constitution has failed the test of the purposes found in Federalist #10. Can you say logrolling? Can you say, "what have you done for the district?" This has nothing to do with any "common good" which people want for the country. It has everything to do with picking your neighbors pocket because he's damn well already picking your own pocket. In the military we called this a "cluster f**k". Teenagers would call it a "circle j**k". It doesn't take fancy rational choice theory to understand. So, I'm sick of the lie that "American's are getting the government they want". Indeed, Americans are rationally ignorant of just how much government they are getting -- or how much government they might want. Al Sharpton thinks that the super rich are being taxed at a 5% tax rate -- and their taxes should be "raised" to, say 15%. For Sharpton's purposes, he's perfectly rational to be completely uninformed about the facts of the matter, for what difference it will possibly make to the successful pursuit of his own personal aims.

(Semi-technical aside. It's rather clear that for all the difference it could ever make in the causal nexus of the universe, a single individual is never acting rationally by voting, or even following political events. There is just no chance that a single vote from a single point of view can make any difference in the whole scheme of things. In a national election, it's never happened, and the experience of Florida should show you that it really can't ever happen. There are a dozen other factors which intervene before that single vote could be the deciding factor -- and this is just another thousand lottery rolls of probability on top of the effectively zero odds that a national election will come down to a single cast vote.)

So are Americans choosing the government they want? Are they even thinking clearly and well about the problem? Rational choice theory tells us that we shouldn't expect them to think any clearer or well than Peter Pan political commentator George Will. And if they do happen to think clearly about it, choice theory tells us plainly that the logic of the situation will still drive them to make expedient and collectively destructive choices they would never have made if choosing directly for the common good as a whole. Ask a Congressman and he'll tell you. He's voting for the good of his district, and he's not worrying about the good of the country. And if he doesn't tell you that, he's lying. Trust me.

As they say, it ain't rocket science folks.

Boot Boxer. Here is the radio spot Rosario Marin is running on talk radio in Southern California. She's up against Bill Jones and some others in the Republican primary which will decide who takes on Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate race. Hey, I managed to write this without saying one hideous thing about Barbara Boxer.

Professor Bainbridge wonders -- can fiscal conservatives cost Bush the election?. Bainbridge has an interesting link to a column on Bush's amnesty for illegals proposal by Phyllis Schafly. She doesn't seem particularly excited by the idea.

Thomas Friedman -- Bush administration's real vulnerability is its B.M.D. � Budgets of Mass Destruction, "which have recklessly imperiled the nation's future, with crazy tax-cutting and out-of-control spending ..". Friedman asks, "Is your future better off now than it was four years ago?.. ".

Want to write an op-ed for the NY Times? You might want to read this first.