March 31, 2004
The Nuclear Option.
Firms join hands to licence a new atomic power plant in America. Such a thing hasn't been dared since 1973.Mexico.
"Go into any discount store in Mexico and look at low-priced clothing, toys, shoes and electronics, or even some Christian religious objects, and it is hard not to buy Chinese ..". more TOM FRIEDMAN. Quotable: ""We are caught between India and China. We have lost about 500,000 manufacturing jobs. It is very difficult for us to compete with the Chinese, except with high-value-added industries. Where we should be competing, in the services area, we are hit by the Indians with their back offices and call centers. . . . Not enough people here speak English." -- Jorge Castaeda, former Mexican foreign minister.The Iraq - Terror Connection.
"The Benjamin-Simon book [The Age of Sacred Terror] contains a long account of the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and also a stern defense of Clinton's decision in August 1998 to hit the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan with cruise missiles. What is interesting is the strong Iraqi footprint that is to be found in both episodes. Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the makers of the bomb that exploded at the World Trade Center, was picked up by the FBI, questioned, and incredibly enough released pending further interrogation as a "cooperative witness." He went straight to Amman and thence to Baghdad, where he remained under Saddam Hussein's protection until last year. As Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week: "The Iraqi government didn't cooperate in turning him over and gave him sanctuary, as it did give sanctuary to other terrorists." That's putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidal's organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a momentdoesn't every smart person know that there's no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror? ..One of the crucial reasons for apathy and inaction, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was the fact that two of the prime movers in jihad sponsorship, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were considered official "friends," not least by the American intelligence "community." An unnoticed benefit of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is the extent to which both the Pakistani and Saudi oligarchies have been "turned" .. ". more CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS.
Iraq.
"We moved against Iraq for what turned out to be the wrong reason and it's probably the only reason that would have gotten international action. That is a damning charge against Western democracy which we deserve to think about long and hard .. ". -- David Kay.America 1900.
"The U.S. was the wealthiest economy in the world. Per capita income was on a level with Britain and Australia, was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of living in Japan and Mexico. Still, most Americans in 1900 were living in what we today would consider poverty. In present-day dollars, per capita American income in 1900 averaged around $5000, less than a fifth the current level. In other words, the typical American in 1900 had about the same income that a typical Mexican has today .. ". more 2BLOWHARDS.Dropouts & Joblessness.
"Each year, about 4 million 18-year-olds should graduate from high school. Of those, 1.2 million drop out without a degree. .. And unemployment among dropouts is growing. In 2003, 2.4 million young people ages 16-24 who didn't finish high school were jobless .. ". more on dropouts and joblessness.March 30, 2004
Is It Hayek?
"We need to get rates to a more neutral level. If you keep (rates) too low for too long, it can contribute to excesses .. ". It's Fed President Jack Guynn.Leftists Need only Apply.
Danial Pipes exposes the government of Califoria's UC Press as a Leftist only closed shop. Quotable: "One subset of California books honors left-wing culture, such as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, leftist printmakers in New York of the 1930s, and Ant Farm, a radical architectural collective. Another subset hails left-wing politics, such as U.S. labor unions, an American consumer revolt, and the founder of the Tibetan Communist Party. Squinting as hard as I could at Californias spring list of 140 titles, however, I found not one single conservative book .. ". File this one under Your Tax Dollars At Work.The Politics of Boom & Bust.
"Bull markets tend to occur in the third and fourth years of presidential terms while markets tend to decline in the first and second years. The "making of presidents" is accompanied by an unsubtle manipulation of the economy. Incumbent administrations are duty-bound to retain the reins of power. Subsequently, the "piper must be paid," producing what we have coined the "Post-Presidential Year Syndrome." Most big, bad bear markets began in such years-1929, 1937, 1957, 1969, 1973, 1977 and 1981 .. Some cold hard facts to prove economic manipulation appeared in a book by Edward R. Tufte, Political Control of the Economy. Stimulative fiscal measures designed to increase per capita disposable income providing a sense of well-being to the voting public included: increases in federal budget deficits, government spending and social security benefits; interest rate reductions on government loans; and speed-ups of projected funding. [Example] Federal Spending: During 1962-1973, the average increase was 29% higher in election years than in non-election years .. ". From Stock Trader's Almanac via The Big Picture.Killer Leftists.
"Now perhaps, it is time for a new "Silent Spring," a book outlining how so many children's voices have been forever silenced by the environmentalists .. ". more Oh, That Leftist Media.March 29, 2004
Mass Immigration.
Tent cities are being built to house a massive new surge in illegal immigration. Almost a quarter million illegal aliens were detained over the past 6 months in the Tucson, AZ sector alone.Mass Immigration.
Contemplate the 100+ language LA's government school system, and then contemplate this editorial cartoon.Planning.
"An article in Inc.com tells a story about entrepreneur Craig Knouf who reportedly has revised his business plan more than 120 times .. ". more JEFF CORNWALL. And to think, economists once conceived of entire nations run according to a single 5-year business plan -- a plan drawn up, you guessed it, by economists.National Movement to Shackle Tax & Spend Politicians.
Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights is seen as a model for the nation by activists across the country. It also happens to be just the thing California will need if it is to survive as an economic power in the 21 century. (via Bill Hobbs).NY Times vs. Union of Concerned Scientists.
In a stunning turnaround the NY Times has published remarks critical of the Union of Concerned Scientists and its report on the President. The remarks come at the end of a piece on Bush science advisor John Marburger, who is described at the beginning of the the article as "a prostitute" by Harvard professor Howard Gardner.
Mass Immigration.
America, is seems, has room for everyone -- including scores who killed and torturered for their governments. Now that's an open borders policy to write home about.Politics as Crime by Other Means.
The state has always been the most efficient institution for stealing the wealth of others. Consider Indonesia.Up From NPR.
"A few years ago, I worked for a struggling dot-com in Manhattan whose work force was almost uniformly [leftist]. Given my conservative orientation, I saw little sense in getting involved in workplace political discussions. My silence was interpreted as acquiescence until I could stand it no longer and fessed up. One co-worker, who had served on the committee that hired me, felt betrayed. "But," he stammered, remembering my resume, "You worked for NPR." .. I was a co-producer for one of the most unusual programs NPR ever carried, "Bridges: A [Leftist]/Conservative Dialogue." The premise was a discussion between the [leftist] of the show's title, Larry Josephson, and leading conservative thinkers .. One of our first shows after I arrived was a history of American conservatism with the historian George Nash. His magnum opus, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, has long been a reference bible on the right. The book condenses the thought of some of the most consequential political and economic thinkers of the 20th century men such as Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Burnham. I had heard of very few of them. Nash traced the intellectual fault lines that appeared on the right and that endure today, such as, for example, the one between traditionalists and libertarians. As I read, I kept thinking to myself: "This sure beats Michel Foucault." .. With each subsequent guest Sam Tanenhaus on Whittaker Chambers, James Q. Wilson on crime and punishment, David Horowitz on Vietnam and the New Left my [leftist convictions] weakened .. ". more PAUL BESTON.March 28, 2004
Quotable Horowitz.
"[Howard] Zinn's work is a disgrace to the intellectual calling. It is a tendentious, absurd and malicious work, a Protocols of the Elders of Zion with America standing in for the Jews .. ". more DAVID HOROWITZ.George Shultz - Defending the State System.
Amidst the caterwauling of a thousand pygmies GEORGE SHULTZ cuts through to what matters. Compare Shultz to the utterly cynical child talk of former President Clinton. OK, spare yourself, and simply enjoy uncynical foreign policy talk for grown ups.Richard Clarke.
Voted for Gore, not a Republican. Never trust that the partisan Democrat press will get the facts straight. They didn't this time. And they haven't before.Money Map. The Red State - Blue State Divide.
Fundrace 2004 Red State Blue State national county-by-county map. And don't miss the national city maps. Patterico investigates his neighborhood here. Do your own neighborhood search, or type in a few Cambridge, MA area zip codes and find the Harvard Law professor who contributed money to race hustler Al Sharpton, convicted not so long ago of defamation when he spearheaded the destruction of a prosecutor's life by means of an ugly sham in which the false claim was made that the prosecutor raped a black 15 year old girl. At Harvard Law such behavior not only gets a pass, it also gets a big check in the mail -- for good work done, I guess.And is Hollywood the very heart of the Left Coast? You be the judge.
And don't miss this. Harvard University, like a thermal nuclear device, is ground zero of megabuck Democrat fundraising in the Boston area. Harvard professors give cash hand over fist to the Democrat party left -- so if you're wondering where all those alumni contributions, tuition payments and tax dollars are going, well, a hefty pile of the money is being shuffled along to the coffers of Democrat party politicians.
March 27, 2004
VDH.
"To sustain both our military power and foreign largess, we also must look to ourselves inasmuch as we are running vast trade deficits, along with unsustainable budget shortfalls, and are stuck in an entitlement craze where government payouts bring not gratitude but shrill demands for even more subsidies. Our borders are porous and yet we are paralyzed and afraid to enforce our own laws even as 12 million illegal aliens inside the United States cannot be identified or even be referred to as illegal. Our educational system is increasingly therapeutic and turning out too many poorly educated youth who have not inherited the tradition of American expertise and competence and cannot in the immediate future ensure our privileged position as the world's most affluent consumer society. The Chinese, Europeans, South Koreans, and Japanese are all lending us money for consumption. But they do so only in the trust that our legal system, stability, and competence will continue to justify such debts, which can only be paid back on the expectation that America can sustain its global civilizing role and lead the world in technological innovation and capital formation. So to press on, we must begin to look at the struggle across the spectrum in this new multifaceted war: bring consensual government to the Middle East; destroy the last al Qaeda holdouts; put Syria and Iran on notice to cease their support for terrorists; reexamine the location and purpose of all our bases; encourage candor and a new honesty with our allies; and seek to bring a new discipline to our own government and citizenry .. ". more VICTOR DAVIS HANSON.Surprise. America tops Europe.
"The U.S. economy has expanded by 7.8 percent since the recession, the best performance in the developed world. Indeed, it has grown more than three-times faster than European economies. The U.S. unemployment rate has fallen by 0.8 percentage points again, the best performance in the developed world. The U.S. unemployment rate of 5.6 percent is far lower than the 8 percent unemployment rate in Europe .. ". more DANIEL MITCHELL.Is it Hayek?
"America is in, [Jim DeMint] says, "an eleventh-hour crisis" of democracy because it recently reached a point where a majority are "dependent on the federal government for their health care, education, income or retirement." Tax reforms, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, have removed many Americans from the income tax rolls: "Today, the majority of Americans can vote themselves more generous government benefits at little or no cost to themselves." DeMint asks: "How can any free nation survive when a majority of its citizens, now dependent on government services, no longer have the incentive to restrain the growth of government?" it's JIM DEMINT as quoted by GEORGE WILL.Reagan Republicans to Bush - We May Just Sit This One Out.
"The Bush administration may be moving leftward in the belief that Reagan conservatives have no place else to go. If so, it is a colossal mistake. Reagan conservatives do have someplace to go: it's called home. They can sit on their hands and not vote at all .. ". more LYN NOFZIGER. And Nofziger has this reminder for the White House: "When the president's father took conservatives for granted, he lost."If President Bush loses, it will be because small-government Reaganites like me sat on our hands and refused to pull the lever for an "I'll buy every vote I can" Republican. If this is the kind of President we wanted, in 1980 we'd have voted for the President who supported LBJ in 1964, rather than the Republican.
And don't be mistaken. President Bush continues to grab money that doesn't belong to him in order to buy his own re-election -- he's certainly doing this in the case of home buying. He's taking the money my wife and I planned for and worked our butts off for -- and desperately need to pay our morgage -- and he's taking our money and he's using it to buy votes for himself -- and a house for someone else -- someone who didn't work for that money and has no right to that money. It's a crime -- and like many crimes, one perpetrated by the state and sanctioned by law.
This is just one of many ways in which things from a Reagan Republican perspective have taken steps for the worse rather than the better after four years of Bush of the Presidency.
Quotable Stein.
"In October 2000, Clarke and Special Forces Colonel Mike Sheehan leave the White House after a meeting to discuss al-Qa'eda's attack on the USS Cole: "'What's it gonna take, Dick?' Sheehan demanded. 'Who the s*** do they think attacked the Cole, f****** Martians? The Pentagon brass won't let Delta go get bin Laden. Does al-Qa'eda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?'" Apparently so. The attack, on the Cole, which killed 17 US sailors, was deemed by Clinton's Defence Secretary Bill Cohen as "not sufficiently provocative" to warrant a response. You'll have to do better than that, Osama! So he did .. ". more MARK STEYN.Footnote: I served on a ship identical to the USS Cole. I've never been able to accept the fact that the President and the Pentagon believed that the men of the Cole were not worth defending, were not worth bring justice for ..
Imagine letting an enemy attack your warship and you do nothing, again -- an enemy which has publicly declared war against you. What kind of military of officer would sit back and allow that? What kind of commander in chief would say "go ahead, kill my sailors, attack my forces, I'll just look the other way"? It's unbelievable that this actually happened, and that we are talking about Americans here. Not Frenchmen. Not Spaniards. Americans.
March 26, 2004
While America Slept.
"For more than a decade, I felt I was a voice in the wilderness, warning whomever I could reach that the Jihadists were marching towards this country .. I observed the clouds gathering in Khartoum in 1992, when terrorists from all walks of life were assembled by Hassan Turabi to consult on the next world target. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hizbollah and those men who would later form al Qaida were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Mujahideen from Chechnia to Algeria. On the menu: how to defeat the United States. I read about these meetings by purchasing the daily Arabic al Hayat, in subtropical Miami. But the mainstream press in Washington missed what was to come. The holy war machinery was moving, while America slept tight.We started to hear about al Qaida around 1994, said Richard Clarke. Err, I began to know about them around 1996, admitted former secretary Madeleine Albright. In the MSNBC studios where I was glued on the TV screen, I sat in disbelief. This country was at war and it didn't even know? ..
After the first Twin Towers attacks in New York in 1993 and the Khobar Towers operation in 1996, Washington sends in the FBI for forensics. The same year, the Taliban takes over Kabul, and al Qaida forms training camps around that poor country. The US dispatches the diplomats to Riyadh instead for mediation. The infidels are intimidated, Usama Bin Laden told Western journalists the following year. Their soldiers can't fight, their Government is on the run, asserted the commander of the believers on al Jazeera later ..
Ironically, he had the courtesy to inform the United States of his intention. On February 22, 1998, the bearded man declared war. The Clinton administration obviously didn't hear this declaration. In August, Bin Ladens organization destroyed two American embassies in East Africa. This time, the White House had to respond. The world .. was wondering why Washington wasn't using its power to protect its own citizens. Two missiles landed on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and thirty Tomahawks dug the rocks of Afghanistan. The Taliban readied themselves for the encounter with the Marines but no marching orders were issued across the Potomac.
In 2000, the USS Cole was hit in Yemen. This time, neither the Seals were deployed nor the Cruise missiles were fired. The international situation could have gotten complicated, theorized Secretary Albright at the hearings. We should not be emotional, rationalized Secretary Cohen. We had no compelling evidence, said Dick Clarke.
At the 9/11 hearings, Senator Kerrey .. wondered how al Qaida operatives crossed all layers of American defense. .. the truth is not so difficult to understand. Al Qaida did not force its way onto our mainland; it was invited in ..
How would you know whats on al Qaidas mind, said Secretary Albright at the hearings. That sentence alone should summarize the proceedings of the commission .. ". more WALID PHARES.
Microsoft.
Catallarchy is defending Microsoft -- and feeling a bit dirty. For some interesting remarks on patents, copyright and Microsoft go here.France.
"Timmerman .. demonstrates in striking detail how France morphed into an exceedingly corrupt corporate state: fascism with a friendly face. The French willingness to put its corporatist interests above all other concerns resulted in their encouraging Saddam Hussein to wipe out the Marsh Arabs at the behest of French contractors. The French refused to send engineers into an area where they might be kidnapped, "so they suggested that the Iraqis 'clean up' the area ahead of time," Timmerman reports. The Iraqis did just that and "some three hundred thousand marsh Arabs were sent into forced exile in Iran, their way of life gone forever." more NICK SCHULZ. From a review of The French Betrayal of America. (via InstaPundit).Rumsfeld's Rules.
Here they are. Quotable:"Don't accept the post or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you're free to tell him what you think with the bark off and you have the courage to do it."
UPDATE: Here's the ABC News story based on the content of last night's ABC News special Rumsfeld's Rules of War.
March 25, 2004
Put a Fork in Richard Clarke.
A writer at TIME takes a stab. No, I don't think Clarke is credible. What he's said about Rice and Bush patently isn't credible. Here's my take on what is going on. Thousands died on Clarke's watch, and he's understably uncomfortable with letting the full blame fall at his own feet (via Clinton). I mean, he's the one who warned everybody, right? Well, he knew the threat -- and year after year after year he worked for a President who utterly failed to respond to that threat. And Clarke says himself that he would spin to protect the top guys -- which means he cared more for his own employment than for the truth or the safety of the country. It's hard not to get the feeling that there is something wrong with this man -- and I think what we are seeing is the public meltdown of a man suffering an unbearable case of what the professors call "cognitive dissonance". It's predictable human nature, but it isn't pretty and it isn't admirable.UPDATE: Don't miss today's CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER. Quotable: "The 1990s were al Qaeda's springtime: Blissfully unmolested in Afghanistan, it trained, indoctrinated, armed and, most fatally, planned. For the United States, this was a catastrophic lapse, and in a March 2002 interview on PBS's "Frontline," Clarke admitted as much: "I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists, sending them out around the world would have been destroyed." Instead, "now we have to hunt [them] down country by country." What should we have done during those lost years? Clarke answered: "Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. . . . That's . . . the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened." It did not. And who was president? Bill Clinton. Who was the Clinton administration's top counterterrorism official? Clarke. He now says that no one followed his advice. Why did he not speak out then? And if the issue was as critical to the nation as he now tells us, why didn't he resign in protest? ...
Clarke is clearly an angry man, angry that Condoleezza Rice demoted him, angry that he was denied a coveted bureaucratic job by the Bush administration. Angry and unreliable. He told the commission to disregard what he said in his 2002 briefing because he was, in effect, spinning. "I've done it for several presidents," he said. He's still at it, spinning now for himself".
UPDATE: Dean Esmay makes an important point:
Most disturbing to me in all this is something too few people have noted. Clarke seems like a fairly typical career civil servant who is neither appointed nor elected. Such people tend to become fairly narrow-minded, inflating the importance of their own role, and also resentful of the "big vision" folks--i.e. the elected and appointed officials who have to tie together broad policy positions involving far more than one civil servant's specialty. This is pretty normal, but now, all future administrations are going to have to worry that the career civil servants whose job is to give them information and advice will try to make them look stupid ..If our governing officials can no longer trust the people who work for them, this is not a good thing. Because we're not talking about blowing the whistle on criminal activity here: we're talking about policy debates, and a career civil servant deciding he doesn't like the strategies formulated by the people he works for--and being treated like a hero by partisans who just don't happen to like the people in office right now.
Very unhealthy, very dangerous in the long run.
Yes, very.
Get Happy.
"I think it's time for a reality check. What's everyone really complaining about? That India and China are joining the global trading system? That Russia and Taiwan just had democratic elections, however imperfect, for their Presidents? That the American productivity growth rate jumped to a 3% average annual rate from 1995 to 2003, about double the anemic pace of 1973 to 1995? .. ". more CHRISTOPHER FARRELL.Quotable: "Let's not lose sight of the bigger picture here. Even with the threat of terrorism, freer trade is invigorating global growth by providing entrepreneurs from all the world's major economies access to bigger markets. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek emphasized the role the markets play in creating and disseminating knowledge. In the Information Age, the cost of gathering and sharing information and knowledge has plummeted even as the size of the market has expanded exponentially. "Capitalism, as Hayek conceived it, was fundamentally dynamic, and that dynamism was due to the discovery of new needs and new ways of fulfilling them by entrepreneurs possessed with 'resourcefulness,'" writes historian Jerry Muller in The Mind and the Market. These are the tantalizing glimmers of a payoff from globalization. WHAT IF? Productivity growth isn't the magic mantra it was a few years ago because, as the U.S. loses manufacturing jobs, an increasingly efficient Corporate America is under little pressure to add to its payrolls. Nevertheless, "productivity growth is what determines our living standards, the competitive advantage of companies, and the wealth of nations," says Erik Brynolfssohn, an economist at MIT. Take the recent report on Social Security issued by the system's trustees. It assumes under its intermediate projection (essentially the baseline forecast) that productivity will grow at an average annual rate of 1.6%, and that the Social Security system runs into financial trouble come 2042. Yet, consider this: The Social Security problem largely disappears if the productivity growth rate hits an underlying trend growth rate of 2.5% a year .. ".
Zero Inflation -- 6.4% Growth.
In Japan. Now enough idiot talk from the economists and the press about the impossibility of growth with prices that are holding stagnant or are declining.More than a Trillion in New Borrowing "Responsible".
At least it is according to President Bush. And so is government spending in the 10 trillion dollar range over the next four years. I kid you not. That's what the President had to say about the national budget passing the House yesterday.Blogosphere vs. Democrat Party News (aka "professional journalism").
"The collective knowledge of the blogosphere is greater on any subject than the collective knowledge of professional journalism. Not because bloggers are smarter, or more motivated, or more interested or more dis-interested...but because of the structure in which they operate. Professional journals may do a better job at compiling some stuff in one place, but if you learn how to navigate the blogosphere you can gather more and better facts and analysis that you can by reading any mainstream periodical or daily .. ". more JESSICA'S WELL.. (via InstaPundit).U.S. Economy at Risk.
"The current deterioration in the U.S. fiscal position and the acute decline in the net national savings rate represent risks to the financial system and the economy as a whole .. " more from NY FED President TIMOTHY GEITHNER.March 24, 2004
"Give a Man a Fish ..
and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his 'basic rights.' .. ". more THOMAS SOWELL.Gay Marriage.
Oregon county orders a hault to all marriages as part of its effort to advance the cause of gay marriage. (via Improved Clinch). I know what you're thinking. Got a joke? Post it in Comments.George W. Nixon.
"In previous columns, I have warned that George W. Bush is in danger of appearing Nixonian that is, using Richard Nixons political methods, such as a willingness to subordinate everything to a re-election effort, including abrogation of ones own principles; punishing staffers with genuine policy disagreements for being disloyal; and keeping secret information that might undermine decisions one has already made. The clearest evidence yet of Bush as Nixon has arisen .. ". more BRUCE BARTLETT.Blogging Economics.
"As weve seen with the development of the field of law & economics during the last four decades, knowing a little economics and a lot of anything else produces very creative and interesting stuff ..". more Economic Blogging from The Idea Shop. Includes links to lots interesting academic literature.Outsourcing.
It's a Good Thing says a new report from the American Electronics Association. (via California Insider).Richard Clarke.
InstaPundit has the goods on Richard Clarke. Remember, this guy was once head of counter-terrorism. And he worked for the last four Presidents. The only thing you can do is shake your head in disbelief.U.S. Army.
U.S. will cut German force in half. "We've got your back" -- for nearly 60 years that's what America said to Germany. But then it came Germany's turn ..Gay Marriage.
Democrat House Leader Nancy Pelosi supports violation of the law in California. Like I've said before, never be surprised by lawmakers with utter contempt for the law.Germany.
"There is almost no area where Germany stands out with its achievements .. " " .. when you talk about the future, about future technology and future knowledge, nobody thinks of Germany first .. " -- Germany's leaders expressing the current Germany malaise. Quotable: "Germany could potentially be following the pattern of the United States after the Carter malaise and Britain in the depressing years before Margaret Thatcher in opting for a conservative revolution."
Quotable Steyn.
"Q: Why did John Kerry cross the road?
A: He didn't cross the road. He crossed to the middle to demonstrate his grasp of all the nuances and subtleties involved in crossing the road, and was still explaining them to the New York Times reporter when the logging truck hit him."
March 23, 2004
Google Search.
Google search defining liberalism. Amazing how the internet has spred the power to play a role in the evolution of civilization -- even such a central part of civilization as the language.Outsourcing.
Netscape founder Marc Andreesen defends outsourcing and America's competitive advantage -- Marginal Revolution has the links.Mega Rich Democrats.
"Did you ever wonder why George Soros, Warren Buffett, John Kerry, and innumerable wealthy Hollywood celebrities all support the Democratic party hook, line, and sinker? It doesn't seem to make sense. Why would these patricians favor the party that wants to increase tax rates? Here's one explanation. They may act like philanthropists, but in actuality these Democrats are fat cats who can either avoid taxes entirely or pay just a minimal amount. They surely don't pay their fair share relative to their wealth. These megabuck corporate elites take minimal salaries and then benefit from tax-sheltered windfalls when their company stock prices go up. In addition they create huge foundations that provide tax deductions which can offset much of their taxable income. Ongoing contributions to these foundations can materially reduce income taxes for an indefinite period of time. So the guys at the top whether they are billionaires by inheritance, luck, or hard work have amassed enormous fortunes that grow, and at the same time they use their assets to keep their income taxes low. Legions of tax accountants and lawyers make sure they take advantage of every tax loophole .. ". more on MEGA RICH DEMOCRATS.The folks who stress over taxes are the broad middle class -- the people for whom tax rates can make a difference over whether mom or dad have free weekends or have to work a second job. The folks for whom tax rates can make a difference over which schools Jason and Emily go to -- or if they get to go at all. Pre-School two days a week or three? State university or private? And so on.
A car upgrade this year? Or another year driving the old clunker?
This is a world the Mega Rich Democrats don't feel -- income tax increases often leave them untouched, and any tax increase merely effects the size of their tax deductable donations to charity, and never shows up at all as an impact on their lifestyle. Does it cause them to send their kids to different schools? No. Does it cause them to change cars? Are you kidding me? It doesn't even cause them to downsize from five homes to four. Tax increases or tax cuts simply don't register in the lives of the Mega Rich. And so they don't care -- they don't care whether taxes go up, and certainly so when this means your taxes, and not theirs.
Quotable: "John Kerry, fat cat from Massachusetts, is unlikely to endorse any true tax on the rich. He only wants to raise taxes on the wannabe's people like you and me."
UPDATE: InstaPundit readers answer the question, What did you do with your tax refund daddy?
Tony Blair.
What was "right" is now "left". These political labels can make you dizzy. It's truly remarkable to see British Labour move continually closer to the view of Hayek -- and ever farther away from those of Keynes.Serfdom - Are We There Yet?
Robert Formaini has an interesting examination of why we haven't yet lost all of our freedom. Note well: Formaini -- and George Stigler -- are making up a strawman position on the "inevitability of serfdom" which Hayek himself never held, one of the Hayek myths which makes my Top Ten Hayek Myths list.The article includes this great Walter Wriston quote:
"Capital goes where it's needed and stays where it's well-treated."
Terrorism & Richard Clarke.
I think we can all agree to this: "The message is that the United States' mechanisms -- the CIA, the FBI, the DOD, the White House -- failed during both the Clinton administration and the Bush administration .. " -- part of Richard Clarke's reply to his Bush administration critics.Immigration.
"Republican congressional offices say their correspondence is running as much as 400 or even 1,000 to 1 against" Bush's open borders plan.ONE GOVERNMENT ONE BANK.
"Whereas the top ten banks held only 17% of total bank assets in 1990, now the top ten hold about 44% of all bank assets .. What we are witnessing is the culmination of deposit insurance, fractional reserve banking .. and a long trail of bailouts and other interventions into the workings of the world of money. The Fedand by extension the US taxpayer has become the reinsurer of the banking system, willing to bear the risk of catastrophe .. ". more ONE GOVERNMENT ONE BANK.March 22, 2004
Outsourcing.
How to avoid getting sued by your employees -- outsource overseas. American workers file many times more lawsuits than do workers abroad -- and worker related government regulations are less costly overseas. So outsourcing dramatically lowers tort costs on American businesses, and also reduces high costs imposed by government regulations. Labor leaders in America are not happy ..Steyn on Europe & Terror.
"For more than a week now, American friends have asked me why 3/11 wasn't 9/11. I think it comes down to those two words you find on Holocaust memorials all over Europe: "Never again." Fine-sounding, but claptrap. The never-again scenario comes round again every year. This very minute in North Korea there are entire families interned in concentration camps. Concentration camps with gas chambers. Think Kim Jong-Il's worried that the civilised world might mean something by those two words? Ha-ha. How did a pledge to the memory of the dead decay into hollow moral preening? When an American Jew stands at the gates of a former concentration camp and sees the inscription "Never again", he assumes it's a commitment never again to tolerate genocide. Alain Finkielkraut, a French thinker, says that those two words to a European mean this: never again the fhrers and duces who enabled such genocide. "Never again power politics. Never again nationalism. Never again Auschwitz" - a slightly different set of priorities. And over the years a revulsion against any kind of "power politics" has come to trump whatever revulsion post-Auschwitz Europe might feel about mass murder. That's why the EU let hundreds of thousands of Bosnians and Croats die on its borders until the Americans were permitted to step in .. ". more MARK STEYN.Feulner on Bush.
"So far Bush has threatened to use the veto dozens of times, but he has never followed through .. " more ED FEULNER.40 Job Openings.
At a major retail store where I work part time. These are jobs ranging from the stock room to security to commissioned sales in major appliances. And the store can get only a small trickle of job seekers to even apply for these positions. This include six opening for the very job position President George Bush once held -- and at the very same national retailer. Of course, an ever increasing majority of the jobs held at the retailer where I work are now taken by folks from outside the country -- and wages have dropped steadily for two decades, down several dollars an hour even just in the past couple of years. So count a job the President himself once held as "JOBS AMERICANS WON'T DO" which American businesses can now fill at extremely low wages by shipping in foreign workers under the Presidents plan giving amnesty for illegals -- and effectively open borders for lowest bid foreign labor.March 21, 2004
Animation, technology & outsourcing.
"A lot of animation now involves CGI 3-D animation .. In another negative trend, jobs in traditional animation are being outsourced to shops in cheaper international markets like Australia, Korea, Taiwan and India (for a cost savings to the studios of around 50%.) The net effect over the past three years has been a loss of around 1,000 jobs, representing roughly 40% of the American animation workforce at its maximum .. more 2BLOWHARDS.Carnival Time.
Work and kids and Bruce Caldwell's Hayek-L seminar have kept me away from the blog. But no need for me when there is a Carnival of the Capitalists going on. Enjoy this week's offerings from the best of the capitalist bloggers.March 20, 2004
France.
Unemployment, rundown public housing, a corrupt political culture, immigration, the failed promise of socialism all fuel the rise of the Popular Front -- today with a new female face -- as the French go to the polls in regional elections. Quotable: "Amid the run-down housing estates of Ile de France, a battered Socialist campaign bus flies the familiar red flag ..". MORE.March 19, 2004
FRAUD -- USA TODAY stories were Pure Fiction.
A five time Pulitzer Prize nominated writer for USA TODAY has been charged with repeatedly fabricating news reports for USA TODAY.Jean-Franois Revel.
"Europe, capitale Al-Qaeda". Read French? Read the article. Don't read French? Read the English translation. (via Institut Hayek).Russia & Taxes.
"It is very important that after completion of a tax reform, the basic components of the tax system are not reviewed for many, many years ..". to comea more VLADIMIR PUTIN on RUSSIAN TAX REFORM.Gay Marriage.
"Dressing gay marriage in a suit of civil rights has become the standard way of selling it to the broader public .. ". more SHELBY STEELE.MRC's Lefty Press Awards.
"Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological .. ". more TAKE A GUESS, and dozens of other lefty press boobs.Steyn on Iraq -- 2003 Predictions Updated & Fact Checked.
"ONE YEAR ON: No humanitarian disaster. Indeed, no humanitarians. The NGOs fled Iraq in August and nobody noticed, confirming what some of us have suspected since Afghanistan the permanent floating crap game of the humanitarian lobby has a vastly inflated sense of its own importance and is prone to massive distortion in the cause of self-promotion." more MARK STEYN.China.
Why China values the small stuff and has no time for Big Abstract Ideas. Quotable: "Making money, sending my kids to good schools, buying a home and a car become, in this view, virtuous precisely because they are Small Ideas. These decisions do not reorder society according to some abstract ideal, but they do improve your own personal life in very concrete ways .. ".Your Tax Dollars at Work.
Your taxes are enormous. Well, what the hell does George Bush and the Congress do with all that money? Well, one thing they do, is they ship it off to the IMF, which then gives it away to places like Argentina, a country run by ideological kooks and incompetents. There's no reason to be happy with Bush or the Congress about this. Here is more about the IMF and Argentina's mismanaged government. Quotable: "Throughout almost the entire period .. the present Buenos Aires has been subject to Fund assistance and oversight. From the outset the relationship can best be portrayed as one between an alcoholic and bartender, with the latter (the IMF) unwilling or unable to temper the former's (Argentina) zeal for binge drinking (borrowing) .. a nascent central bank charged with rescuing feckless governments and the private international financial institutions that underwrite sovereign debts, the IMF accomplishes its mission by funneling member state contributions (quotas) to distressed borrowers, in the process imbuing moral hazard in both parties. In other words, this international organization lends contributions supplied by governments, whose quotas are met via the involuntary confiscation of property (taxation), to recipient states in order that the beneficiaries continue to service public debts to private lenders, also a nefarious compact that entails violating the property rights of a third party. This facet of the international financial architecture is nothing more than systematic pilfering."In short, Bush and the Congress steal your money and give it to Citibank and the Argentinians. True and truly outrageous.
March 18, 2004
Stealing other People's Money.
"Government flood insurance is so "compassionate" that the program didnt even raise my premiums when, just four years after I built my house, a two-day northeaster swept away my first floor. I could still use the place, since the kitchen and bedrooms were on upper floors, though some guests were unnerved when a wave sloshed through the bottom of the house. After the water receded, the government bought me a new first floor. Federal flood insurance payments are like buying drunken drivers new cars after they wreck theirs. I never invited you taxpayers to my home. You shouldnt have to pay for my ocean view. Actually, I dont have such a great view anymore. On New Years Day, 1995, I got a call from a friend. "Happy New Year," he said. "Your house is gone." Hed seen it on the local news .. The ocean had knocked down my government-approved flood-resistant pilings and eaten my house. It was an upsetting loss for me, but financially I made out just fine. You paid for the house -- and its contents .. I could have rebuilt the beach house and possibly ripped you taxpayers off again, but Id had enough. I sold the land. Now someones built an even bigger house on my old property. Bet well soon have to pay for that one, too .. ". more JOHN STOSSELThe Economics of 18-34.
Young, upwardly mobile, and deep in debt. Quotable: "Over the past decade .. average tuition and fees in real dollars rose 47 percent at public four-year colleges .. ".Sierra Club at War.
Richard Lamm says opponents have launched a campaign of environmental McCarthyism against him.Econology.
"The U.S. economy is gearing up to add nearly 3 million jobs by the end of next year and unemployment will drop below 5 percent by the start of 2006, a team of University of Michigan economists said on Thursday .. ".moreForeign Power Subverts American Democracy.
"The Mexican government .. is working with a group called the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior to use its matricula consular database to deploy illegals to state legislatures and city councils across America. There, the illegal aliens .. pack the gallery and seek to apply pressure against legislators who sponsor or intend to vote for bills that enhance immigration law enforcement .. ". more on MEXICAN SUBVERSION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. (via John & Ken).M.I.T. & Entrepreneurship.
"the roughly 4,000 companies founded by M.I.T. alumni and faculty members had created 1.1 million jobs and generated annual sales of $232 billion worldwide. And that was seven years ago .. ". more on M.I.T. & ENTREPRENEURSHIP.Capital vs. labor.
"If you were a manager, why would you hire a human being instead of a machine? Humans get sick. They daydream. And they take coffee breaks. The cost of capital equipment, meanwhile, from laptop computers to lathes, has plummeted since 1995. Moreover, the cost of leasing and financing new tools has fallen to the lowest levels since, well, before there were laptops and lathes. At the same time, federal tax policy has been tilted toward capital spending, with taxes on most dividends and capital gains falling to 15 percent. Changes in the tax law two years ago allow small businesses to write off $100,000 in new equipment immediately, while big firms get a temporary 50 percent write-off. People, however, remain relatively expensive. Let's say an applicant can deliver $35,000 of value for the firm and she is willing to work for $35,000 a year. Great match, right? Not exactly. In addition to her salary, the employer also has to pay a 7.65 percent Social Security and Medicare tax, and contribute to workers' compensation and unemployment insurance. And then there's health insurance costs: employers paid an average of $6,600 per family last year .. ". more TODD BUCHHOLZ. Buchholz is the author of the bestselling book New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought.Al Franken.
Get's fisked. And it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Here is the debate which inspired the fisking."grinding condescension and babble"
"sheer mindless demagoguery" "bombastic lordly presence". The WSJ's Dorothy Rabinowitz on John Kerry -- from a Dorothy Rabinowitz profile.It's Happened Again ..
"A professor who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself .. ". more.Poverty vs. Intellectual Bankrupcy.
"Surely there is no more commanding moral imperative for people in the West than to urge each other, and their governments, to bring relief to the world's poorest. And what a tragedy it is, therefore, that many of the kind souls who respond most eagerly to this imperative bring to the issue an analytical mindset that is almost wholly counterproductive .. ". more on poverty from The Economist.Via AndresGentry who writes: "What seems common amongst most Western self-described leftists or socialists who I've run across in China is an excessive regard of themselves: "I'm good because I care". The second thing that's common is an inability to comprehend that non-whites, supposedly the beneficiaries of their noblesse oblige, might not agree with them or even see their supposed compassion as anything other than an unwarranted arrogance. It's thinking by rote. It's not compassion, it's feeling good about yourself. And at the end of the day, it doesn't do a jot of good for those who supposedly are the object of one's affections .. ".
John Kerry -- Senator from Europe.
".. in the biographies of both Roosevelts, JFK, and the two Bush presidents, you find that these men had had deep immersion into the political rhythms of America .. [John] Kerry has none of this in his bio .. The "Swiss-educated son of a foreign service officer," as Time magazine described Kerry, has never had to try and talk with and connect to the sprawling, chaotic tens of millions ..". more HUGH HEWITT. And this: "Kerry suffers from "Senatitus" -- the strange condition affecting long-serving United States Senators which proceeds from years and years of no one telling you to your face that you are making no sense whatsoever."March 17, 2004
"Global Warming" - A Long Way from "Put-A-Fork-In-It" Science.
NY Times Headline: "Study Disputes Idea on Global Warming".America vs. the world.
And the winner is .. Quotable: "The 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign book, "Putting People First," somehow imagined that "Japan and Germany "threaten to surpass America in manufacturing by 1996." .. ". more ALAN REYNOLDS.Ann Coulter.
"After the Madrid bombings, it looks like liberals and terrorists will have to powwow on whether there was an Iraq /al-Qaida link. Two hundred dead Spaniards say there was .. ". more COULTER.Well, if there wasn't then, there is now.
Editor, Writer, Bureaucrat, Spy.
Speechwriter for Roosevelt, State Department offical, editor of the New Republic, spy in the service of mass murder.Brink Lindsey -- Outsourcing Myth Buster.
"Job losses are normal, productivity is up, the U.S. runs a net surplus in IT, and the drop in manufacturing jobs is unrelated to U.S. imports. [Not to mention that fact that] offshoring increases growth by making computers and technology more affordable, thereby boosting productivity in technology and information-based jobs .. ". Trade expert Brink Lindsey explains.Bear Flag League.
You've likely seen my California Bear Flag League Blogroll in the left column. But this is really cool. Interocitor has a Bear Flag League Feedroll and a Bear Flag League Rollup page. Like I said. Cool.Paul C. Roberts Rains on "What, Me Worry" Parade.
"Unable to pay for its imports with exports, the U.S. is paying by giving up ownership of its assets. Foreigners are becoming the owners of our real estate, companies and government and corporate bonds. When they acquire ownership, they also acquire the future income streams produced by these assets .. ". more Paul C. Roberts.California in Crisis.
"Public payroll soars. Salaries move far ahead of inflation .. ". more from the L.A. Daily News. Note well. You didn't read this in the LA Times.It's One War.
"Why only one medal for two different campaigns? Because it's all the same war .. ". more Citizen Smash.Book Recommendation.
"W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm's Myths of Rich and Poor remains the single best book on this subject written in the last five years. If you want to counter the "decline of American well-being" rhetoric of the left, this is the book to read .. ". Recommended by economist Steve Horwitz.California.
"Health insurance premiums rose faster in California last year than in the rest of the country, an ominous sign for a state struggling to maintain its economic competitiveness .. ". more on healthcare and the sick man of these United States. Note well -- immigration continues to be the word the LA Times dares not speak.March 16, 2004
Bank of Japan.
Is the dollar buying finished? The Bank of Japan may be looking for an exit strategy.The Language Tree.
" biologists who have developed sophisticated mathematical tools for drawing up family trees of genes and species. Because the same problems crop up in both gene trees and language trees, the biologists are confident that their tools will work with languages, too .. ". more -- A Biological Dig for the Roots of Language.Outsourcing.
The WSJ reports, ".. the latest U.S. government data suggest that foreigners outsource far more office work to the U.S. than American companies send abroad. The value of U.S. exports of legal work, computer programming, telecommunications, banking, engineering, management consulting and other private services jumped to $131.01 billion in 2003, up $8.42 billion from the previous year ..". Quoted by Robert Musil.It's not a Choice.
We have to cut spending. It's only a matter of time. Let's do it now -- Veronique de Rugy explains how. Why do it now? Well, if we do it now we'll save ourselves and our descendents months and years of working as slaves to compound interest -- that is to say the force of nature which is the logic of capital investment both foregone and borrowed upon.17-1 Democrat.
That's the party affiliation breakdown of the Harvard economics department. It's 20-3 Democrat in the Berkeley economics department. 21-7 at Stanford. 15-1 at Syracuse. (Data via Newmark's Door, with some qualifying information about the Green, Libertarian and Working Families Parties).Duke economics.
A great deal of academic economics today consists of pseudo-scientific statistical "prediction" and "testing", much of it the misuse of "significance testing" or the mistaking of correlation for causation -- and the rest at bottom no different than putting a ruler up against a trend and the claiming "scientific" status for the "model". I won't go into how and why this has nothing to do with science as it is done in the chemisty, physics or biology departments. Economics also does other types of fake physics but my point here is to direct your attention to how this "idiot savant" fakery (AEA description) is transforming the make-up of American economic faculties.Here is the current breakdown of the affiliations of the Duke economics faculty:
5 Democrats
10 Republicans
13 non-American
The American Economics Association some decades back labeled new econ grads "idiot savants" because these folks were uniformally characterizable as math wizes with little or no understanding of the economy -- either in terms of the explanatory strategy of folks like Smith and Hayek, or in terms of the everyday facts and workings of the economy. They were, in other words "idiot savants", often 2nd rate math or physics majors looking for easy entry into academic careerism. I.e. folks without a deep scientific interest in making explanatory sense of the spontaneous order of the market. And a great many of these "math jock' types -- who excel at the pseudo-science math game -- happen to be grad students from Korea, India, Taiwan, etc. (thanks to Newmark's Door for the data).
March 15, 2004
Paul Krugman.
"Paul Krugman goes beyond the bounds of decency and evidence when he accuses the Council of Economic Advisors of corruption .. ". more Marginal Revolution.Ernesto Guevara.
The Osama Bin Laden of his time. So why are lefties walking around with a picture of this killer on their t-shirts?Quotable Shaw.
He who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Pauls support. From an article on Democrat aide and Iraqi agent Susan Lindauer.Krugman Update.
Institutional Economics updates this bit of Krugman bizarreness with this observation on the Krugman interview: "Unfortunately, the transcript does not fully capture the stammering and squirming that took place when Don Luskins name was mentioned by interviewer Tony Jones. I have never seen an interviewee look so uncomfortable .. ". And here is the relevant exchange. Meanwhile, the complete interview can be found here.Birds Block Fence.
Seven birds -- that's right, seven -- stand between the US Border Patrol and 800 feet of fencing to keep out illegal aliens.Capitalist Bloggers of the World Unite!
It's a Carnival of Capitalists blogging on economic policy, entrepreneurship, and the economy.March 14, 2004
Jobs.
Who needs the tax, healthcare and regulatory burden of additional workers? Well, American businesses don't -- and they are massively expanding output without the deadweight financial and regulatory cost of the American worker. BusinessWeek tries to make sense of it all.Loser States.
The Bottom Ten -- unemployment basket cases: California 6.1% Illinois 6.2% Ohio 6.2% South Carolina 6.3% Texas 6.3% New York 6.5% Washington 6.5% Michigan 6.6% Alaska 7.3% Oregon 7.7%Immigration & Environmentalism.
Graph posted on the SUSPS (Support US Population Stabilization) web site -- the organization backing Richard Lamm's run for a post on the board of the Sierra Club.
Rather Biased.
Which TV news broadcast pushes its role as a cell of the Democrat Party hardest -- ABC, NBC, or CBS?Quotable Steyn.
".. the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes .. Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway ..". more MARK STEYN.LA Public Schools.
"[the] district's students are 72 percent Hispanic, 12 percent African American, 9 percent white. Two-thirds of the students in kindergarten through third grade come from homes in which English is not the first language. The district, where students speak 72 languages, has more students -- about 750,000 -- than 27 individual states have and a budget larger than the entire state budget of Colorado ..". more GEORGE WILL on ROY ROMER and the Los Angeles public Schools.March 13, 2004
The Mystery of Khan.
"If recent research in Oxford's biochemistry department is to be believed he was one of history's most philoprogenitive studs, with 16 million living descendents.more on GENGHIS KHAN.Hayek.
Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Non Sequitur of the Dependence Effect" from Southern Economic Journal Vol. 27. April, 1961 (pdf). Hayek takes down John Galbraith.Alistair Cooke.
The BBC has a great "Letter From America" page in tribute to the retiring Cooke, age 95.Globalization.
".. these are the two basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda .. ". more THOMAS FRIEDMAN.Jobs.
Why the slow job growth? Bruce Bartlett is on the case. Quotable:Economist Brian Wesbury notes that there were more limited liability corporations established in Illinois last year than any year since this form of business was allowed in 1994. He reports that 18,600 LLCs were created in 2003, a 42 percent increase over 2002. Journalist Bill Hobbs reports similar data for Tennessee. He found that 7,412 LLCs were created in that state last year, up from 6,204 in 2002. As in Illinois, this is the largest number ever recorded.UPDATE: Bill Hobbs: "I am continuing to dig up LLC formation data from other states and so far here is what I have found: In the seven states from which I've collected or received data, all seven saw record LLC formation last year."
March 12, 2004
Krauthammer.
"It is not John Kerry's fault that he is endorsed by a Frenchman .. But Kerry has made the major -- indeed, only discernible -- theme of his foreign policy ``rejoining the community of nations'' and being liked abroad once again. Which is why he does not just court foreign support, he boasts about it. ``I've met foreign leaders, who can't go out and say this publicly,'' he told a Hollywood, Fla., fund-raiser, ``but boy they look at you and say, `You gotta win this one, you gotta beat this guy.''' For the world. For France." more Charles Krauthammer.Money to Burn.
Half a trillion in borrowing every year and the government still has buckets of money to burn on such things as free copies of the 628 pages document "The President's Council on Bioethics: Being Human: The President's Reader on Bioethics". Click on the link, and the goverment will send you a free copy. Your taxes at work.If you have no interest in reading excerpts from Peter Pan or Emily Dickinson you can always use the paper in the book to help start the fireplace.
Gay Marriage.
Roy Rivenburg on the divide over gay marriage. A top notch piece of reporting from .. the LA Times? Yep. The LA Times. (via Patterico). Quotable: "Many gay leaders are quick to dismiss analogies between polygamy and homosexuality. "Polygamy is a choice; sexual orientation isn't," says writer Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent supporter of same-sex marriage. "Polygamy is also terrible for society. It abuses women, creates a class of unmarried males [by leaving a shortage of single females] and leaves children unclear about their parents." Nevertheless, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who backs gay marriage, says court decisions upholding same-sex matrimony could be interpreted to permit multiple spouses. He suggests even incest between consenting adults could end up decriminalized, despite the possibility of inbred children: "After all, we don't generally ban marriages between people who have serious genetic diseases, even if the odds of a defect in their children are much higher than for brother-sister marriages." Some gay activists are already campaigning for such changes .. ".S. Dakota.
So how does a natural "red" state like South Dakota end up with two Dhimocrat senators? Oh, That Biased Media.Tanenhaus at NY Times Book Review.
Historian Ron Radosh writes on CNET in praise of Tanenhaus's appointment: "In the true sense of the word, Sam [Tanenhaus] is a defender of the best of the liberal tradition in America. He is a man of great intellect and literacy, who looks at things independently. For example, although I disagree with him about his positive evaluation of Cornel West, those who read his article on West in Vanity Fair realize that he calls them as he sees them, without seeing any necessity to adhere to any particular party line .. Could it not be that Bill Keller and the other NYT editors realize that someone with Sam's erudition and intellect is the perfect candidate to improve and strengthen the NYTBR?".
Hayek & the NY Times Book Review.
Bruce Bartlett in a comment suggest that it's something of an exageration to say that Friedrich Hayek has been banned from the New York Times Book Review. Well, lets take a look. Between 1961 and and 1989 Friedrich Hayek wrote four books and published several important collections of essays. In the period between 1989 and today there have been more than a dozen books written on Hayek, and more than half a dozen volumes of his collected writings. In my view Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-1979) and his two major collections of essays -- Studies (1969) and New Studies (1978) -- are among his most intellectually significant works. And Hayek's popular The Fatal Conceit was Hayek's most widely praised book since The Road to Serfdom -- folks like Tom Peters simply raved about the book. But not one of these books was ever given a review in the NY Times Book Review.And what of that shelf of books written on Hayek by other authors? Not a one reviewed or even mentioned in the NY Times Book Review.
Take a look through the NY Times archives and check for yourself.
It's quite true that when hard core free market advocate Henry Hazlitt regularly wrote lead book reviews for the NY Times -- 60 years ago -- a little book by Hayek titled The Road to Serfdom was reviewed in the Times. But that was several generations ago -- and a very, very different NY Times Book review. We haven't seen the likes of that since well before most of us were born. By the time the 1960's came around, the NY Times assigned its review of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty not to Hazlitt or any other author sympathetic to Hayek and capitalism -- but instead to a hard-core true believing socialist, who not unsurprisingly didn't look with any favor on a book seeking to defend capitalism. And then -- complete blackball.
Blogging Hate.
It's merely personal explains a professor at St. Lawrence U. -- even when his profanity laced hate is targetted directly at his own students. But it's all ok and of course perfectly understandable, isn't it? I mean, we're talking about Republican students here, you know ..March 11, 2004
Krugman - what's the frequency Paul?
Is this man having -- how shall we say -- personal problems? It sure sounds like it. I'm not a doctor, and I don't know what the clinical signs ofNew book editor at NY Times.
English major and Whittaker Chambers biographer Sam Tanenhaus has been named the new editor of the NY Times Book Review. Tanenhaus, a former NY Times editorial page hack, has for some years has been at work on a biography of William Buckley.Anti-leftists like Friedrich Hayek have been blackballed by the NY Times book review for generations. We'll see whether or not Tanenhaus reforms the appalling editorial behavior of the NY Times BR, given his background as a left sympathetic NY Times editorial pagie with a special interest in the political history of the American anti-left. It will not count as an improvement if a dishonest political hack like Paul Krugman is given the review of a book like Bruce Caldwell important Hayek's Challenge. If that's the sort of thing we get, then we'd be better off if the Times simply went back to its time honored little black balls.
For some perspective on Tanenhaus read this piece by Jonah Goldberg or this Tenahaus editorial in the NY Times.
Books that Changed the World.
"SIXTY years ago this week, George Orwell reviewed a work by a little-known Austrian professor and refugee from Hitler, FA Hayek. It was called The Road to Serfdom , and Orwell didnt think much of it. Conceding that there was some justice in Hayeks criticism of collectivism, which Orwell granted was "not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisition never dreamed of", Orwell nevertheless dismissed Hayeks argument for a return to "free" competition out of hand: "Since the vast majority of people would far rather have state regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter." Well, Orwell got it wrong. Within 40 years, it was collectivism that was in retreat while governments, especially in the UK and the US, were withdrawing from attempts to manage the economy and reasserting the virtues of the free market. And they found the intellectual justification for their policies in the book that Orwell had dismissed. Now, with the free market and globalism dominant - for the time being, anyway - Hayeks may be claimed as one of those books that changed the world, even though comparatively few have read it, and of those who have done so, not all, probably, have understood it. Theres nothing new in that, of course. Books may have a huge influence even when few have read them in their entirety. That certainly could be said of the work which Hayek may be said to have dislodged: Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. No-one can deny that Marx was the most influential political thinker of the 19th century. His critique of capitalism and his emphasis on the inevitability of its overthrow provided the intellectual basis for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. If it seemed to many who called themselves socialists or social democrats that capitalism was doomed (as Orwell believed), this was because Marx had told them so. Even more remarkably, inaccurate as Marxs analysis of history was, reputable historians endorsed his interpretation of the historical process. Books that changed the world? Well, very obviously, that may be claimed for the Bible and the Koran .. ". more ALLAN MASSIE.Jobs.
Well, I buried the lede on this one. Bill Hobbs has linked to the Heritage study on employment statistics (linked by PrestoPundit last week) using the header: Household Survey Accurate, Employment Surges. Bill really has hit the nail on the head. That is the big news -- and it's the big news you don't see in the major news outlets.Kill Trees, Get Tenure.
An astounding 26% of all academics papers published in the field of economics are never cited. More evidence that -- by and large -- the economics of the ivory tower is all about gaining job security in a pseudo-scientific feudal guild -- and very often has little at all to do with adding to our understanding of how the order of the economy might possibly add to human wealth.Road to Serfdom - 60 Years.
Click here to listen to yesterday's CATO Institute event 60 Years -- The Road to Serfdom featuring James Buchanan and Daniel Yergin. Or click to watch the event. (Real Player).Patterico - named editor at The LA Times.
Read this posting by Patterico, then click back and scroll down and read a headline I've posted from today's LA Times. Then laugh yourself silly.Oh, by the way. The story comes to the Times via the very same Patterico. And don't miss this update. Enjoy.
StepInside!.
The indomitable Aaron the Rantblogger host this week's Carnival of the Vanities -- enjoy the fun.Dont' worry - Don't Register.
BugMeNot.com has registered 335 newspapers so you don't have to. (via Jeff Doolittle)STOP.
"The California Supreme Court today ordered San Francisco officials to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples .. ". more LA TIMES.Quotable Steyn.
"the most notable characteristic of the negative reviews is a metropolitan condescension that Mel Gibson has had the bad taste to make a religious movie about a Jesus who isnt an Episcopalian social worker with enlightened views on women, gay marriage, and so forth. Jesus, they assure us, is about love, not violence. Fine. Make your own Jesus movie .. Anti-Americanism makes strange bedfellows. The Arab Islamists despise America because its all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europes radical secularists despise America because its all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. Theyre both right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free market in churches enables religion to thrive. In Europe, the established church .. killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into a bunch of wimpsville self-doubters, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely .. ". more MARK STEYN.NY Times - Pravda on the Hudson.
Former NY Times reporter Jayson Blair: "I believe that "The New York Times" newsroom does have a social change agenda, and it's very [leftist], it's certainly anti-conservative. You could make the argument that it's a pro-[leftist], anti-conservative social change agenda, and Howell didn't just push it, but he made it obvious. It's normally more subtle and more hidden and... O'REILLY: OK. So they wanted... BLAIR: ... masked and cloaked. O'REILLY: So they wanted a new society, more secular society, more liberal society. Is that fair to say? BLAIR: That is fair to say. O'REILLY: And if you didn't buy into that, what would happen? BLAIR: I can't think of anyone there who didn't buy into that. O'REILLY: All of them -- all right. Let me give you ... a real simple question. BLAIR: All right. Go. O'REILLY: If you walk into the newsroom and you said that "The O'Reilly Factor" is my favorite program, I love that O'Reilly guy... BLAIR: Well, look at what... O'REILLY: ... what would happen to you if you were a "New York Times" reporter? BLAIR: I'd be laughed out of the newsroom. I mean, people would brand me as a neo-con, and, you know, they'd stop talking to me. They would... O'REILLY: Really? BLAIR: It would hurt my stories. People would say that I -- you know, there are a handful of people who have conservative... O'REILLY: Yes, they've got a couple of token -- Safire and these guys. BLAIR: Right. But they're outcasts .. O'REILLY: So the prevailing wisdom inside the nation's most powerful newspaper, all right, is... BLAIR: It's not open to middle America, let's put it that way, Bill. O'REILLY: Right. It's a very sharp agenda that they push, not only in their editorial pages, but in their news pages. BLAIR: Unfortunately yes. O'REILLY: OK. And if you don't tow that line ... then your career at the "Times" is hurt? BLAIR: Yes, yes. O'REILLY: Are you telling me the truth, because they're going to say this guy lies -- this guy Blair lies about everything. He's trying to get us. BLAIR: Look, Bill, you know, the first step for me -- you know, I lived a life of lies, I lived a double life. The first step for me in changing on the in -- I mean on the outside is changing on the inside, and that means coming clean. I'm telling... O'REILLY: So you're telling me the truth. BLAIR: ... you the truth. I mean, Bill, I am [leftist] to moderate personally. It does nothing for my political views to lay this point out, but it is the truth... O'REILLY: Why does the publisher and all of -- why do they tolerate this kind of a -- you know, "The New York Times" has a proud tradition -- I mean has a proud tradition... BLAIR: I mean... O'REILLY: .., and now it has become an ideological hack. Why do they tolerate it? BLAIR: Well, I mean I think that the new publisher -- there's a book being done right now about the years -- by Bill McGowan (search) who wrote, "Coloring the News" (search) about the years of Arthur Salzberger, Jr., as the publisher of the paper, and he has a [leftist] agenda that he wants to push, and... O'REILLY: So it comes right down from the top. BLAIR: ... and he thinks the fact that it's -- the newspaper is respected by so many other media outlets, it doesn't matter what they print .. ". more BILL O'REILLY INTERVIEWS NY TIMES REPORTER JAYSON BLAIR.CALIFORNIA CRIME.
"Already, the pay hikes have totaled 19 percent. And with more training stipends and fitness pay, easier sick leave policies, new overtime provisions and bigger pensions, the total package is going to cost California taxpayers an additional $600 million a year .. ". more -- HOW GRAY DAVIS STOLE YOUR PAYCHECK.Hokumis Economicus.
"No economist in his or her right mind would have predicted that we would have gotten 7.8 percent growth in output with 11.3 percent growth in productivity and a loss of 3.1 percent in employment. That is completely outside the experience of history. By attacking the Administration's credibility in forecasting employment, Krugman and others are implicitly criticizing its failure to forecast the unprecedented burst in productivity. In fact, Krugman's tone all but suggests that the Administration knew about the coming productivity miracle and was engaging in a cover-up! " more ARNOLD KLING.March 10, 2004
John Kerry.
"When Kerry joined me in the Senate, I already knew about his record of defamatory remarks and behavior criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam and the conduct of our military personnel there. I had learned in North Vietnamese prisons how much harm such statements caused. To me, his remarks and behavior amounted to giving aid and comfort to our Vietnamese and Soviet enemies. So I was not surprised when his subsequent overall voting pattern in the Senate was consistently detrimental to our national security .. ". more SEN. JEREMIAH DENTON.John Kerry - an "opportunist."
Says former Kerry shipmate Steve Gardner . Quotable. "I dont care how much John Kerrys changed after he moved off my boat, his initial patterns of behavior when I met him and served under him was somebody who ran from the enemy, rather than engaged it .. ". more Gunners Mate Stephen M. Gardner.UPDATE: Kaus comments: "Unfortunately, Time's story is written by Douglas Brinkley, about the last man you'd want to assess Gardner's credibility. Brinkley, after all, has a whole lot invested in his Tour of Duty tale of Kerry heroism and leadership. He's also publicity-mad. ... Maybe Gardner's not to be trusted. But I don't trust Brinkley to be the one not to trust him."
Gay Marriage.
Never be shocked by legislators with utter contempt for the law -- California lawmakers join the lets get gay married craze.60 Years.
Hear or view CATO's The Road to Serfdom 60th Anniversary event live beginning at 3:30 pm today (Eastern). Featured speakers include Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan and PBS documentarian Daniel Yergin.March 09, 2004
60 Years.
"On March 10, 1944, when Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, the 20th century seemed very advanced on its way to becoming the apogee of collectivism. Hayek was born in Vienna in 1899, and when he was a teenager people could travel almost everywhere without passports, visas or work permits. Empires and kingdoms were still the rule, but free trade under British leadership and the gold standard meant relatively small governments and real personal freedom for a large proportion of the population of the Western World. The concentration of political and economic power in the hands of politicians promoted by the two world wars and guided by the Fabian socialists in the U.K. and the New Deal in the U.S. was soon to change that. Hayek was invited to the London School of Economics in 1931 and became a British citizen in 1938. The London School of Economics moved to Cambridge during the Second World War and it was there that he wrote this book, dedicated to "the socialists of all parties," and which many consider to have started the turning of the tide against socialism. The modern welfare state had evolved from Bismarck's Germany, with the regulation of private enterprise, government intervention in people's lives, and the development of state health coverage and pension plans. Hayek argued, to the dismay of the intelligentsia, that Nazism, far from being an extremist movement, really was the "culmination of a long evolution of thought simply collectivism freed from all traces of individualist tradition." In Hayek's words:"The democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who now wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security are the ultimate aims of socialism [But] socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of 'planned economy'"In Latin America today, the apparent success of socialism and loud denunciation of capitalism and globalization is the culmination of the movement towards collectivism accomplished by both Social Democrats and Christian Democrats over the past few decades. Hayek correctly believed that even under a relatively mild form of socialism the love of liberty is extinguished. Today, the Latin Social Democrats and Christian Democrats are being displaced by extremists such as Chvez, Kirchner, and Lula, who hope that a good part of the population has by now forgotten what individual freedom really means. Only 2,000 copies of the first edition were published in England, and then Hayek asked his friend and fellow Austrian economist Fritz Machlup, then working in Washington, for help in getting it published in this country. But there was little interest and one publisher said it was "unfit for publication." It was finally published by the University of Chicago and then Henry Hazlitt wrote a glorious review for the New York Times Book Review, declaring that "Friedrich Hayek has written one of the most important books of our generation... It is a strange stroke of irony that the great British liberal tradition, the tradition of Locke and Milton, of Adam Smith and Hume, of Macaulay and Mill and Morley, of Acton and Dicey, should find in England its ablest contemporary defender -- not in a native Englishman but in an Austrian exile." Soon afterwards, a condensation of the book was published in the first 20 pages of the April 1945 issue of the Reader's Digest, which had a circulation of 8 million, of which 1.5 million went to American soldiers. But the Allied Occupation authorities in Germany did not allow the publication of The Road to Serfdom in that country, in order not to offend the Soviets. Hayek later said:
"After the publication of The Road to Serfdom, I was invited to give many lectures. During my travels in Europe as well as in the United States, nearly everywhere I went I met someone who told me that he fully agreed with me, but that at the same time he felt totally isolated in his views and had nobody with whom he could even talk about them. This gave me the idea of bringing these people, each of whom was living in great solitude, together in one place. And by a stroke of luck I was able to raise the money to accomplish this."In April 1947, 39 economists, political scientists, historians, and journalists met in the Swiss Alps, at the village of Mont Plerin to discuss the threats to freedom. Among them: John Davenport, S. R. Denninson, Aaron Director, Walter Eucken, Milton Friedman, F. A. Harper, Henry Hazlitt, Albert Hunold, B. de Jouvenel, Frank H. Knight, Fritz Machlup, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Leonard Read, Lionel C. Robbins, Wilhelm Roepke, and George Stigler. The Mont Plerin Society was then born under the leadership of Professor Hayek .. ".
TV.
If Christmas 2003 was all about dirt cheap DVD players, Christmas 2005 will be all about low cost big screen LCD TVs.Arson & Academia.
Cal-Tech student implicated in SUV torching. The student named looks to be the same one described in this story on troubled teens.This is a sad equation: anti-social youth + university education = terrorist.
The students undergraduate education was at the U. of Chicago. Hmmm. Wonder if they have a tuition funded branch of the Earth Liberation Front there.
The Earth Liberation Font has a picture of a burnt out Hummer on its front page. Nice.
Who funds the ELF anyway? The Ford Foundation? Bill Moyers? Mrs. Kerry? Just asking ..
UPDATE: Ben & Jerry and lefty Rockefeller money bankroll an ELF linked group. How wonderful.
UPDATE II: It is the same messed up kid mentioned in the story above.
Tip Jar.
I've added a PayPal tip jar for donations.I'm dedicating my PayPal donations to the purchase of blogging related supplies. Down the road I'd like to get a laptop so that I can blog or work on the Hayek Center site while out in the back yard with the kids (I'm a 5 day a week at home daddy). But before I get that (if things go well) I'm looking to get myself a Grundig S350 AM Radio so I can listen to Hugh Hewitt's radio show, which I can't pick up on my $11 Sears radio. Odd as it may sound, Hugh's show can hardly be heard in much of Orange County if you are without a decent radio. Any ideas on a good laptop or maybe a better radio would be welcomed.
Crap Journalism.
"So why are you reading about what "some say" in the paper? Obviously, the reporter and/or the editors think it's important for you to hear this particular opinion. Often, words like "some" or "many" can be replaced with the phrase "Times editors" with no appreciable change in meaning .. ". more PATTERICO.Will there be anything left of the LA Times when Patterico is done with them?
Jobs.
"But what about unemployment? What if people want to work, but can't get a job? In almost every case, government programs are the cause of joblessness .. ". more of WALTER BLOCK - "A Primer on Jobs and the Jobless".Economic modeling witchcraft.
"The modellers themselves have drunk their own cool aid. You rarely hear sober caveats about why this is not a hard science or the limitations of these forecasts .. ". more THE BIG PICTURE.
Evolution.
Of cornets and biological design -- an NY Times profile of Darwinian biologist Niles Eldredge.Thomas Sowell on Gay Marriage.
"The last refuge of the gay marriage advocates is that this is an issue of equal rights. But marriage is not an individual right. Otherwise, why limit marriage to unions of two people instead of three or four or five? Why limit it to adult humans, if some want to be united with others of various ages, sexes and species? Marriage is a social contract because the issues involved go beyond the particular individuals. Unions of a man and a woman produce the future generations on whom the fate of the whole society depends. Society has something to say about that. Even at the individual level, men and women have different circumstances, if only from the fact that women have babies and men do not. These and other asymmetries in the positions of women and men justify long-term legal arrangements to enable society to keep this asymmetrical relationship viable -- for society's sake. Neither of these considerations applies to unions where the people are of the same sex. Centuries of experience in trying to cope with the asymmetries of marriage have built up a large body of laws and practices geared to that particular legal relationship. To then transfer all of that to another relationship that was not contemplated when these laws were passed is to make rhetoric more important than reality." more THOMAS SOWELL.March 08, 2004
Quotable Steyn.
"I think deficits are morally neutral. If I go to the bank and ask them for a loan to buy a house, they'll look kindly on me. If I ask for a loan because I fancy a three-in-a-bed sex romp with two high-class hookers, they'll suggest I wait till I get my Christmas bonus. The portion of the deficit caused by Iraqi reconstruction is analogous to the house loan. Most of the rest - Bush's prescription drug plan for pampered seniors, the mohair subsidy, funding for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland - is analogous to the hooker blow-out .. ". more MARK STEYN.Keynes vs. the Classics.
What cost $100.00 in 1836 would cost $80.70 in 1902. Greater productivity, lower costs. Just what economics and commmon sense tell you to expect. But consider. What cost $100.00 in 1936 would cost $1261.74 in 2002. That is, something which cost you $9 in 1936, would cost you $113.56 in 2002. The Age of Keynes has been the age of massive, unbriddled and completely pointless inflation. And, if truth be told, a massive redistribution from wealth from one pocket to another. Has your pocket been picked?Stats via The Inflation Calculator.
Bush on Autopilot.
"Bush should come to San Francisco. A challenging audience would make him disengage the autopilot. Dubya's delivery Thursday was stale. It lacked fire. He told the crowd he was "looking forward to a spirited campaign, " but I'm still waiting for the spirited part. Instead, I heard the same stock phrases the president has delivered for so long that they have ceased to have any effect .. Bush should come to San Francisco to mix it up. Let him talk to people who aren't sold on him yet. Let him work for the applause. Let hecklers yell at him. That always worked for his predecessor .. ". more DEBRA SAUNDERS. It's hard to tell that Bush wants another term in the White House. Maybe he doesn't. And certainly anyone who really believes in lower LONGTERM tax rates and limited government surely isn't all that excited about four more years of this presidency.French Academic Speaks.
"Despite his clarity, Seneca still must be taken seriously as a philosopher .. ". MORE.Quotable Sowell.
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." -- Thomas Sowell.March 07, 2004
It's A Party!
Celebrating 60 years of The Road to Serfdom in London, in Portland, in Krakow, and in Washington, D.C. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was originally published 60 years ago Wednesday -- March 10, 1944 -- in London.Read the April 1945 Reader's Digest condensed version of The Road to Serfdom here (pdf).
The paperback edition of The Road to Serfdom has been in the Amazon top 1,000 for most of the last week. An amazing achievement for Hayek's amazing little book.
UPDATE: An interview with Heritage President Ed Feulner on Hayek & The Road at 60.
Books.
Does Mel Gibson know about this? "Bookstores had already bought all of the initial print run of 1.9 million copies of the 12th and last book in the Left Behind series" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. The book is Glorious Appearing : The End of Days.Coin Flip.
"In the theory of probability, fair coin flips are the fundamental particles of randomness .. At least it seemed that way. But renowned statistician Persi Diaconis has locked the fair coin flip in the ivory tower of abstraction, forever. It started years ago with his demonstration that he can flip a coin so that it comes up heads at will .. Then he built a coin-flipping machine and showed that, when flipped the same way, coins always land on the same side ..". more SIGNAL + NOISE. (via MR)The Age of Keynes.
$100.00 in 1936 had the same buying power as $1332.37 has today. Data courtesy of the CPI Inflation Calculator.The Voodoo of Economics.
Lies, Damn Lies and Employment Statistics.UPDATE: Arnold Kling take a look at the key issue.
March 06, 2004
"Terry will say anything."
"That's your nutshell, folks: the two most valuable assets of the current head of the Democratic party are 1) his ability to raise tons of dough and 2) his willingness to go on national television and spin with little or no regard for the facts or the truth .. ". more RealClear Politics.Economic Freedom.
"The U.S. per capita income went up by 34 percent [between 1981 and 2001]; in [states rated in the top third for economic freedom] it went up 43 percent. In [those states rated in the bottom third] it went up only 17 percent .. ". more LINDA SEEBACH.Soviet Communism.
Is it an open and shut case? Robert Oppenheimer -- a member of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in America. See also this. All of which suports earlier evidence reported in Brotherhood of the Bomb : The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller by Gregg Herken.60 Years -- The Road to Serfdom.
"Sixty years ago this month, in March 1944, The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek was first published in Great Britain. For six decades it has continued to challenge and influence the political- economic landscape of the world. Hayek delivered an ominous warning that political trends in the Western democracies were all in the direction of a new form of servitude that threatened the personal and economic liberty of the citizens of these countries. At the time the book was released Great Britain and the United States were engulfed in a global war, with Nazi Germany as the primary enemy and Soviet Russia as the primary ally. In 1944 the British had a wartime coalition government of both Conservative and Labor Party members, with Winston Churchill as its head. During these war years plans were being designed within the government for a postwar socialist Britain, including nationalized health care, nationalized industries, and detailed economic planning of industry and agriculture. For the 12 years before Americas entry into the war Franklin Roosevelts New Deal had transformed the United States through a degree of government spending, taxing, regulation, and redistribution the likes of which had never before been experienced in the nations history. Many of the early New Deal programs had even imposed a network of fascist-style economic controls on private industry and agriculture; fortunately, the Supreme Court had declared most of these controls unconstitutional in 1935. At the same time, the Soviet Union was frequently portrayed as a modelhowever rough around the edgesof an ideal socialist society, freeing the masses from poverty and exploitation. The Nazi regime, on the other hand, was usually depicted as a brutal dictatorship designed to maintain the power and control of aristocratic and capitalist elites that surrounded Hitler. Hayeks challenge was to argue that German Nazism was not an aberrant right-wing perversion growing out of the contradictions of capitalism. Instead, the Nazi movement had developed out of the enlightened and progressive socialist and collectivist ideas of the pre-World War I era, which many intellectuals in England and the United States had praised and propagandized for in their own countries. It was in Bismarcks Germany, after all, that there had been born the modern welfare statenational health insurance, government pension plans, regulations of industry and the workplaceand a philosophy that the national good took precedence over the interests of the mere individual. In this political environment Germans came to take it for granted that the paternalistic state was meant to care for them from cradle to grave, a phrase that was coined in Imperial Germany. Two generations of Germans accepted that they needed to be disciplined by and obedient to the enlightened political leadership that guided the affairs of state for their presumed benefit. Beliefs in the right to private property and freedom of exchange were undermined as the regulatory and redistributive state increasingly managed the economic activities of the society for the greater national interest of the German fatherland. By 1933, when Hitler came to power, the German people not only accepted the idea of the fhrer principle, Hayek argued, but many now wanted it and believed they needed it. Notions about individual freedom and responsibility had been destroyed by the philosophy of collectivism and the ideologies of nationalism and socialism. But Hayeks main point was that this tragic history was not unique or special to the German people. The institutional changes that accompanied the implementation of socialist and interventionist welfare-state policies potentially carried within them the seeds of political tyranny and economic servitude in any country that might follow a similar path. The Ultimate Monopoly The more government takes over responsibility for and control over the economic activities of a society, the more it diminishes the autonomy and independence of the individual. Government planning, by necessity, makes the political authority the ultimate monopoly, with the power to determine what is produced and how the resulting output shall be distributed among all the members of the society. What freedom is left to people, Hayek asked, when the government has the ability to decide what books will be printed or movies will be shown or plays will be performed? What escape does the individual have from the power of the state when the government controls everyones education, employment, and consumption? He also warned that the more that government plans production and consumption, the more the diverse values and preferences of the citizenry must be homogenized and made to conform to an overarching social scale of values that mirrors that hierarchy of ends captured in the central plan. Even dissent, Hayek warned, becomes a threat to the achievement of the plan and its related redistributive policies. How can the plan be achieved if critics attempt to undermine peoples dedication to its triumph? Politically incorrect thoughts and actions must be repressed and supplanted with propaganda and progressive education for all. Thus unrestricted freedom of speech and the press, or opposition politicking, or even observed lack of enthusiasm for the purposes of the state became viewed as unpatriotic and potentially subversive. In addition, the classical-liberal conception of an impartial rule of law, under which individuals possess equal rights to life, liberty, and the peaceful acquisition and use of private property, would have to be replaced by unequal treatment of individuals by the political authorities to assure an ideologically preferred redistributive outcome. But, asked Hayek, by what benchmark, other than prejudice, caprice, or the influence of interest groups, would the planners make their decisions? Finally, in one of the most insightful chapters in the book, Hayek explained why, in the politicized society, there is a tendency for the worst to get on top. Fulfillment of the governments plans and policies requires the leaders to have the power to use any means necessary to get the job done. Thus those with the least conscience or fewest moral scruples are likely to rise highest in the hierarchy of control. The bureaucracies of the planned and regulated society attract those who are most likely to enjoy the use and abuse of power over others. Hayek died on March 23, 1992, at the age of 92. In the 12 years since his passing, The Road to Serfdom has come to be seen as one of the greatest political contributions of the twentieth century. Indeed, it played a very crucial role in stemming the tide toward totalitarian collectivism in the decades that followed World War II."-- Richard Ebeling.
American Marxism.
The Monthly Review on Paul Sweezy, 1910-2004. Quotable:His initial intention in attending the London School was to work with the conservative economist Friedrich Hayek. However, in the heated debates then taking place, particularly among younger scholars, Sweezy found himself increasingly attracted to Marxism. Key influences inducing this change in perspective were lectures he attended by Harold Laski at the London School and reading Leon Trotskys History of the Russian Revolution ..
4th Estate.
Oh, That Liberal Media really is the must read blog of the moment. Hasn't InstaPundit heard of this one yet? Already it's the #1 go to shoplift on the web.Corporate Governance.
"You'd think that the board could have found a chairman to mismanage Disney for only, say, $2 million a year. But corporate boards routinely overpay for mediocrity. Indeed, while corporate America ruthlessly applies capitalism to shave costs in acquiring paper clips or secretaries, the top executive suites tend to be, along with North Korea, the world's last enclaves of socialism .. ". more NICK KRISTOF!Hayek's Challenge.
"For much of Friedrich von Hayek's career, mainstream economists tended to dismiss him as a free-market extremist who had lost the argument against Keynesianism in the 1930s and 1940s. Even anti-Keynesians patronised him as a venerable polymath with correctly anti-interventionist views who nevertheless belonged down the hall in the political-theory department. When in 1950 Hayek joined the University of Chicago, a stronghold of free-market theory, he taught in the newly created Committee on Social Thought, not as he had hoped in the economics faculty, which politely declined him a post. Vindication, however, came to this dry, dogged Austrian in his 70s, by when academic economists and policymakers were belatedly taking note. In 1974 Hayek won the Nobel prize for economics. The theoretical idea he was proudest ofthat only markets, not governments, could gather and disperse price knowledge effectivelyhelped inspire a wave of deregulation and privatisation. His chief political ideathat free markets and political liberty were indissociablelent strength to the revival of classical liberalism. By his death in1992, Hayek had joined Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick as one of the three theoretical godfathers of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. Such is the heroic story, and like all heroic stories it contains a measure of truth. Yet the exact nature of Hayek's achievement remains a puzzle. If asked for a good summary of Mr Friedman's lasting contribution, you can point to Capitalism and Freedom (1962), a box of argumentative tools, sharpened by theory, for reversing three decades of governmental thinking, be it on social security, minimum wages, mandatory seat belts or flood relief. Nozick's big book was Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), a philosophical critique of the redistributive welfare policies and a defence of the minimal state. By contrast Hayek's diverse and ruminative outputon business cycles, money, economic ignorance, liberty, social evolution, the human mind, economic methodology, the character of social science, complexity theorythreatens to engulf readers before they start. Of all modern right-wing economic thinkers, Hayek is most like Karl Marx in trying to link everything to everything else. And that may be one reason why it is exaggerating only slightly to say that Hayek nowadays is more revered than read. Obviously guides are needed, and Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge is a welcome introduction. It has several merits. As an editor of Hayek's collected works, Mr Caldwell knows his texts. Unlike many writers on Hayek, he does not treat him as a guru. He admits his obscurities and longueurs. He opens with the influences on Hayek: Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics, and Ludwig von Mises, Hayek's mentor, who questioned the value of abstract model-making and urged economists to focus instead on how market decision-takerswhich means all of usreally think and act. Mr Caldwell takes us through Hayek's debate with Keynes about money and the business cycle, summarises his key article, Economics and Knowledge (1937), as well as his two best known books, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960), before delving into his more philosophical endeavours. Hayek's Challenge is not a biography. We learn little of Hayek the man or his private life, though the spite of academic combat lightens the going, especially in the footnotes. Punning on his own title, Mr Caldwell ruefully admits that charting the Hayek archipelago is a challenge. One reader of the manuscript, he tells us, wanted more on Hayek's economics. The balance does seem odd at times: too much method, too little substance; not enough of the political thought, too much on Hayek's speculations about the mind, a topic his cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was rather better at. Othersfor example, John Gray in Hayek on Liberty (1984) and Roland Kley in Hayek's Social and Political Thought (1994)make of Hayek a more systematic thinker by imposing on him a clearer grid. Mr Caldwell's approach may be truer to the inquisitive and open-ended character of Hayek's thought. But it makes things hard to follow. Hayek believed that markets and societies generally exemplified spontaneous order: as a rule even the best-meant interventions make things worse. True or not in economics, that is, alas, not true for books. Hayek's Challenge, for all its virtues, could have done with the hidden hand of an editor."Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek. By Bruce Caldwell. University of Chicago Press; 489 pages..
March 05, 2004
Academia.
What's it like to be a non-lefty at Smith College. Well, the first rule is, steer clear of politics ..If Bush loses, its his own damn fault.
" it is difficult to think of a single instance during his time in office that George W. Bush has said anything stinging or even partisan about the party that has demonized him without pause for three and half years .. ". more MONA CHAREN
March 04, 2004
IMMIGRATION.
Immigration pop quiz. Sample question:If 2 million illegals enter our country through the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector annually .. and 7 percent .. have criminal records, how many criminals are entering our country each year in Pima and Cochise counties alone?
JOBS.
Overregulated businesses cutting back on highly taxed employees? Sen. Hillary Clinton has a solution -- create another goverment agency. And of course, what the spontaneous order of the free market really must have is a government strategy, claims Mrs. Clinton and -- can you believe it! -- this country has no plan! No government plan for the free economy. Shocking!But this might be a good idea -- Clinton calls for a 10 percent across the board cut in corporate taxes.
FREEDOM INDEX.
How free is your state? The 2004 Fraser Institute Economic Freedom of North America Report.
Economics. Politics drives NBER decision on recession dating.
Academia. "Let's have a look at the record, shall we? Daniel Pipes, taunted and booed at Berkeley. Antonin Scalia, denied "endorsement" by sixteen professors at Amherst. Former terrorist, welcomed with open arms at Dartmouth. And still they ask, "What [leftist] faculty? .. ". more ARMAVIRUMQUE.
The GOP Betrayal. CATO's Veronique de Rugy on The Republican Spending Explosion.
The Bankrupting of America. "According to Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University, the present value of the gap between promised [Social Security & Medicare] outlays and projected revenue is $51 trillion -- more than four times the nation's annual GDP. Today the household wealth of Americans -- the value of their houses, 401(k)s, cars, refrigerators, toasters, socks, everything -- is about $42 trillion .. ". more GEORGE WILL.
March 03, 2004
California. Moody's and Standard & Poor on California's financial outlook -- and its credit rating.
WORLDCOM. The corruption and incompetence Greenspan's bubble bankrolled -- the story of Bernie Ebbers. And here is CNBC's David Faber on Ebbers and WORLDCOM.
Disney. "Corporate democracy in America has most often been a lot like Soviet democracy: the votes didn't really matter .. ". more FLOYD NORRIS. And don't miss Robert Musil's continuing Disney coverage.
Torts & the Corruption of Science. The lead scientist responsible for scientific study linking autism to vaccinations turns out to have been in bed with tort attorneys hoping to cash in on victims of autism. Ten of the 13 authors of that report have now retracted earlier claims, "We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism.". The study provoked a sharp drop in in the number of children getting vaccinations in Britain -- and with that a corresponding sharp rise in measles outbreaks. What to say?
Church vs. State. A three member 9th district panel ruled today that clergy-officiated marriages are unconstitutional, violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In related news, President Bush was criticized as seeking to divide Americans when he suggested the ruling was unfounded in either the Constitution or American judicial tradition. More.
California. A decades worth of evidence that California Democrats are not giving California voters the goverment they want. More proof that George Will and Glenn Reynolds are flat wrong about the logic of representative goverment -- a system dominated today by ideological whack jobs and payoffs to favored pigs at the trough of cash and privilege.
Jobs. "Birthing grounds of entrepreneurial activity suffer from a disproportionate share of government intervention and regulation when compared to larger corporations .. the evidence from all over the world supports the premise that the best role for government in entrepreneurial development is to provide access to education about the process, and then get out of the way! .. ".
more JEFF CORNWALL. (via Bill Hobbs).
Freedom of Religion. "The encroachment of antidiscrimination laws on civil liberties has become so commonplace that new examples of the phenomenon usually elicit yawns. But even the jaded may find their breath taken away by Monday's stunning decision of the California supreme court holding that Catholic Charities could be compelled to violate Catholic doctrine by offering its employees insurance coverage for contraceptive products .. The court relied on the U.S. Supreme Court's 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith for the proposition that sincerely held religious objections "do not excuse compliance with otherwise valid laws regulating matters the state is otherwise free to regulate."
Justice Janice Brown, nominated by President Bush to the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote the masterful dissent. She noted that Smith applied directly only to individual religious claimants, not to the religious conduct of religious organizations. Religious organizations are clearly entitled to an exemption from government regulation when they are engaged in "ministerial" activities central to their religious mission. One could hardly imagine, for example, that the government could force the Catholic Church to hire female priests without violating the Church's free-exercise rights .. ". more DAVID BERNSTEIN.
March 02, 2004
Economics. Is there a dimes worth of difference between the new Keynesians and the old Monetarists? Brad DeLong takes a look.
And Arnold Kling strikes a blow for that old time Keynesian religion.
Global Lying. "There has been quite a bit of talk recently about the "suppressed" report commisioned by the Pentagon that discusses potential consequences of climatic change, after an astonishingly stupid article in The Observer grossly misrepresented the contents of the report, and news organizations across the globe reported the story in the Observer without bothering to read the original report .. ". more Horologium.
Bush 2004. It's not often you hear a big time campaign manager reduced to stuttering incoherence -- but that's what happened to Bush Campaign manager Ken Mehlman when grilled by John & Ken of KFI-LA about Bush's amnesty plan, WMDs and truly massive Federal overspending. The President and his people are off their game -- due in no small part to self-inflicted wounds. It's be interesting to see how or when they ever get their game back.
California. Big, big win for Arnold Schwarzenegger. California votes once again for fantasy land and head in the sand, delaying the inevitable day when the state comes face to face with the overwhelming fiscal reality of massive overspending. This may be good politics for Schwarzenegger, but there is no way to pretend that this is good money management for future generations of Californians.
Gay Marriage. Marrying Mayor is charged with 19 criminal counts by top cop and district attorney in New York. Mayor may face 12 months in jail for violating NY laws.
Lies, Damned Lies & Paul Krugman. "Given Krugman's history of intentional distortions, does it surpise anyone that, after ommitting any mention of Medicare when discussing the Social Security surplus, he does NOT forget to mention it as a Bush "target" for "squeezing spending". Did you get that? Something like six months after Bush passes a huge new increase in Medicare spending, Krugman has the incredible gaul to talk of Bush trying to "squeeze" Medicare spending! .. ". MORE Rkayn Knowledge
UPDATE: "Krugman is the most intellectually dishonest person I've ever known. I'm dead serious. That he has a national forum in which to spew his venomous hatred is a travesty." -- Keith Burgess-Jackson, prof. of philosophy, U. of Texas. (hat tip Luskin)
UPDATE II: "Posts responding to columns of .. Paul Von Krugman have been scarcer here recently because, frankly, it is almost impossible to find a respect in which to take him seriously, including, without limitation, as an economist, a columnist, a reporter or as a provider of political arguments. He is mostly of "interest" as a free rider, degrading the credibility, good will and other intellectual property of institutions that have allowed him access to their respective tills: Princeton, the New York Times, the regretful John Bates Clark Medal committee and, increasingly, the Democratic Party itself .. ". more ROBERT MUSIL.
RIP. Favored student of Joseph Schumpeter, economist Paul Sweezy whipped the ideas of Keynes, Schumpeter and Marx into heady leftist brew once popular among academics and intellectuals. Dead at age 93.
Tax-free "Charity". Tax-free capitalism funds leftist politics -- funnelling tens of billions of dollars to radical --often racist -- lawyers, academics, political organizers, propagandists, etc.
Gay Marriage. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- "If the people change their minds and want to overrule [California's Defense of Marriage law], that's fine with me. But right now that's the law, and I think that every mayor and everyone should abide by the law .. " more ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER.
Gay Marriage. Virginia Postrel's sister-in-law gets hitched.
Double Bubble. "Rare is the economy that transitions from recession to recovery and, ultimately, to expansion without an attendant rise in interest rates. And yet 27 months into the current recovery, thats very much the state of affairs in the United States. The Federal Reserve is the key actor in this drama. Borrowing a page from the script of the New Paradigm of the late 1990s, the Fed continues to hold the view that monetary tightening need not interfere with the rapid growth of a productivity-led economy. But the prescription of low nominal interest rates introduces a new dimension of financial market risk into the equation -- the possibility of multiple asset bubbles. In an effort to spark debate over the wisdom of this policy strategy, the following open letter to Alan Greenspan appeared in the March 1, 2004, issue of Newsweek International .. " more from the CHIEF ECONOMIST of MORGAN STANLEY.
Why Business Bankrolls Socialism. "Within the past few weeks, a handful of large companies have reported they expect to collectively save more than $2.5 billion over time, thanks to the new government subsidy for employers that offer prescription-drug benefits to retirees.
These include estimated savings of $572 million at BellSouth Corp., $415 million at AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, $300 million to $400 million at Deere & Co., $190 million at Alcoa Inc., $450 million at U.S. Steel Corp., and $500 million at Delphi Corp .. ". (via the Mises Blog)
Haiti. "If there was one moment when recent U.S. Haitian policy went wrong, it might have been in 1993 when Bill Clinton was considering whether or not to restore the exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by force of American arms. Aristide had a well-earned reputation for thuggish tactics and emotional instability. Huddled with top aide George Stephanopoulos, Clinton briefly considered and then dismissed a CIA report that Aristide is a manic depressive. "You know," Clinton said, "you can make too much of normalcy." .. ". more RICH LOWRY.
Iraq & Liberty. Tom Palmer -- just back from Iraq -- is setting up an Iraqi think tank which will promote liberal institutions and a free society in that country. Palmer has lined up a major donor to help launch the thing for one year -- but what he needs now are lots of smaller donors. Send him a few bucks if you're so inclined.
March 01, 2004
Jobs. "At 5.6 percent, the national unemployment rate is now lower than the average unemployment rate of the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s .. ". more J. EDWARD CARTER on Bush 2001-2003 vs. Clinton 1993-1995.
Hayek. "The Austrian Teacher" By Jason Steorts -- from the February 23, 2004, issue of National Review.
A review of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek, by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago, 489 pp., $55)
"Friedrich Hayek said of his book The Fatal Conceit that "it is a work for which one has to be an economist, but this is not enough!" This sentence captures the essence of both the book and its author. Hayek was an economist, of course but he was much more. His contributions extend to fields as disparate as cognitive psychology and political philosophy. So the study of Hayek's thought is not without its difficulties: One must think like an economist, but this is not enough.
Bruce Caldwell who is an economist, and a historian confronts the difficulties inherent in Hayek scholarship with this new book. Caldwell admits to some trepidation about his work. "I am an historian of economic thought, and my own self-image is that I am a careful one," he writes. "One need not be a genius to recognize that writing outside one's field is not a good way to be careful." Such reservations notwithstanding, Hayek is fortunate in his biographer. Hayek's Challenge is a success, and Caldwell proves himself capable of presenting Hayek's ideas in all fields with both depth and clarity.
The book is divided into three main sections. Roughly the first quarter discusses the rise of the Austrian school of economics and its antagonism with the German historical school in the late 1800s the background against which Hayek would emerge. The next section of the book just over half traces the development of Hayek's thought over the course of his life. Readers interested in the facts of that life will be disappointed, as few are given. What is provided in great detail, rather, is a discussion of Hayek's main works, summarizing both their general themes and their specific arguments. In the final section of the book, Caldwell assesses Hayek's legacy. Here Caldwell is less historian and more interpreter, offering his thoughts on the success and relevance of Hayek's work and placing it in the context of contemporary thought.
Where Caldwell succeeds best is in showing how certain of Hayek's basic concerns affected his views across the board, on seemingly unrelated matters; and those who know Hayek in only one of his guises should find it rewarding to get to know the man as a whole.
Consider, for example, Hayek on income redistribution. Readers of National Review are perhaps most likely to think of Hayek as the author of The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, works of political philosophy in which he defends market institutions against interventionist policies designed to achieve "social justice." (Hayek's work in this area played an important role in the conversion of Robert Nozick, another great defender of free markets, from socialism.) What many may not know, however, is that Hayek's antipathy toward socialistic meddling was but one manifestation of his more general concern with what he called the "knowledge problem" his insights into which are, according to Caldwell, his most important contribution to economics.
In the 1937 essay "Economics and Knowledge," Hayek formulated the "knowledge problem" this way: "How can the combination of fragments of knowledge existing in different minds bring about results which, if they were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess?" Hayek's answer was that market institutions manage to gather the "fragments of knowledge" and coordinate individuals toward efficient outcomes. No one knows just what combination of production inputs will minimize costs and produce the quantity of goods that satisfies demand. But the operations of the market, in which prices are not fixed but respond to changes in supply and demand, are a "discovery procedure" (as Hayek would later put it) for such information.
Lest that sound like a small insight the stuff of an introductory economics textbook note how Hayek's answer diverges from standard neoclassical economic theory. In the textbook version, individuals are assumed to have perfect rationality and foresight. They then unfailingly make decisions about the allocation of their resources that maximize their utility. While this model no doubt has its uses, its unrealistic assumptions are often seized upon to discredit laissez-faire economics.
Hayek, like many of his peers (and the Austrians in particular), was also inclined toward skepticism of the elusive, perfectly rational homo economicus. But rather than take the apparent implausibility of the standard model as a reason to reject free markets, Hayek saw that free markets helped compensate for the limitations of human knowledge and rationality. By spontaneously gathering dispersed information and coordinating it through the setting of prices, markets make the choices of individual men both better informed and more rational than they would otherwise be. Hayek also understood long before most, and to his great credit that the incompleteness of any individual's knowledge makes central economic planning both impossible and undesirable. (Undesirable in that the planner must, as Hayek explained in the 1939 pamphlet "Freedom and the Economic System," "impose upon the people the detailed code of values that is lacking" paving a path toward despotism.)
Caldwell goes on to show how Hayek's reflection on the knowledge problem led him to conclusions about the methodology of economics. Just as no central planner knows enough to bring about an efficient economic outcome, no economist knows enough to make precise forecasts. Instead, economists must content themselves with offering general explanations of the principles by which economic outcomes arise, and making predictions about the pattern of future events (rather than predicting specific outcomes). This skepticism continues to rub economists of a positivist persuasion which is to say nearly the entire field the wrong way.
According to Caldwell, Hayek's main message concerned "the limits that we face as analysts of social phenomena." In this vein, Caldwell ends with a plea for a renewed interest in the study of economic history a field that has been almost entirely displaced by economists' ever-increasing interest in mathematical models and empirical analysis. The positivist hope has been that such work would establish law-like relations between events and economic outcomes; but for Hayek and, as is clear by the end of the book, for Caldwell too such ambitions smack of hubris.
None of which is to say that empirical work should be abandoned. Hayek's call is for modesty in the profession's aims, not for complete asceticism. But one doesn't have to be an economist or a political philosopher, or a cognitive psychologist, or anything else to reflect on the last century and see the catastrophes to which overly sanguine economic planners can lead. For this reason alone, Hayek's challenge is worth remembering, and Bruce Caldwell has done a great service by reminding us of it."
Mr. Steorts is a former Harvard Crimson columnist and National Review intern
Rule of Law. Jonah Goldberg gets it: " I keep hearing that it's terrible to "change" or "tinker" with the Constitution .. In fact, the folks fretting over changing the Constitution are largely -- though not entirely -- the same people who celebrate the pernicious doctrine of a "living Constitution." .. What I don't understand is why it's a great thing for unaccountable judges to change the meaning of the Constitution without a public debate while it is some form of tyranny for the House, Senate and fifty states to debate the issue over the course of months or years under the glaring spotlight of the media.
Before you answer that an amendment is more permanent, let me pre-emptively say: Not so fast .. tell me exactly what could be done under our regime to reverse the Supreme Court's banning of sodomy laws under Lawrence .. In effect, the Supreme Court amended the constitution just last year and the pro-gay marriage folks cheered .. more JONAH GOLDBERG.
Jobs. Don't miss Tim Blair on how CNN is spinning 5.6 percent unemployment rate numbers -- and the comments section is also definitely worth a look (flagged by InstaPundit).
The phony benchmark behind CNN's jobs spin is the unsustainably high employment numbers produced by the Fed-generated artificial boom of the late 1990's -- with businesses in a frenzy to anyone and everyone for jobs which had no chance of being permanent. The best explanation of this artificial Fed-generated boom and bust comes from economist Roger Garrison.
John Kerry. "Mr. Kerry has already confessed his complicity in killing civilians as accidents of war. However, he has offered a classic Nuremberg defense that this was not only a commonplace occurrence throughout the Vietnam War, but he was carrying out a policy with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. His commander of naval operations in Vietnam, who specifically designed the mission that Mr. Kerry and the other Swiftboat commanders executed, Admiral Zumwalt, clearly disagreed. An examination of the truth behind this disagreement is not an attack on Mr. Kerry. It is a matter of vital historical interest .. ". MORE Thomas Lipscomb.
Religion. It's not just a Mel Gibson thing -- The Passion of the Muslims.
Got to Love It. Aaron the Rantblogger proudly does a Google search.
Bush vs. your family's health. "Does Bush want to be portrayed as the minion of religious extremists who'd stifle science even at the cost of lifesaving medical technologies? If he doesn't, then he's going about things all wrong .. ". more GLENN REYNOLDS
Taxes. Wrap your mind around this one. A Canadian Conservative Party leadership candidate is proposing that a worker's first $250,000 would be earned tax free. Colby Cosh has put his 30-something mind to work on the idea, and he's not impressed.