The Kids: Professors Worry About Right-Wing Students

What do the professors think about the lurch to the right in the past decades, and what do they think about their increasingly right-wing students who have responded to a

"concerted effort" by "Goebbelsian" masters of rhetoric that have turned the country to the right over the past generation or so.

Actually, some of the professors recognize that they have to change their ways, according to Reason’s Nick Gillespie reporting from the Modern Language Association convention.

Faced with a choice between a sort of bitter righteousness and increasing irrelevance on the one hand and engaging students with more fair-minded argumentation and open-ended discussion, some academics are choosing the latter.

No! It can’t be true! But here is Mark Bauerlein from Emory University:

"We need more and wider perspectives," represented in the classroom, he said. "Bring in a little less Foucault and a little more Hayek. Some Whit[t]aker Chambers to go along with Ralph Ellison."

What a concept. Actually, it is Step Two. What we conservatives would really like in college is to have a conservative thinker or two merely mentioned. The real scandal of the modern university is not that conservative ideas don’t get a fair hearing. It is not that conservatives ideas don’t even get discussed. It is that conservative thinkers don’t even get a mention.

It’s like those photos in Soviet encyclopedias in which the Bolshevik heroes kept getting airbrushed out as, one by one, they got purged.

The real victims of the liberal university are the girls. Since boys have long been marginalized and reviled by the liberal university they have turned away from liberal education. But girls, who thrive in the bums-on-seats and girls-are-victims model of education, have believed and followed the liberal line.

But when that liberal, career-oriented, pro-choice, educated woman ends up childless, as she often does, what’s the point?

Everyone Worries About Deficits

The federal deficit is terrible. The trade deficit is worse. How long can it go on? That is what we have been worrying about at least since 1970. And The Washington Times rehearses the experts’ worries about them.

We know where the federal deficit comes from. Politicians spending taxpayers’ money in response to the demands of taxpayers. And, of course, beyond the formal budget deficit and its accumulated national debt there is the unfunded debt, the promises made, principally for Medicare and Social Security, that are not reflected in the federal government’s headline budget numbers.

But what about the trade deficit? It has gone up when the dollar was high in the late 1990s and it has gone up when the dollar was low in the early Noughties. What is going on?

Maybe Arnold Kling has the answer. Productivity.
Here are the productivity numbers for the last half century.

Period Average Productivity Growth 1955-1960 2.03 1960-1965 2.79 1965-1970 2.09 1970-1975 2.31 1975-1980 1.55 1980-1985 1.38 1985-1990 1.65 1990-1995 1.59 1995-2000 2.28 2000-2005 3.39

The table shows a pretty staggering increase in productivity over the past ten years. What caused it? Who knows, for sure, and Kling insists that we refrain from giving credit or blame for any particular president or economic policy.

William W. Lewis in his book The Power of Productivity thinks he does have an answer. He credits the relatively free economy of the United States that allows intense, fair competition over most product markets. And he emphasizes the importance of retail. Retail, sparked by Wal-Mart accounted for half the gain in productivity in the 1990s. Has that continued into the Noughties?

Maybe the productivity numbers help us understand the continuing saga of the twin deficits. Maybe a nation that is increasing the productivity of its workers (or whose workers are increasing their productivity) at 3.39 percent per year can afford deficits as far as the eye can see. Maybe the way we should look at the deficits is that foreign investors can’t get their hands on U.S. financial assets fast enough.

Or maybe it is a two-way street. Maybe the productive workers of the United States want to buy cheap goods, from wherever they are made, and the rest of the world wants the stability and security of US financial instruments as a store of value.

The Dear Old MSM in Their Liberal Bubble

Conservatives love to twit the mainstream media for their bias and their insularity. And now that we really have a voice in the national debate we can afford to be more generous to our adversaries, and humorously represent them as jolly old dinosaurs “asking each other what’s happened to all the tasty fronds,” as Jonah Goldberg does.

He can’t help chuckling as three old dinosaurs, Tim Russert, Ted Koppel, and Tom Brokaw agree with each other about the shocking state of the nation.

These three giants of television journalism tut-tutted about one government failure after another, from the Katrina response to the government’s inability to provide health care for everybody to our dismayingly low taxes. Brokaw agreed with Koppel, Koppel agreed with Brokaw. Russert nodded as one newsman repeated what the other one just said.

But of course, things are in a parlous state, if you are a liberal MSM dinosaur. Things just aren’t the same as in the good old days when what the TV news said was accepted as objective news and there was no way you could escape the liberal bubble.

The trouble is that the liberal bubble leads the MSM not just into tut-tutting, but into seriously flawed journalism, as Michael Barone points out in critiquing The New York Times “Dec. 16 story reporting the National Security Agency intercepts of telephone conversations between terrorism suspects abroad and U.S. citizens or legal residents in the United States. The Times didn’t bother telling its readers this practice is far from new and is entirely legal.”

Let’s put the issue very simply. The president has the power as commander in chief under the Constitution to intercept and monitor the communications of America’s enemies. Indeed, it would be a very weird interpretation of the Constitution to say the commander in chief could order U.S. forces to kill America’s enemies but not to wiretap -- or, more likely these days, electronically intercept -- their communications. Presidents have asserted and exercised this power repeatedly and consistently over the last quarter-century.

In the old days, the Times could get away with this, because there would never be a chance for the conservative case to see the light of day. But not any more. Within a day or two of the Dec 16 Times story, conservatives had posted on the web examples of Democratic presidents—not just the evil Bush—invoking the power to do warrantless intercepts of foreign powers, and the MSM has been on defense ever since.

Muslims Don't Read Western Media

Should we forget the Bush strategy of using cold hard steel to push back the Islamist terrorists or can we win the war on terror by winning hearts and minds?

According to Daniel Pipes, winning hearts and minds isn’t going to do the job. Muslims the world over prefer to read only Muslim media and thus are impervious to western outreach through the media.

Many indications suggest that Muslims favor tuning in to or reading media prepared by their coreligionists, trusting these more than what comes from non-Muslims.

As an example of this Pipes offers the murder in 1994 of a Jewish boy, Ari Halberstam, on the Brooklyn Bridge by Rashid Baz, a Lebanese immigrant who killed Halberstam in revenge for the killing of 29 Muslims in a mosque in Hebron by Israeli Baruch Goldstein. It didn’t matter that the Israeli government had strongly condemned Goldstein’s attack. The Muslim media that Baz read never reported the Israeli condemnation. Instead they had encouraged revenge against an agent of the Israeli will.

Of course, everyone lives in a bubble. President Bush lives in a bubble, according to Newsweek. And liberals live in a bubble, according to Thomas Lifson.

One of the reasons people choose to live in a bubble is to stay focused on their goal. President Bush is focused on the war on terror. Liberals are focused on working towards a progressive millennium. Muslims are focused upon bringing Islam to the whole world.

All this focus is great. Unless it distracts you from noticing that you are heading into disaster. To avoid this fate it is best to keep a weather eye on what the other guys are saying and writing.

Now We Can Fight Back

It used to be there was little we could do if The New York Times put a lump of coal into the nation’s Xmas stocking. And it was hard to fight against Democrats when they undermined the cold war during and after Vietnam.

But now we have the conservative blogosphere and we have commentators like Michael Barone who writes an article—drawing on the conservative counterblasts to the NYT NSA screed of Dec 16—to point out that the courts have always recognized the president’s power to intercept foreign communications for intelligence purposes.

The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, should not be interpreted in a way that makes it "a suicide pact." The notion that terrorists’ privacy must be respected when they place a cell-phone call to someone in the United States is in the nature of a suicide pact. The Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in the United States should not be stretched into a ban on interceptions of communications from America’s enemies abroad.

And now we have Amir Taheri reminding us, against the elite push to declare the war on terror a failure, just how much has been achieved in the last four years since the shock of 9/11. In Afghanistan and Iraq the

democratic forces may fail because of their mistakes, or be defeated by Islamist and secular despotic opponents. But they also have a chance to win. And that — as seen from the United States, which should be supportive of democratic forces everywhere — is certainly a success.

The United States, Taheri writes, cannot change its foreign policy on an instant. And let us be under no illusion:

The spread of democracy is good for American safety and security, not to mention trade and economic interests. And it is also good for nations that wish to enter the mainstream of global life.

The lesson of the Bush years is that there are democratic forces out there longing to get a chance in the benighted dictatorships of the world. All they are saying is give us a chance.

A Christmas Story from the Land of the Elves

At Christmastime it is right and proper that we step back from the hurly burly of everyday life and think a little. For instance, we could think a little about the land of the elves, writes Robert Cole.

Once upon a time in the far off Land of Cold Commerce there lived some elves. Lots and lots of elves.
Some of the elves wore overalls. Some wore white collars and some wore blue collars.

You can see where this is going. “Some of the elves thought that they had power.”

The Elf Lord of Nevele thought he could change things. Long, long ago he’d granted the elves of Knab independence and robbed the Elves of Snoisnep of tax relief. He’d given the working-class elves credits, but not enough credit for being able to look after themselves as elves.

It seems that this particular land of the elves is on the other side of the Atlantic. The Elf Lord of Nevele is Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchecquer at No. Eleven, Downing Street. Of course, he wants to be a bigger Lord, the Lord High Elfship of Number Ten. Anyway, one day, the Spirit of Business woke up from a very long nap and

Light shone all around, scales dropped from the eyes of the elves and they began to hear with a clarity never before known.

Yeah, like we should be so lucky.

Anyway, guess what happened. People started to think of themselves not as workers or capitalists or Elf Lords of this and that, but as “all of these types of people simultaneously.”

They realised that it was only by behaving with mutual consideration, and by having respect for the fragility of the interwined relationships that supported them all, that they could thrive.


The Land of Cold Commerce became a Warm Weald of Wealth. Things began to make sense. And everyone lived happily ever after.

Ah, yes. And God bless us every one, eh, Bob Cratchit?

Will "Kos" Lead Democrats Off a Cliff?

Who is Markos Moulitsas and what does he want? That is what Democrats must be asking themselves as “Kos” has propelled his Daily Kos into the stratosphere as the No. 1 liberal blog in the nation, and that is what writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells wonders as he interviews Moulitsas in Berkeley, California for Washington Monthly.

Wallace-Wells finds that Moulitsas is a tactician. He doesn’t really seem to know what he wants, except that he wants to win, wants Democrats to win. But the trouble is that all the Democrats he supports tend to lose. In 2004 he raised money for 13 Democrats and every one of them lost. All through the fall of 2004 he was confidently predicting victory, and, well, you know what happened.

But he seems to represent a real constituency.

The younger-than-35 liberal professionals who account for most of his audience seem an ideologically satisfied group, with no fundamental paradigm — changing demands to make of the Democratic Party.

Moulitsas and his supporters don’t have a coherent political philosophy. They just want to beat Bush and the evil neo-cons. And the Democratic leadership feels like placing “a gaudy bet” on Kos and his chums.

But the more that the Democratic Party turns to Moulitsas for help, the more the limits to his movement become apparent, the less the raw animus of many liberals for the Iraq war seems likely to translate into any lasting liberal movement.

Wallace-Wells paints Moulitsas as a fanatic, a slight man with a high pitched voice:

He speaks in twenty-minute chunks, so you don’t need to ask questions so much as provision buckets to catch the flood.

For a conservative, this all seems like great fun, it feels like the Democrats digging themselves into a hole. The great prosperous middle of the nation will never turn to a fanatic like Kos who wants to enroll them into a mass movement. Go ahead, Democrats, we chuckle, wrap yourself around this fanatic and see where it gets you.

Of course, if things really go south, then all bets are off. America might rally to a tactical ruthless Democratic Party.

But before then “Kos” is more likely to lead the Democratic Party off an electoral cliff. After all, back in the 1980s the secret weapon of the evil neo-cons was Ronald Reagan, a man who offered America radical change with a smile and a bob of the head. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Kos and his chums don’t understand that the Democrats are not hungry revolutionaries with nothing to lose that can afford to take big risks to win a great prize. Democratic voters have a lot to lose if things go the wrong way: their government pensions, their first-dollar health benefits, their government jobs, their government subsidies, for a start.

Is the Worm Turning in NY Subways?

Studies show that state and local government workers earn about 40 percent more than workers in the private sector. That is what Steve Malanga reports in City Journal.

So why do unions like the transit workers union in the New York metropolitan area get away with striking when their semi-skilled bus and train operators get paid around $50,000 a year with full health benefits and pensions at 55?

Maybe they aren’t going to get away with it for much longer. According to Ryan Sager comments on the TWU website were running 4-1 against the strike until the union took the comments section down. Wrote one person on the TWU site:

My annual salary is less than half than the lowest paid transit worker in the system, and now I am going to lose at least one if not more days of pay due to the strike . . . Thanks for that — and happy holidays.

The fat salaries and benefits of government workers will only last as long as the average voter puts up with them. When the day comes that the average voter turns against the overpaid, under-challenged government worker then the public employee unions will suddenly find that their good friends the municipal politicians will be nowhere to be found.

Politicians always go where the votes are. Nothing personal, you understand.

Unsustainable Medicare

As commentator Bruce Bartlett writes, the federal budget is dangerously out of whack. Never mind the gross federal debt of $9.9 trillion. The real number is the unfunded liabilities on Social Security and Medicare. On President Bush’s watch

Social Security’s indebtedness has risen to $5.7 trillion, Medicare Part A is now up to $8.8 trillion and Part B has grown to $12.4 trillion. In addition, there is now another Medicare program -- Part D for prescription drugs -- that George W. Bush rammed through Congress. The unfunded liability for just this one program is $8.7 trillion, for a total of $35.6 trillion.

It is going to be interesting to see what happens with Medicare over the years. What do America’s senior citizens really want from their government health care program? What are they willing to pay for it? What is the rest of the nation prepared to pay?

That is why the $35.6 trillion number is meaningless. So we’ve made a ridiculous promise that cannot be redeemed. As Herbert Stein said, years ago, If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.

The interesting thing is how the politics of this is going to work out and how the government will hide from the senior citizens of the day that it is not going to redeem its promise of abundant, affordable health care for senior citizens.

We can see how it works out in nations with government monopoly health systems. They restrict the provision of health care by rationing. How will it work out here?

The Joys of National Health Care

Our neighbor to the north has a government monopoly system of health care. In Canada you are not allowed to spend your own money on health care.

But Jacques Chaoulli, a French Canadian physician decided to challenge that, according to Anthony Dick. He argued in court that it was illegal to refuse medical care by putting people on waiting lists and at the same time to prevent people from seeking their own remedy by paying for needed medical procedures out of their own pockets.

Eventually, the Canadian Supreme Court agreed.

The question is, however, why ordinary people are so enamoured of a system that denies them the right to spend their own money to save their lives if the state won’t do it for them? Dick wonders about this too. The Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper recently went out of his way to argue against any private provision of health care.

“There will be no private, parallel system,” he recently promised at a rally in Winnipeg.

This longstanding hostility to private health-care alternatives cannot be explained away simply by noting that most Canadians have bought into the Left’s premise that taxpayers have an obligation to pick up the hospital bills of every citizen who ever gets sick. Something further is required to explain why some Canadians think sick people should be actively prevented from using their own money to purchase health care from private companies that deliver service better and faster than the government.

I believe that the reason is a dark and shameful one. People like the moral and financial cop-out of government health care. That way they never have to make the decision to spend their entire savings on a medical procedure to stay alive. They can just submit to the government system, and avoid the moral decision: Is my life worth more than my money? (Or is Aunt Millie’s life worth more than my money?)
The French Canadian movie The Barbarian Invasions takes a brilliant look at this moral universe.

It should not be surprising that people want to escape difficult decisions. We are human, after all. But should we really live in a society that forbids people from spending their own money on lifesaving medical procedures? What, as the left likes to say, does that say about us and about our society?

President Bush Rallies the Nation. Why Did He Wait?

There are many who must wonder. Why did President Bush wait until now to rally the American people to the war in Iraq?

In his speech to the nation on December 18, 2005, President Bush, as he has done before, laid out his policy. And as he has done before, he acknowledged that there are valid grounds for disagreements with his policy. He admitted that the war in Iraq

has caused sorrow for our whole nation -- and it has led some to ask if we are creating more problems than we’re solving.

That is an important question, and the answer depends on your view of the war on terror. If you think the terrorists would become peaceful if only America would stop provoking them, then it might make sense to leave them alone.

This was an honorable thing to do, to lay out the core of the anti-war case. Bush then continued, and laid down the facts that led him to the decision to take war to the terrorists. Finally,

My conviction comes down to this: We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them.

The advantage of this sort of talk was that it frankly admitted the difference in opinion, without demonizing the opposing point of view. Then he went on to point out that, right or wrong, we had to finish the job. For to give up now would be to invite disaster.

But why did he wait until now to make this speech? I believe there are two reasons.

First of all, he has wanted to avoid the real Vietnam syndrome, the perpetual “light at the end of the
tunnel”—continually invoked and continually failing to appear as promised. If you have listened carefully over the last three years to President Bush you will know that he has been very careful about what he has said and what he has promised. So he has been prepared to put up with the hail of elite criticism until he has actually achieved the victory in battle that points to victory in the war. A national Iraqi election in which all Iraqis participate is surely as big a victory as you could wish for.

Secondly, there is Bush’s pride. I think that President Bush is too proud to rally Americans unless he has real achievement to rally us to. He just won’t give his opponents the rope to hang him with.

Bush in Bubble Racks Up Another "W"

There he sits, the incurious President Bush, isolated from Congress and living in a fantasy bubble. And on December 15 he stumbled into another touchdown in the War on Terror, as Iraqis in their millions went to the polls to elect a national parliament.

But he doesn’t have a plan! But there weren’t any WMDs! But he won’t admit his mistakes! But it’s all about oil!

I know. It just doesn’t make sense, does it. We must get the international community involved, as Senator Biden (D-Del) insists. We must get the UN involved. Otherwise we could end up with a disaster on our hands.

The big story, of course is that the Sunni voters turned out in force to vote.

In Saddam’s home province, Tikrit, more than 80 percent of voters turned out, a local official said.

And, according to reports, in Ramadi Sunni militias actually provided security at the polls.

That is what the Bush administration has been working to achieve all along, to make the opportunity for power through ballots more attractive than the opportunity through bullets.

Even as the Bush strategy slowly, step by step, gets results, you can see the point of the Democrat attacks. Their accusations apply a necessary tarnish to the achievements of the Bush administration. Instead of glorious triumphs, they seem like messy foulups.

So when it is all over, Democrats can say, yes, we won, but we won in spite of the efforts of the Bush administration.

And it could work.

Who Needs Literacy

About 14 percent of adults in the United States cannnot perform a simple reading task like “searching a short, simple text to find out what a patient is alloved to drink before a medical test.”

About 22 percent of adults cannot perform a simple computational task like “adding the amounts on a bank deposit slip.”

Adult literacy is slightly improved from the last adult literacy survey conducted in 1992.
That is what the U.S. Department of Education just released in its A First Look at the Literacy of America’s Adults in the 21st Century.

Yes, but at least the rest of American adults are literate, right? Not exactly. Those with “basic” literacy, the ability to perform the simple tasks mentioned above, but nothing more, amount to 43 percent of the adult population.

Only 13 percent of American adults are rated “proficient” in prose reading, document reading, and computation skills.

So what’s the point? What’s the point of spending five percent of GDP on schooling K-12 when the net result is an America where only 13 percent of adults exhibit “proficient” skills in literacy?

Maybe these numbers are telling us something. Maybe they are telling us that literacy has been overrated. Maybe most people only need basic literacy skills. Maybe the fuss over literacy has been ginned up by literate people who think that everyone should be like them. After all, if literacy were the royal road to power, money, and the love of beautiful women, you’d think that everyone and his brother would be literate and proficient, and eager to cash in.

By the way, the survey only tested reading skills. Writing skills? Forget about it.

Hugh Hewitt Pops MSMer's Bubble

Be sure to check this interview of LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik by Hugh Hewitt. The full text is available on Radio Blogger. It is priceless.

Hewitt interviewed Hiltzik on his radio show because he had made some uncomplimentary remarks about Hewitt as director of the Nixon Library. The result was hilarious, as Hewitt revealed Hiltzik to be a committed left-wing activist, with consistently left-wing opinions on every left-right political issue from Helen Gahagan Douglas (for you youngsters, liberals consider Nixon to be a red-baiter because in the 1950 Senate campaign he called Douglas the Pink Lady, pink down to her underwear) to the Iraq War (he’s against it). Hiltzik found it difficult to agree that Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting in the 1950s was not in the same league as Stalin’s Great Terror.

After demonstrating, on issue after issue, that he is about as left-wing as you can get, Hiltzik won’t say who he voted for president in 2004. Oh no. That just wouldn’t be right.

The MSMers can never admit who they voted for. It would end the pretence of “objectivity.”

Your Bubble is Bigger Than My Bubble

President Bush lives in a bubble. That is the breathless conclusion of Newsweek reporters Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe. He doesn’t answer the calls of congressmen and his humor, rather than being inclusive and team building, like Ronald Reagan’s, is often intended to belittle a subordinate,

intended, however so subtly, to put the listener on the defensive. It is a towel-snap that invites a retort. How many people dare to snap back at a president?

Of course media analyst Brent Bozell is outraged. What Thomas and Wolffe are really upset about is that President Bush doesn’t call them. The media really doesn’t care about policy (except that it should be more “moderate”), it cares about access.

But Bruce Bartlett agrees with Newsweek. The president doesn’t like day-to-day politicking, meeting with members of Congress, or getting information from outside official channels. “The result is Mr. Bush appears to live in a sort of fantasy world utterly divorced from reality.”

The critics fail to appreciate that the leader of any organization must operate in a bubble in which most information is blocked out. Otherwise he wouldn’t get anything done. Every enterprise operates on faith in the future, and a willingness to ignore bad news and discouraging reverses. The key is to have the information to know when to take decisive action: to launch the right new product at the right time or to abort a failed initiative before it engulfs the enterprise in disaster. In the Iraq War, of course, the president would have gone mad if he had made it a point to be connected to the daily ups and downs of political sentiment.

On the two important national issues presented to him during his term in office, President Bush has made the right decision, bubble or no bubble.

President Bush’s war on terror operates within the simple grand strategic situation of the United States. It must not let the oil in the Middle East fall into the hands of one power. That is why the Iraq adventure makes complete strategic sense. It stopped Saddam’s predatory adventurism and it blocks Iran’s future predatory expansion westwards.

President Bush’s economic policy of tax rate cuts may well have prevented an economic meltdown. We cannot be sure of that, of course, because the tech crash did not develop into a full scale depression. Job One for an American president is to keep the economy on track.

People who do not understand these two points, the necessity to keep the Middle East divided and the necessity to keep the US economy on track, are the ones who are really living in a bubble.

But so far, President Bush has passed the test.

After the Iraq Election, Then What?

When you bring a nation back from the dark night of terror, you have to do it step by step. On December 15, the Iraqi people will elect the leaders who will lead the nation for the next several years. But, as Amir Taheri writes, the big problem comes later. It comes when the new government sets the economic framework for the new nation.

The trouble is that the Iraqi people cannot imagine anything other than a distributionist Soviet-style state.

It is important for the Iraqis to realize that they can’t build a Western-style democracy based on a Soviet-style economic model: A key condition of genuine democratization is the creation of a robust and self-confident private sector. Yet that is something that most members of the new Iraqi leadership reject, both by ideology and personal calculations. Almost all want to be chiefs and patrons distributing favors on behalf of the state and buying support for themselves.

Of course, this kind of attitude isn’t confined to Iraq. Many people in the United States, both politicians and ordinary voters, cannot see beyond the idea of the national government as a dispenser of benefits and favors.

The Iraqis have an advantage. They are not entering the world of democracy as pioneers struggling on an unexplored frontier. We humans know pretty well how a prosperous economy based on democratic capitalism works. It works best when you minimize privilege and subsidy, keep government interference and the size of the public sector down. It needs a robust court system defending private property against the power of the great special interests.

It is a truth that the peoples in the democratic countries have struggled with for over a century. Welcome to the club, Iraqis.

If Fathers Had "Choice"

If women deserve “choice,” then why shouldn’t men enjoy comparable rights to order termination or continuance of the fetus in the womb of their sex partner. That’s what Meghan Daum argues.

Most people now accept that women, especially teenagers, often make decisions regarding abortion based on educational and career goals and whether the father of the unborn child is someone they want to hang around with for the next few decades. The "choice" in this equation is not only a matter of whether to carry an individual fetus to term but a question of what kind of life the woman wishes to lead.

But if we are talking about the mother, er, host of the fetus making this sort of “lifestyle” decision, why not extend the same rights to the father, er, sperm donor?

So off goes Ms. Daum for 800 words of mostly unmarried hypotheticals. She illustrates with remarkable clarity how once you step out of the moral and legal framework of a marriage you end up in a moral and legal snakepit.

Let’s look at this differently. Let’s say that your “educational and career goals” are a fine thing, and the “kind of life” you wish to lead is an even finer thing. Can anyone say that their lifestyle choices are finer than a man and a woman entering into marriage and making a vow to bear and rear the fruit of their union?

When you “choose” to assume less than full responsibility for the children you conceive, aren’t you making a rather unfortunate statement about the kind of life you wish to live?

We’ve had about a century now of talk about overpopulation and the unwanted child and lifestyles and choice and all the rest of the opt-out agenda. Expect the next generation but one to develop a rather judgmental attitude towards all this self-serving talk.

As a Hindu friend said: If you get married and don’t have children, what’s the point?

People want to have their cake and eat it. They want the freedom to make choices, but don’t want to deal with the moral consequence of their choices.

People forget that freedom is not a cloud-cuckoo land where everyone is freed from every restraint and consequence. Freedom is the right to make the wrong choice, and live with that wrong choice for the rest of your life.

Let’s stipulate that abortion should be legal. But legal doesn’t make it right. And nobody should imagine that the choice to abort doesn’t have consequences, consequences that will be whispering in your ear for the rest of your life.

More and more, I am coming to believe that conservatives should say: Go ahead liberals and feminists, make my day. Go ahead and abort every liberal and feminist baby in sight. That’s what you liberals want; that’s what you believe in and that’s what you should have.

But we are conservatives. We believe in rules. We believe in following rules not because they are the law but because they are right. We just think that aborting babies is wrong. And we won’t do it.

You can see where this leads. It leads to conservatives grabbing the moral high ground. Liberals would hate that even more than they hate President Bush.

President to Take Credit for Good Economy

Now you’re talking. The White House is sending out the word that the president is going to focus now on the war and taxes, after being distracted for months by hurricanes and Supreme Court flaps. According to Donald Lambro the president is finally getting out and

promoting one of his highest domestic achievements and the fiscal policies that have produced four years of uninterrupted economic growth.

Here we are, after all, the industrial country with the fastest economic growth and 43 percent of Americans think we are in a recession. Why would they think that?

They think that because our media publicize all the bad news, and the president hasn’t been publicizing the good news.

Now that is going to end. The president is going to get out and toot his own horn, and we’ll see what the American people think about that.

What Would Hayek Do?

In Britland they are worrying about the consequence of cranking up the government share of the economy from 38 percent in 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister to an expected 44 percent this year or next. Well, we all know the answer to that. Nothing good.

In the annual Hayek Lecture given at the Institute of Economic Affairs,
Andrew Neil thinks about the bigger picture. With China and India poised to become economic giants in the next 50 years should Britain stay a part of a Europe in inevitable decline or should it become the 51st state of the USA?

What would Hayek say?

Based on the ideas he formulated over a lifetime of scholarship and advocacy he would argue against a Britain founded on The Fatal Conceit of building society using “constructivist rationalism,” the idea that
“all social institutions are, or ought to be, the
product of deliberate design”. Instead he would argue that Britain should be built using “evolutionary rationalism,” that is
orderly
“structures which are the product of the actions
of many men [and women] but are not the
result of human design.” He would say (and his words would apply just as much to us here in the good old U.S. of A.) that

Government policy should not respond to
China as such, he would say, but strive to
become a low-tax, high-skill, well-educated,
high-productivity vibrant nation-state just
offshore the highest-taxed, increasingly low-skilled, sclerotic set of rich nations in the
world. The ability to compete with China would
follow naturally.

It really isn’t that hard, is it. Just do it.

But we can see where the hard part is. It’s dealing with all those who have squirreled into the vast welfare state (that princely 44 percent of GDP) and built themselves a nice little hoard over the years. Maybe their hoard is a tenured professorship. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out union job. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out government job. Maybe it’s a job in some tax-favored industry.
All those folks are going to squeal like banshees over any move to a low-tax, high-skill vibrant nation-state. Because, after years getting paid pretty nicely for not doing too much, they are going to object to all that vibrancy. To them, it will feel like Hurricane Katrina.

It’s just human nature.

Teen Sex Leads to Depression in Girls

We all know, because liberals have taught us, that sexual restraint is harmful, leading to dangerous mental health disorders such as “repression” and “neurosis.” That is what Freud taught us a century ago. If you repress your natural, non-violent instincts in conformity with oppressive social or religious tradition, your healthy instincts will erupt into mental illness.

What the world needs is open, creative people with a healthy sex life. That’s what the experts have been teaching us and our children for the past half century.

When it comes to teenagers, of course, liberals teach us that they are all going to do it anyway, so we need to teach the kids how to have “safe sex.” And, according to the experts, children already suffering from depression and anxiety might turn to sexual experimentation and drugs in an effort to medicate their mental illness.

Now comes a study that asserts that the experts had it all wrong. According to Warren Throckmorton,

a new study, which followed over 13,000 middle and high school students for two years in a row, found that depression did not predict risky sexual or drug using behavior.

Instead it works the other way around.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Denise Hallfors told [Throckmorton] in an interview that her research team found evidence that heavy drug and alcohol use significantly increased the likelihood of depression among boys. For girls, the findings are stunning: Even low levels of alcohol, drug or sexual experimentation increased the probability of depression for girls.

OK. Let’s look at the numbers shall we? Compared with teens who were absolute abstainers from sex and drugs

Girls even experimenting with drugs were slightly more than two times as likely to be depressed (8-10 percent). Those experimenting with sex were three times more likely to be depressed than abstainers (12 percent versus 4 percent). For sexually promiscuous teen girls, the results are staggering: 44 percent of girls with multiple sexual partners during the study period experienced depression.

Now here’s a thought. What is the rate of depression among promiscious teen girls who have had an abortion? Is it 10 percent higher than ordinary promiscuous girls? Or 20 percent higher? Or even 40 percent higher? Obviously more research is needed.

For years liberals have been insisting that the basis of social mores should not be encrusted patriarchal tradition but rational, factual social science research. We should not believe old wives tales or the wisdom of the fathers. We should trust instead the objective, scientific research of the educated elite of experts.

How about it, then, liberals?

Talk Up The Economy

In the last fiscal year federal revenues came in $100 billion above the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. That means that the federal deficit came in $100 billion lower than estimates. Think what that means.

It means, according to Newt Gingrich and David Merritt, that the econometric models the CBO uses to “score” the federal government’s activities are broken, and a new CBO director is needed to provide the American people with better tools to measure the performance of the government.

It means, according to Donald Lambro, that President Bush should get out more to talk about the strength of the economy, and also work early and often to extend the tax rate cuts that were enacted in 2003 and sent the economy into overdrive. “Here’s an economy that’s growing by more than 4 percent a year, producing 200,000 plus new jobs a month,” and the American people think the economy is in the tank. There’s a reason for that, of course. The president hasn’t been talking it up.

Of course, maybe the White House folks have been crazy like a fox. Maybe they have been quiet on progress on the economy and in Iraq because, not needing to fight any elections this year, they figured they could wait till now before determining how to present their story. And in the meanwhile the Democrats have overreached themselves with their gloom-and-doom rhetoric.

Anyway, it now looks as though the president will be talking all the time about the administration’s successes. He had better. The media ain’t gonna do it for him.

New Party Leader Addresses Brit "Broken Society"

Ten years ago British Prime Minister Tony Blair turned the Labour Party away from its economic socialism. But the real problem in its left-wing recipe was left to fester, the destruction of civil society by the all-powerful social-services state. Conservatives in Britain and the United States know what that looks like, and we know what to do about it. Writer Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed to it in numerous articles and in Life at the Bottom: the utter degradation of underclass life under the tutelage of the welfare state. Numerous writers and politicians have shown what to do about it, from Charles Murray and his Losing Ground to Rudolph Giuliani and his “broken window” policing. Now the spotlight shifts to Britain.

It is significant that the first speech of new Tory leader David Cameron, elected by Conservative Party members to be leader of the Conservatives in the British Parliament, should address the “broken society” of the welfare state.

I want to set free the voluntary sector and social enterprises to deal with the linked problems that blight so many of our communities, of drug abuse, family breakdown, poor public space, chaotic home environments, high crime.

We can deal with these issues, we can mend our broken society.

In opening this flank attack on the welfare state he is opening a new era in British politics. As always, the thinkers and the scribblers have got there first: There is Civitas, the British think tank that has opened a low-cost independent school to serve parents of modest means that want to escape from the “bog standard” government schools. And there is James Bartholomew and his book The Welfare State We’re In, a devastating history of the welfare state in Britain over the last century.

It’s a radical notion, that the social space for helping the helpless should be filled by a voluntary sector, rather than by government experts and functionaries. For most people in Britain and in the United States the idea is over the top, so used are we to the educated class’s insistence that only they, furnished with our money, have the standing to help the poor and the unfortunate.

We will see whether David Cameron can move the British people away from the government model of social welfare towards another model: ordinary people helping ordinary people, face to face, heart to heart.

The Mind of the Left

What is it like to belong to the left? How does the left think? Conservatives ponder this from time to time, as we think about our political adversaries, and as we formulate our ideas.

One of the best ways to look into the mind of the left is to ask a former member. You could ask, for example, Tammy Bruce, the lesbian writer and talk-show host who used to be the head of a National Organization for Women affiliate.

In an interview with John Hawkins to promote her new book The New American Revolution, she tells what it is like to be a left-wing activist. Asked by Hawkins

You said victimhood is the cornerstone of the identity of many liberals and for that reason, it’s very difficult for many of them to give it up. Why do you say that?

Bruce replies:

With an identity that’s based in victimhood, if you find either that you’re not a victim or you find personal independence and power, it literally becomes a threat. (If) your identity (is) based in victimhood (and) that is removed, it literally strikes at the core of the identity of that person.

What about hate mail and death threats? As a person who has had a public life on the left and on the right, is there a difference in the level of hate that you experience from the other side? Says Bruce:

When I was on the left my activism began on abortion rights and even in facing pro-life individuals, I would get the occasional death threat but really nothing to speak of. Upon my being honest and coming out and writing my book and dissenting from the left as a liberal, the threats and attacks are extraordinary. It is a remarkable window into the kind of venom, the kind of hate that drives the left.

And Bruce found that Christian conservatives were happy people.

[I was] quite surprised by how happy they were. I mean, I remember being on the left; no one is happy, trust me. They (are the) biggest group of miserable people you would ever want to meet. Everything is wrong, everything is going bad, everyone is after you, everyone wants to get you, people are building camps.

Modern developmental psychology has quite a lot to say about all this. You can check out one model, Spiral Dynamics, here. In the Spiral Dynamics model it is perfectly natural for many people to live as “red” victims. But they grow out of it, For many people, the way they do this is by accepting the Christian framework of God’s love for sinners and victims.

Does Iraq Have an Army?

In the Atlantic James Fallows reports that Iraq has no army. He writes:

An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren’t even close. The Bush administration doesn’t take the problem seriously — and it never has[.]

In National Review Online W. Thomas Smith Jr. reports that the Iraq armed forces are developing into the best army in the Middle East. They are turning out “the right sort of men”

"In all the discussion about troop or unit numbers, or fully trained versus trained, we’re missing the real story," says [Gen. Daniel P.] Bolger. "The truth is these guys fight. They want to fight and win, and they do. Some pundits may not know that, but the Iraqis know it."

Who are you gonna believe?

The big question after the fall of Saddam’s regime was whether to rebuild the Iraq armed forces from the ground up, or whether to start with the existing Baathist cadres. The Bush administration chose to build from the ground up. Obviously that takes longer. But it results in an army free of the taint of the Saddam era and more likely to be loyal to the new regime.

Was that the right decision? That will be for the historians to decide.

Vive l'Empereur!

December 2, 2005 is the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest victory. They are having a grand reenactment of the battle on December 3 about six miles from Brno in the Czech Republic, but the part of

Napoleon will be played by an American from Colonial Williamsburg. Mark Schneider is 36, the same age as the emperor at Austerlitz on Dec. 2, 1805, and is probably a better horseman than his historical counterpart.

He also looks like the emperor. Sorry, l’Empereur!

The French are being a bit standoffish about the whole thing, and

President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have declined to attend commemorative ceremonies in the Place Vendôme in Paris, whose column was forged from the bronze of captured cannons, and in Slavkov (formerly Austerlitz) in the Czech Republic, where today the battle will be re-enacted. France will be represented by its defence minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie.

The Daily Telegraph notes the importance of the battle. “Like Waterloo, it has given its name to a railway station.” In Paris, of course.

Gloom and Doom on the Economy

What is going on with the economy? On the one hand, GDP is growing at 3.5 to 4.0 percent a year. On the other hand, Americans are saving nothing and racking up huge debts by borrowing against their home equity. On the one hand we have a huge balance of payments deficit; on the other hand the dollar is up about 10 percent against the Euro in the past year. American consumers are buying confidently, yet 43 percent of Americans think we are in a recession, according to Brian S. Wesbury

The uncertainty can be laid to the door of the two big things that the government has done over the past four years. First of all it has flooded the world with dollars to prevent deflation and meltdown in the wake of the Great Bear Market of 2000 to 2003. Secondly it enacted a significant tax cut that cut the tax rate on investment returns for all businesses in the United States.

Three years later we are now in the period of adjustment where we will learn whether these two bold initiatives actually worked. Has the Fed’s anti-deflation policy led to an unsustainable real estate bubble that will soon burst and bring the rest of the economy down with it? Will the tax rate cuts really bring long-term benefits to the economy without deficits as far as the eye can see?

Stay tuned, and place your bets. This time next year we will know whether the gambles paid off or whether they will end in tears.

Phonics Wins in Britain

In case you were worrying, here’s some good news. The Brits just decided to give up on progressive reading programs and mandate the teaching of “synthetic phonics” in the nation’s schools from age 5.

And think. It’s only 30 years since British Prime Minister Callaghan

highlighted the “unease felt by parents and others about the new informal methods of teaching” in his 1976 speech calling for a “great debate” on education.

So that’s all right then. Hey, here in the United States our progressive educators have been pushing “whole language” reading methods for over a century.

But it’s been a long fight to get the Brits back to sanity. The educational establishment fought against phonics tooth and nail. The teachers boycotted testing for eleven years, so it was only in 1995 that national tests exposed “massive levels of illiteracy.”

In 1997 New Labour failed to push for real reform in reading, allowing schools to choose between four reading methods. So another ten years slid by while nothing was done.

The present change in policy is being driven by

the results of a seven-year project in Clackmannanshire, which taught all children using synthetic phonics throughout primary school. When they were tested at age 11, they were three years ahead of their contemporaries across Scotland.

Think of that, mothers of America. How would you like your children to be taught with trendy “child centered” methods and end up three years behind the kids being taught the right way. How, as the saying goes, does that make you feel?

The question that all thoughtful Americans must ask is why? Why has this folly gone on for so long? Why have the schools of education hung onto these trendy child-centered educational methods in the teeth of evidence that they don’t work?

The answer is, I think, that teaching kids the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic is just flat out hard work. So the education establishment keeps coming up with new ways to make schooling less stressful and more interesting—for teachers.

Advice to the Ankle-biters

Many on the right have criticised the president for not doing enough to maintain support for the war in Iraq. Maybe they are right.

But maybe it is better for the president to wait until his opposition attacks before responding with a counterattack.

Suppose he had spent the whole of the last year making speeches on the progress in the war. Why then his opponents would be accusing him of hyping progess, and the Bush Lied folks would be parsing everything he said and would be writing about how on September 17th there really weren’t 95 Iraqi battalions ready for combat but only 87. And that would prove that Bush’s “credibility” was destroyed. And therefore we should bring the troops home.

In any war there are ups and downs. In any war there are horrible mistakes and miscues. In any war you can make a case for disaster any time up to the final battle. In any war there is always a case to be made that the whole thing has been mismanaged from the start, that the leaders didn’t have a clue, that they went in without a plan, that the military contractors are fleecing the government, that the army is broken, that the generals are fools.

In any war there will always be the Falstaffs, whining before the battle in Henry IV Part 1, “I would ’twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.” Do not we all wish that secretly in our hearts?

So the best strategy for the president is probably to keep quiet most of the time and round on his critics, as he did on Wednesday, when they present him with a favorable opportunity for a skirmish.

The best strategy for the Democrats is to keep up the ankle-biting. With their constant carping they have succeeded in eating away at the president’s popularity, and they have kept their left-wing crazies home. If things go south, they can say: “We told you so.” If things go well, they can tell a war-weary nation that it is time for a change.

Of course, that would be dishonorable. But as Falstaff says:

What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon.

Who needs it?

Why GM Failed

The great achievement of General Motors, writes Robert Samuelson, was to figure out a way to build not just one car for everyman, as Henry Ford had done with the Model T, but to build a whole range of cars for every price and taste. General Motors did this, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan,

by decentralizing operations (production, distribution) for various products among separate divisions while centralizing policy matters (personnel, finance) at the top.

This strategy worked wonders, at first. But over the years General Motors allowed its costs to increase and it stopped building cars that got people excited and for which it could charge premium prices. Sloan forsaw this problem:

too much success could be fatal. It might dull "the urge for competitive survival," which is "the strongest of all economic incentives." Companies might fail "to recognize advancing technology or altered consumer needs."

In today’s business world, the emphasis is on change, recognizing the “strategic inflection points,” in the words of former Intel CEO Andrew Grove. Its basic reality is a world of change that a business has to ride or fall off. General Motors was built to manage change. Intel is built to respond to change.

General Motors looks like it may go bankrupt. Intel is going from strength to strength.

But really, there is nothing shameful about going out of business. Every business does it, eventually. The day will come when an old and tired Intel will head for the exit, perhaps in a maelstrom of debt and bankruptcy just like today’s auto industry. That’s life.

Having It Both Ways

You’ve got to hand it to veteran Democrats like Washington’s own Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA). After the vote in the House of Representatives a week ago in which the Democrats decided not to vote for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, he allowed as how the whole war was a mistake.
Quoted in The Seattle Times:

Dicks now says it was all a mistake — his vote, the invasion, and the way the United States is waging the war.

But Dicks isn’t calling for an immediate pullout. Nor is he even calling for a pullout in six-months, which is the modified proposal from John Murtha (D-PA). Oh no.

While he disagrees with Murtha’s conclusion that U.S. troops should be withdrawn within six months, Dicks said, "He may well be right if this insurgency goes much further."

But if Dicks voted against an immediate pullout, and he disagrees with Murtha’s six-month timetable, then he is more or less in agreement with the Bush administration policy that troops will be withdrawn as and when the Iraqi security forces are capable of taking over.

Presumably the Bush plan is that some time in January, after the Iraqi elections and after a new Iraqi prime minister is chosen, the Iraqis will formally request that the US will start withdrawing troops.

Oh good. That means we are all in agreement. Except that Democrats like Norm Dicks maintain that the whole thing was a mistake, and that knowing what he knows now he would never have voted for the war in the first place.

Another way of looking at the Iraq “mess” is from the perspective of the Iranian Amir Taheri. He reckons that the US policy, to hand Iraq back to the Iraqis, is on track. To hand back Iraq to the Iraqis has taken several steps:

The first objective, to bring down Saddam, was achieved in three weeks.

The next objective was to break the apparatus of oppression created by the Ba’ath. Despite some residual problems, this, too, has been achieved.

Another objective: Break Saddam’s war machine, which had been used against Iraq’s neighbors as well as Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites. After just three years, nothing is left of that infernal machine.

The formation of the Governing Council represented the first step toward restoring Iraqi sovereignty. Next came the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, in June 2004.

That was followed by the formation of an interim government, a series of municipal elections, a general election leading to the formation of Iraq’s first pluralist government, the writing of a new constitution and a referendum to get it approved.

The next item on the checklist is the general election set for Dec. 15.

And the first thing that the new Iraqi government will do in February, Taheri writes, will be to negotiate the withdrawal of coalition troops.

Presumably, Congressman Norm Dicks could agree with that. Even though he maintains that the whole Iraq adventure has been a complete mistake.

McCain without a McClue on Economic Policy

Over the years Republicans and conservatives have wondered about Senator John McCain. Who is he and where does he stand on economic policy?

That was what Stephen Moore has been wondering too. “Just who is John McCain, and what is his economic philosophy?” That’s what he wondered as he headed in for an interview with the senator.

I mean, if you are a Republican in the post-Reagan era there is a presumption that you have internalized the lesson of Reaganomics, the idea that you grow the economy by lowering tax rates and encouraging across-the-board business growth. And there is a presumption that you have turned away from the Democratic recipe of targeted privilege and subsidy.

But John McCain has always seemed to act against the Republican grain. First, he was involved in the S&L scandal, the only Republican in the Keating Five that carred water for Charles Keating, the corrupt S&L official. That raised a huge question mark, not just about McCain’s probity but about his common sense. What Republican would want to carry water for an official in a notoriously government-favored (and Democrat sponsored) industry and that was known to be in trouble since the late 1970s?

Then he’s been a thorn in the side of President Bush and was the co-author of the monstrous McCain Feingold bill to limit campaign speech.

So here is what Moore found out about McCain’s economic philosophy. Said McCain:

"I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."

In case you were wondering, McCain was for years chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation.

Isn’t it getting a little past time for McCain to complete his economics education?

Rachel's Story

Suppose you had been brutally raped back in 2002. Suppose you had battled back and had confidently faced your attacker in court, had testified and sent him to jail.

Suppose you had written an article about your experience and now, finally, here it was, published in Marie Claire on July 7, 2005.

So here you are, riding in the London Tube on the way to work, reading your story in a women’s magazine at about 9:00 am, heading out of Kings Cross station when all of a sudden:

I felt rather than heard an explosion; it was as if I had been punched violently in both ears. The world went as black as if I had been plunged deep underwater.

Well, it’s a survival story, the story of Rachel North, rape victim and terror victim, but none the less compelling for that.

And it is a reminder that we are heading out of a curiously tranquil era in western history when nothing really happened.

But now we are going back into the real world, the world no longer of equable reason, of kindliness and due process and people dying peacefully in their beds. We are returning to the real world of life and death, of the dark chthonic forces that dwell in the ravines between the ethereal peaks of sublime exaltation, of populations on the move, of the clash of civilizations, of religious wars, of heroism and victory, of shame and defeat.

It is a world that has been there all along. Only we chose not to see it.

Keeping the Home Computers Burning

The Brits are having a spot of winter weather right now, what they call “snow chaos.” That is British understatement to describe road conditions where 1,000 cars have been temporarily stranded by five inches of snow in Cornwall.

But Vicki Woods is worrying about the home computers. What happens if the power goes out and there is no power for any of the vital home appliances. Like showers.

My husband observed that the shower wouldn’t work if the electricity went down. The shower? What was he on about? "You chose, if you remember, a power shower. What do you think ‘power’ means?"

Yes, it always comes as a shock when the power goes out. It is even more of a shock to learn that the Brits have jumped from claw-footed bathtubs to power showers in one giant leap. But then Ms. Woods starts to worry about the really important things, like how are we going to keep all the computers running when the power goes out? Time to look for a generator.

The one I liked best was a tidy little yellow object the size of a hat-box, costing £249 ($400). I liked it mostly because it promised "running time approx 10 hours", which would do me nicely if the house was plunged into darkness at three in the afternoon.

The chap down at the pub thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard all week. A little thing like that wouldn’t be able to do anything, let alone power the Woods’server farm.

"You’d be looking at - ooh, what? £500 ($900) down for a serious piece of kit that’ll do all your computers, and all you’ll need then is a gizmo that...

Yes, it’s great fun on a dark November evening to get all snuggled up next to a roaring fire and tap humorous articles about what to do when the power goes out.

But imagine the “scrum” (another classic British word) at the superstore when everyone and his brother are rushing out to buy themselves a generator! How big would it have to be to run the computers, the home theater, the microwave, the power shower, and a light or two?

Winning in Iraq

What is going on in Iraq? Are we on the cusp of helping the Iraqis establish a self-governing society complete with federal constitution and a consensual politics in which the punctuations of suicide bombers are merely gigantic sound effects? Or are we on the cusp of failure, in which the progress from election to constitutional referendum to election is a mirage of stage effect in which the reality is a menacing insurgency that is poised to plunge Iraq into civil war?

The honest answer is that we don’t know. If we knew the real situation then everything would be over, bar shouting.

But military historian Victor Davis Hanson thinks we are on the cusp of victory.

Despite acrimony at home, the politics of two national elections and a third on the horizon, and the slander of war crimes and incompetence, those on the battlefield of Iraq have almost pulled off the unthinkable — the restructuring of the politics of the Middle East in less than three years.

That is why the Democrats are not willing to go beyond their opportunistic truckling to the “Bush Lied” crowd and their ankle-biting criticism of the details of the war in Iraq. When offered a chance to vote on bringing the troops home, they respectfully declined.

They are politicians. They are creating noise—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and preparing the ground for an “I told you so” moment, if it comes, that could help them regain control of Congress or propel a Democrat to the White House in 2008. It is a tactic that has very little downside. If the Bush strategy succeeds, well, then they can say that Bush was lucky to win, considering how he bungled the whole thing from start to finish.

Be Thankful and Hope

In the present season of conservative and Republican exhaustion it is easy to think that the great tide of conserative reform has reached its high tide and has turned into a vicious rip-tide that will swallow its supporters. Even if that is so we should be thankful, especially in this season, for all that the American conservative movement has achieved in its program of resumption, that is, the resumption of eternal truths and practices that sustain the civilized life. We use “civilized life” in the strict sense referring to the life of the city in its characteristic of bringing together those of a commercial habit to serve the consumers.

But there is also hope. In the weeks after the voters of California truckled to their public employee masters and the principled liberal voters of King County, Washington, voted to reelect Ron Sims, the county executive that presides over the third most corrupt election system in the United States, according to one observer, there are buds of renewal. According to Max Borders

Many of us are tired of trying to use political channels to bring about social change. We’re dissatisfied with the way government handles such projects, we’re fed up with the bureaucracy, and we resent having our money taxed from us every paycheck to be managed by those who only claim to know better.

And some of us are doing something about it. Borders cites a whole range of “social entrepreneurs,” many of them successful business entrepreneurs like the Google guys and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who

are starting to figure out that civil society works better than government at bringing about civic improvement, opportunity, and positive change. The altruism boom is underway. And if the government doesn’t smother it, social capitalism can amount to a revolution for tremendous good.

Fast Company has compiled a list of these new social entrepreneurs. But will they make a difference?

One thing is for sure. The present huge power structure that runs the government system of social support will not give up without a struggle.

An Old Reagan Hand Says GOP in Power Too Long

Reagan aide Lynn Nofziger is now 81. It was forty years ago that he left his job as a journalist to join the gubernatorial campaign of Ronald Reagan. Now he sees that the GOP has been in power too long, according to Ralph Z. Hollow.

"They’ve been in power too long," Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. "Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there."

Also, the Democrats have opposed the Republicans at every turn, and Republicans are just tired.

Maybe Nofziger is right. Maybe the Republicans need a turn in the political wilderness to do some thinking and to develop a new political vision. Not that the Democrats are any better.

If Republicans have got fat and lazy at the national level the Democrats are in worse shape. Their aristocratic vision of government by the enlightened and educated for the benefit of the “little people” that sounded so noble two generations ago is now a hollow joke. Today’s Democrats are an oligarchy, pure and simple, a coalition of the well connected and the privileged passing out the spoils of the tax system to their followers.

At least you can say that their followers’ needs are modest, for now. State and local government employees earn a mere 40 percent more than private sector workers and retire in their fifties.

Imagine what things will look like in twenty years. Democrats will probably have convinced themselves that they deserve to earn twice as much as evil Republican private sector workers. And they will retire on magnificent pensions in Florida and Arizona in their forties after twenty years of selfless service for the people.

Yes. Hillary Clinton for President!

Pushing Back Against "Bush Lied"

Although it is true that the Republicans direct all three branches of government and the political power that goes with it, they do not own the culture, the media, and the academy. And the do not own the rank and file that actually do the work in the governments of the nation.

That is why the Democrats can successfully operate a campaign of deceit like the ongoing “Bush Lied” campaign, the accusation that Bush lied the nation into the Iraq war.

But any thoughtful student of political affairs would have observed how carefully the Bush administration built its justification in the months leading up to the Iraq war. You could tell that every sentence had been carefully parsed, probably in light of the Vietnam experience, so that its meaning could be justified by the facts and analysis to hand at the time.

And anyway, how come the left started the “Bush Lied” campaign even before the Iraq invasion. Did they know something that we didn’t know? Or were they merely taking their cues from their handlers? And who were they?

Pundit Michael Barone takes aim at the “Bush Lied” folks.

The propagators of the big lie against President Bush are trying to delegitimize not only him, but all the progress due to Iraq, progress toward freedom for Middle Easterners and toward a Middle East that no longer threatens the United States.

The tactics of the Democrats in the last decade have been openly obstructionist, issuing, one supposes, from the rage at being displaced from the center of power, first in 1980, then in 1994, and most humiliating of all, in the dead-heat election of 2000. You can understand why. It’s about power.

Their whole existence and reason for being is bound up in the continuance of the 30 percent of GDP that they have built up into a vast patronage machine over the last century. Now the chickens are coming home to roost: a vast government machine that does not do very much with a lot of money; unsustainable entitlement programs; privileges and subsidies that are threatened by the new global economic order.

The only thing that Democrats have thought to do about their strategic position is to counterattack, whether it is Social Security, tax cuts, Hurricane Katrina, or Iraq. They can get away with it because the mainstream media lets them get away with it. Imagine Republicans attacking a Democratic president and blocking his program. The mainstream media would make the Republicans into mean-spirited monsters. (Oh yes, they did.)

Sooner or later, Democrats will have to think of something smarter than mindless obstruction. But it doesn’t look as though that will happen any time soon.

And that is a pity. Because the American people are going to have to pay the bill.

Government Workers Earn More

Sixty-year-old baby boomers all across the nation are reporting a curious experience. When they go to their 40-year high school reunions they discover that their old school pals that went to work for the government have already retired. Imagine that! The humble toilers who opted out of the fast lane have already left the rat-race for a comfortable retirement. Who would have thought it?

Of course, it’s worse than that. Not only do government employees retire earlier, they get paid more than workers in the private sector, as Steve Malanga reports.

Take teachers. Everyone knows they are underpaid. But according to the National Compensation Survey, public school teachers earn about 20 percent more in hourly pay and benefits than professional workers in the private sector.

The federal government’s national compensation survey estimates that local public school districts pay teachers an average of $47.97 per hour in total compensation, including $12.39 per hour in benefits — figures that far outstrip not only what private school teachers earn, but also the average of what all professional workers earn in private business, a category that includes engineers, architects, computer scientists, lawyers, and journalists.

OK, but that is just teachers. What about ordinary workers? Well, state and local government workers earn about $35 per hour in wages and benefits while private sector workers earn a little less than $25 per hour. Wow. That means that the average public sector worker makes about 40 percent more than the average private sector worker.

No wonder that liberals are trying to do a number on Wal-mart. If they could force Wal-mart to pay more then it wouldn’t seem that liberal government workers are overpaid. Never mind that, if we arbitrarily raised worker pay with minimum wage laws and mandatory benefits we would end up with European levels of unemployment.

Still. Forty percent more! That starts to make private sector workers look like mugs. What is the point of accepting the risk and the challenge of private sector work if the tenured, lifetime employment government worker earns more?

You tell me.

A Question of Belief

As everyone knows, the world is moving progressively down a path of secularization, away from a traditional language of myth and magic and towards a reality-based world of science and logic. Why then, asks Frank Furedi, is the modern world full of “life coaches, lifestyle gurus, professional celebrities, parenting coaches, super-nannies, makeover experts, healers, facilitators, mentors and guides?”

These modern sources of spiritual authority seem to have stepped into the social space formerly occupied by traditional authority figures.

Yes, it has become fashionable to treat traditional forms of authority — monarchy, church, parliament — with derision. Criticism of traditional institutions has become so prevalent that it bears all the hallmarks of classical conformism. Scientists, doctors and other professionals have also experienced an erosion of authority. But the diminishing influence of conventional authority has been paralleled by the rise of a new ‘alternative’ one.

So we have the curious situation today that people distrust politicians but trust celebrities. Sir Bob Geldorf possesses the moral authority to browbeat elected politicians about aid to Africa. People question the actions of the scientifically-driven drug companies and trust the folk remedies of the herbalist.

The people that patronize herbalists and shop at natural foods stores are often the same people that are contemptuous about the beliefs of the creationists and Intelligent Design folks.

It is perhaps too extreme to say that people who don’t believe in God will believe in anything. But they certainly will believe in something, and if they do not submit themselves to the moral authority of priests and ministers they will submit themselves to the authority of life coaches and gurus.

Perhaps Paul Bloom is on to something in “Is God an Accident” when he writes that children from an early age learn to differentiate between moving objects and immovable objects. They project into the moving objects the notion of purpose. Moving, objects, “psychological things” possess “minds, intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires.” If humans develop the notion of purposeful things as a way of explaining to themselves the behavior of moving things, then it is a short step to ascribing purpose to the whole world of moving objects and the Author of it all.

When you decide that the Author is dead then you soon find you need to replace Him with substitute guides. You still need to learn about your purpose in this world and to divine the purposes of others. You head off on a journey to the other side of the world and find yourself back where you started.

The War over Medicare Drugs

In case you hadn’t noticed, November 15 marked the start of enrollment
for the new Medicare drug plan. Naturally liberals and their willing accomplices in the media are pushing the idea that seniors are all confused about it and that the whole plan is a disaster.

Not so fast, writes Gary J. Andres. It’s true that the plan offers seniors choices. But choice is a conservative principle that is worth defending.

Market-oriented health care reform proponents have a huge stake in the successful rollout of this new program. If it thrives, the innovative changes provide new momentum for market-oriented,consumer-driven policies. If it fails, we move backward, to a government-run, one-size-fits-all program. We now stand at a fork in the road in American health care. Liberals understand that, but do conservatives?

Having choice in health care means, of course, that if you want to maximize your benefits under the new law you have to do a little work, and it’s true that older people are not as good at analysis as they might have been in their youth. But conservatives had better make sure that liberals do not get to define reality on the Medicare reforms. There’s a lot riding on the success of these reforms.

Maybe conservatives should take a little time out over the holiday season and have a talk with a senior. Let us all make sure that our elderly parents understand their options and choices under the new Medicare plan. A simple precaution like that could go a long way to cutting the liberals off at the pass.

Aside from the practical political aspect of this there is the bigger question. If Americans got to choose their health care arrangements, what would they choose? Liberals might be surprised. Conservatives might be surprised. We might all be surprised.

The Senate Goes Wobbly

With the United States Senate voting in one week to let federal judges rather than military commanders determine who is an enemy combatant and to send a sense of the Senate resolution to President Bush to tell them how he plans to get out of Iraq we must look at the possible consequence of “going wobbly.”

Here we are, what Lee Harris calls the western team arrayed against the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” What happens when come of our chaps go all wobbly and work to weaken the current western effort to contain the ruthless men?

We have a historical reference for the current situation, because the history of the twentieth century was largely the story of the western commercial empire battling against the ruthless secular religions of fascism, Soviet communism, and Maoist warlordism.

Except for the advent of Soviet communism, each eruption of the ruthless men could have been easily contained: the Hitler phenomenon in the mid 1930s, the Mao phenomenon at any time up to about 1947-48.

The comparison of the rise of Mao and the current eruption of Islamo-fascism is apt. Mao was a ruthless man who maintained an army in China for twenty years courtesy of the Soviet Union and the vacillation of the United States. When he gained power he used the entire wealth of China to try to project himself onto the world stage as a superpower. But it couldn’t be done. China was an agricultural country, and didn’t have the wealth to sustain a bid for global hegemony in 1950.

If the Islamo-fascists gain control of the Middle East they would, of course, obtain the oil income of Saudi Arabia, say about $180 billion a year. It might not be enough to sustain global hegemony, but it would certainly be enough to cause global mischief and disruption. It might be enough to conquer Europe.

For two hundred years the peripheral world has fought against the emerging global commercial empire, represented in the 19th century by the British and in the 20th century by the Americans. The Islamo-fascists are just the latest reactionary movement that has arisen to oppose it.

For a long generation, since the emergence of the McGovern wing, the Democratic Party has flirted with the reactionaries, only getting serious when they were in the White House.

Maybe we need to elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2008 to force the national Democratic leadership to deal with global reality and stop playing footsie with the Angry Left crazies.

If Republicans Don't Stand for Tax Cuts...

If there is one thing the Republican Party stands for it is tax cuts. That is because it is Republicans who actually pay taxes. Over 95 percent of federal income taxes are paid by the top 50 percent of taxpayers.

So why then is Republican US Senator Olympia Snowe
balking at the extension of the 15 percent dividend and capital gains taxes enacted in the great Bush tax cuats of 2003? Is it just grandstanding, or is she using the tax cut issue to push her pet project?

Republicans had better watch out, writes investment guru
Larry Kudlow. Even if the Democrats insist on disrespecting the investor (and risk-taking) class in their eternal drumbeat about tax cuts for the rich, the investor class might want to teach Republicans a lesson if they don’t deliver on an investor-friendly tax regime.

Republicans may be alienating their most natural supporters. In recent elections, nearly two out of every three voters were stock owners. Where will they turn if the Republicans they put into office no longer represent them?

The problem for investors is that they really don’t have an alternative. Ever since the early 1980s the Democrats have set their face against the supply-side menu of low tax rates. They persist in a vision of the economy as an enlargement of the federal budget. You take money from the taxpayers to fund programs for Americans.

But that is not how the economy works. The economy is a world in which people make goods and services for other people in society so that they can get in exchange the things that they want: food, housing, transportation, health care. The results are in on how to make the economic system work better. You create a level playing field without hills of privilege and subsidy and the valleys of high tax rates and punitive regulation. The more you enact privileges and subsidies—the more that Congress does what comes naturally—the more you distort the relationship between producers and consumers, and the more you leach prosperity out of the system.

In Europe the Fire This Time

Here’s the best piece yet on the French mess. Columnist
Minette Marrin tells about the little village near
Montpellier in which
she used to have a house.

For years we were the only foreigners and while nobody
paid us much attention, everyone was pleasant enough. By the end we
were on friendly terms with quite a few people.

I say by the end, because we left. We sold the house a few years ago
because the atmosphere of the village had gone sour. There was
something almost frightening in the air. It is strange to me that
people have been so surprised by the past few weeks of burning and
rioting in French cities, including Montpellier. It has been obvious
for at least 10 years, even to a
foreign visitor, that something was badly wrong.

What went wrong? Well, first the Marrins noticed a lot of new people, North Africans, hanging around. And they noticed how much the local people hated them. Of course, as tolerant Brits the Marrins took a high line with all this. Until their house was burgled. Until their car wheels were slashed.

Then they sold up and left.

For as long as any living American can remember the European educated elite has had a grand old time wagging their heads at the race problems in the United States.

So it is odd that it has taken the French so long to wake up to the alarming failure of their much vaunted un-Anglo-Saxon society to accommodate its Muslims.

Or maybe it is not surprising. After all, the European educated elite at no time ever thought to analyze the race problem in the United States with a view to learning lessons for their own continent. They analyzed it in the spirit of anti-Americanism, as a way of sneering at the uncouth snaggle-toothed yahoos of North America.

Now it is too late. Now a frightening storm has descended upon Europe. Now it is going to take a war to set it all straight.

Trying to Explain the French and the World

Does it seem cynical that, in the misery of the recent French riots, all the commentators are projecting their ideas upon the suffering French and deftly demonstrating how their ideas show exactly how the French got into their mess and how they could get out of it?

Not really. That’s what humans do. We try to understand the world according to the template that we carry around. We keep at it until our template utterly fails us. And even then we may still continue to worship it.

For economist Arnold Kling understanding the world means attacking the social model of Berkeley cognitive scientist and
liberal George Lakoff. Lakoff divides the world into people that want government to act like a “strict father” and those that want it to act as a “nurturant parent.” You can figure out which US political party is the Daddy party and which is the Mommy party in this formulation. Lakoff believes, as a liberal, that the correct government model is the nurturant parent one.

Kling, as an economist and a libertarian, asks the obvious question. Enough with this parent stuff, already. Why not junk the parent model and have an America without a parent. Just as we have separated church and state, why not separate family and state?

To the traditional Left and Right, one question raised by the riots is how the French welfare state affects Muslims and other minorities. The Right worries that it provides too much support for "alien" immigrant "parasites." The Left worries that it does not provide enough education and employment opportunities.

To libertarians, the welfare state is something that is economically ineffective and morally wrong for everyone, not just for ethnic minorities. Families and non-coercive institutions, such as charities and churches, ought to provide for basic needs. Education and health care ought to be primarily the responsibility of families, not of the state.

But the bigger question is: Why do most people, excepting a tiny minority called libertarians, want the state as parent, differing only in their preference for a Mommy state or a Daddy state? How can we explain this?

We can turn to a model that does a better job of understanding what is going on than the models of Lakoff and Kling. It is called Spiral Dynamics.

In the Spiral Dynamics model there is no binary opposition, between Mommy and Daddy state or between family and state, but a hierarchical model of people in different stages of existence. First of all there are red impulsives, people that experience the world as a cockpit of power and themselves as the victims. But some of them climb out of this power hell and become blue purposives. They believe in the One Truth and, in our western model, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. The children of blue purposives often rebel against the totalism of One Truth. They discover that you can change the rules, if you want. Life is a game, they believe, and they become orange creatives. But the children of creative egos often rebel against the life of the ego. They believe in sharing and caring, the demolition of power structures and hierarchies. They become green communitarians.

The power of this model is that it can accomodate both the binary world of Lakoff, his strict vs. nurturant parents, and the world of Kling and his separation of family and state. Strict parents are blue purposives believing in the One Truth. Nurturant parents are green communitarians, visualizing world peace. And libertarians are orange creatives, believing that you can settle everything with agreed-upon rules.

But what about men of power, you ask, like Mao, Stalin, and Hugo Chavez? They don’t appear in the models of Lakoff and Kling. But we can understand them in the Spiral Dynamics model. They are red impulsives that worship power. Their natural modus operandi is to organize helpless victims into political armies in their march to power.

As things get serious in the years ahead, it is going to be important to have the best model, the one that understands the world as nearly as possible. It may be a matter of life and death.

Spiral Dynamics is not that model. But it is a start.