The Folly of Feminism

Judging by her article in The New York Times Magazine about
the rough time women are having in the Noughties columnist
Maureen Dowd
is fixin’ to publish one of those tiresomely
superficial books that pretends to capture the zeitgeist while actually
telling us nothing except that media people in New York persist in thinking that
they are central to the culture.

Under subheads like “Courtship” “Money” “Power Dynamics” “Movies” and “Beauty” Dowd
tries to figure out what went wrong with the feminist program of the 1970s to
which she and her peers subscribed. How come girls are returning to courtship,
frills and furbelows, and men are picking up the tab at dinner? How come that women
give up so much more on the career track and successful women are so
often childless?

Of course, Dowd cannot really give an answer to all this, for it would mean
shining the light of truth on the whole modern project, and that she cannot
even begin to permit.

The answer is suggested in the complaints of a boss I worked for years ago. He
would complain that the software engineers working for him were forever going off on tangents.
We had all the time in the world for building
cute tools and elegant software embellishments. When, he would wonder, would we focus on getting the job done,
on time and on budget?

Work is hard, and humans will do anything to escape the pain of work.
That is why we have an inexhaustible appetite for diversions, hobbies, addictions, and pleasures.
All this activity is an excuse to avoid getting down to work. The central
work of adult humans is the same as adults throughout the animal kingdom, to bring forth
a new generation and rear it to adulthood.

Leaving aside the social superstructure of culture and custom, this task means
that women must spend a great part of their life energy in nurturing and raising
children. Men must spend a great deal of their life energy in providing
resources for that task, particularly during the critical period when women
are weighed down by pregnancy and by young children.

In today’s society we enjoy a remarkable privilege. We are able to separate
sex from childbearing. Thus modern women have the opportunity to control their
fertility; they can choose when to have children. In the excitement of this new freedom women have rushed out and jumped
over the fence to romp in the greener grass that seemed to grow in the man’s world
of career, power, and status that women seemed to be excluded from because of the
yoke of childbearing and the baleful culture of the patriarchy.

Women are discovering that the grass is not greener in the man’s world. And they
are discovering that their lust to escape domesticity was not a noble yearning
for freedom but just an excuse to go off on tangents and neglect the real work
that needed to be done.

The real work of humans is children. Everything else is a tangent.

Alito, Scalito

Conservatives got what we asked for. In Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito we
have a judge with years on the bench, a clear paper trail, and impeccable conservative
credentials. In return for the compliment from President Bush in nominating
such a candidate for the Supreme Court we have an obligation to
fight for victory over the abortion today, abortion tomorrow, and abortion forever brigade.
And the battle begins today.

On his blog Hugh Hewitt
has the strategy all laid out. He has thoughtfully provided the telephone numbers of the key United States Senators.

The strategy is to head off the Democratic filibuster at the pass, by
getting to the Gang of 14, the seven Republicans and seven Democrats that committed to
voting for cloture back in the spring over President Bush’s filibustered Appeals Court
judges. If they come out for cloture on Alito, then the filibustering tactic is dead.

But let there be no doubt about this. Conservatives need to rally and to show their
senators that a rejection of Judge Alito’s nomination will cost them at the ballot box.
That is the coin of the realm for them.

The Lessons of Volcker and Greenspan

As the quarter century of inflation-free prosperity under the monetary policies of Federal Reserve
Board Chairmen Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan comes to a close with the retirement of Greenspan,
Steve Chapman
reviews the lessons learned.

Back in 1980 people believed that there was a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. It
was the precipitate of a generation of Keynesian economics.

Back then, the conventional wisdom was that we had to choose our poison.
If we wanted a prosperous economy and low unemployment, we had to accept inflation. If we wanted
low inflation, we would have to put up with a sluggish economy and sentence millions of people to
a life on the dole.

But evil conservative economists protested. “‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,’”
wrote Milton Friedman. So Paul Volcker, appointed to the Fed chairmanship in 1979 put this concept into
practice. It produced bone-chilling interest rates and then 11 percent unemployment until the other
leg of post-1980 economics kicked in: the Reagan tax rate cuts. Ever since, the US and the rest
of the the world has enjoyed bold, persistent economic growth.

The great discovery of the last quarter-century is not that the government
should do nothing, but that it should focus on doing certain essential tasks -- one of
which is to avoid debasing the currency on which all economic activity depends. Long after
Messrs. Greenspan and Volcker are forgotten,
Americans will still be in debt to them for that lesson.

Actually, there are four legs to the economic stool:

• Sound money, i.e., Volcker-Greenspan policy


• Low tax rates, i.e., Reagan-Bush tax rate cuts


• Affordable government, i.e., keep government share of economy low


• Even playing field for intense business competition, i.e., hack away at subsidies and privileges

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

The Conservative Base Rejoins the Bush Team

There’s a problem about belonging to a political base. Sometimes your party ignores you. It takes
you for granted and spends all its energy wooing moderates and independents.

So occasionally the base needs to rebel. Just to remind the politicians where they live.

President Bush obviously wants to get Supreme Court nominations through the US Senate with the
minimum of fighting. That’s why he chose John Roberts: brilliant, but slippery. Democrats
could never get a grip on him, so half of them ended up voting for his confirmation. But last summer
conservatives started out unsure about Roberts. It took a while before they climbed on board his
nomination bandwagon.

With the Miers nomination, Bush crossed a line. Many conservatives just couldn’t swallow it, and they
said so. Now President Bush has to submit a new name, and he understands, no doubt, that the new
nominee must be someone that will excite the conservative base even at the cost of a battle in the US
Senate with the Roe v. Wade Democrats.

But with the Miers nomination history, it appears that conservatives are willing to come together
and fight for the president’s agenda.

According to
Donald Lambro and Ralph Z. Hallow conservatives have put the Miers imbroglio behind them
and are ready to fight for the president.

"The White House has begun shoring up its support among conservatives who have been upset
with them. The president has been more forceful
on spending issues, and that bodes well for his administration down the road," said Ron Bonjean,
chief spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican.

"They’ve been playing defense for so long on Harriet Miers that it’s great to see them pivoting
and going on offense again on our issues," he said.

President Bush will need a united Republican Party going into the 2006 mid-term elections. Democratic
victories in Congress could make the final two years of his term a misery.

Miers Withdraws

Today, October 27, Harriet Miers
withdrew
her nomination to be an associate justice on the
United States Supreme Court. So that’s over. The question is: What comes next? Or, to put it another
way, what does the captain of a mutinous company do to stop the growling and scowls from his
licentious soldiery?

The answer is obvious. Lead them into battle. And he should not just lead them into a fight but
make it perfectly clear that he expects them to win.

So maybe, after the Miers debacle, President Bush will nominate a good solid, qualified conservative
for the court, someone like Judge J. Michael Luttig or like Judge Michael W. McConnell.

Then he can say
to the Miers opponents, or imply: ok, you guys,
you wanted a conservative on the court. I’ve got one right here. Now, after all your whining and
grumbling show me what you can do. And let me make something clear. There is a difference between
trying and doing. We are not talking about fighting for the new nominee. We are talking about
fighting and winning.

Will that approach work? It could. The Miers nomination has raised a huge dust cloud that has
obscured the old Supreme Court battlefield. Ever since the election of Bush in 2000,
liberals and conservatives have been lining up for a set-piece battle, with conservative hordes preparing
to attack liberals in their Roe v. Wade citadel.

But now the story has changed. After the successful Roberts nomination and the Miers debacle
the old set-piece battle is not longer on the cards. The next nomination battle will be different.
How different? Well, we shall see.

The Global Education Mess

We think that we have an education mess here in the United States with our education “blob”
spending five percent of GDP every year in return for what? Rising mediocrity. In Britain,
things are even worse because their public school system is a completely centralized, national
government system, whereas in the United States the government education system is rather more
decentralized with most of the money raised and spent at the state and local level.

Britain’s Prime Minister Blair is

launching
an education white paper to announce the government’s
policy to abandon the gold standard of left-wing education policy, the “comprehensive” secondary schools
set up in the 1960s to eliminate selection and streaming in secondary schools. The idea was to liquidate
the dual system of college-prep “grammar” schools and vocational “secondary modern” schools.
His government will introduce legislation to build a system of “self-governing independent state schools.”

It’s about time. As Alice Thomson observes, a funny thing has happened to Britain’s
elite since the introduction of “comprehensive” schools a generation ago. It used to be that the political,
cultural, and business elite had a lot of “grammar” school graduates. The grammar school was understood
to be the way for a bright youngster to climb out of poverty.
Margaret Thatcher, herself a grammar school graduate, “presided over a cabinet of grammar school boys.”

But now the British elites are dominated by graduates of private education. The Blair “Cabinet is full of them,
though ministers don’t brag about it.
Most forget to mention their schools in Who’s Who.”
Somehow, the comprehensive
school does not deliver children of modest means into the elite as the grammar schools used to do.
Perhaps that is why Blair’s political aide Alistair Campbell called them “bog-standard.” (A “bog” is
British schoolboy slang for the school toilets.)

Of course, facts means nothing. The British left believes in uniform one-size-fits-all education
like a sacrament. Nobody should be allowed to escape the government education system. So if
Tony Blair is really serious he could be in for a big battle — with his own party.

Now, what about doing something here in the United States about our disfunctional education system?

Black and White Shame on Race

There are two sides to the original sin of the United States of America: Negro slavery. There is the shame of white guilt for the centuries of oppression and slavery. But there is also, writes Shelby Steele, the shame of black inferiority. The great achievement of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s was for whites to own up to their guilt, and admit their fault. Ever since, blacks have provided an ever-present witness to the fact of white guilt. Steele writes that

in the ’60s whites finally took open responsibility for their racism despite the shame this exposed them to. And they knew that ever-present black witness would impose on them an exacting accountability (Bill Bennett, Vicente Fox, Trent Lott) for diffusing this evil. But, in fact, racism has receded in American life because whites, at long last, took greater responsibility for making it recede despite the shame they endured. And wasn’t it the certainty of shame, as much as anything else, that had kept them rationalizing their racism for so long, looking to the supposed inferiority of blacks to justify an evil?

But there is the other side to the question. Black inferiority. That is not something that can be eradicated by grandiose white plans and programs—wars on poverty and the miasma of diversity and inclusion. Black inferiority, once institutionalized in slavery can only be eradicated by black responsibility. For the black Shelby Steele, the helplessness of the black victims of Hurricane Katrina evokes the shame of inferiority, that after 40 years blacks are still indeed inferior, even if that inferiority was caused by the centuries of oppression.

Oppression or not, the way out of inferiority is the path of responsibility. But to admit responsibility means to give whites the power of witness over black shame.

[Our] open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them to accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other’s" witness to inspire rather than shame.

It is a peculiar fact of life that the way to strength is the way of surrender, the giving up of power. That is why all religions, transcendent or secular, are drenched in the blood of sacrifice, penitence, confession, and atonement. They represent mankind’s endless attempt to touch the hand of God.

Name-calling Lefties

We are all so well trained that we often forget just how much we are not
allowed to say. And that is odd, because our national educated and cultural
elite believes in free speech and abhors censorship.

Radio host Dennis Prager lists what happens to you when you
cross the line on free speech. You are called anti-education, or anti-woman, or
homophobic. It’s great if you are a lefty.

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the
Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in
debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions.
You can simply dismiss your opponent as "anti."

You are anti-worker if you criticize unions, anti-education if you criticize
teachers, and so on.

Basically, if you disagree with the left, they have a way of shaming you with
some epithet that makes you sound like a neanderthal.

There’s a problem with this for the left, of course.

Because they have come to rely so heavily on one-word
dismissals of
their opponents, they have few arguments.

And for conservatives there is a payoff. It forces us
to really think through what we believe
and what we say before we write it and speak it.

The Fight for Economic Competence

It’s been well said that, if the parties of the right stand for anything, they stand for
economic competence in national affairs. Not for them the easy road of compassion and spending
other people’s money on vaguely defined “needs.” When you stand for compassion and sensitivity
you always have the excuse when things go south that you meant well. When you stand for
common sense and balanced budgets and good management, then you have to deliver. If you can’t
deliver, who needs you?

In this season of discontent the Bush administration had better make sure that its economic
policy delivers, as Larry Kudlow warns.
That means spending restraint and keeping tax rates low. American conservatives know all about the
importance of low marginal tax rates. But government spending restraint delivers big dividends too.

Four nations have undertaken a policy of spending
restraint in recent years, Chile, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. In three
of the four cases, the spending
restraint focused mainly not on spending cuts but just keeping year-on-year increases under control.
But any way it was done, the result was a vibrant, growing economy that suprised everyone.

If you really want a big payoff, then real spending cuts are the way to go. That’s what Ireland
did in the late 1980s, reducing government spending from 53.2 percent of GDP in 1987 to 40.6 percent
in 1990, according to William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity.
The Irish economy, once a basket case, is now the toast of Europe (er, make that the envy of Europe). Irish GDP per head
in 2004 was $26,890, well ahead of the United Kingdom at $23,920. The surge has all taken place
in the last 15 years since the Irish cut government spending and lowered tax rates.

Battle of Trafalgar

Today, October 21, is a day that will live... in glory. It was this day two hundred years ago
that the British Royal Navy squadron under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined
fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar.

The victory was a great military triumph in operational terms, for it was a bold attempt to
suprise and confuse the French with unexpected and unorthodox tactics. As
Brett M. Decker writes:

Nelson aimed his ships strait at the middle of the enemy line to break the force
in two. It was a very risky strategy because the massive cannons were positioned on the sides
of their great ships. Heading straight ahead into the enemy line meant Nelson’s side-mounted
guns were useless and exposed Nelson’s fleet to pounding from the broadsides of his targets,
which were
stretched in a long line with their gun ports facing Nelson’s advance.

This tactic of suprise is today the basic modus operandi of all armies: to suprise and disorient
the enemy and keep moving faster than he is able to react.

But the battle had another consequence. It meant that Napoleon could not deploy the invasion
force he had assembled across the English Channel from Britain. Instead of becoming “French-occupied
Britain” the British entered upon a century of global dominance in which they exported their politics,
their culture, and their industry to the world.

One of the things that Napoleon would have done would have been to sweep away Britain’s common
law and replace it with the Code Napoleacute;on, writes
Tom Utley.

The trouble with Britain’s common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on
first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

Tidy-minded continental rationalists have never liked that sort of thing.

But now, two hundred years after its victory against mindless
continental rationalism, Britain is succumbing to the embrace of the universal European superstate,
the centralized, one-size-fits-all European Union.

Was all that brilliance and all that glory two
hundred years ago for nothing?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

What really happened to those WMDs? And what really was the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
Oh, and how is Syria involved in the Iraqi insurgency?

Using publicly available intelligence and his home computer, 19-year-old Ryan Mauro, analyst for
“Tactical Defense Concepts and Northeast Intelligence Network,” has
dug out all the answers to these vexing questions. And he’s got a book out:
Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq.

In an interview with Frontpagemag.com
he tells all the stuff that the MSM and the Democrats don’t want you to know. That there was long-standing
relationships between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That there was a long-standing arrangement between Iraq and Syria to
allow Saddam to shuttle his WMD into Syria when needed to escape inspection. That Syria is behind
most of the Baathist-led insurgency.

One of the problems with the CIA, he says, is that the intelligence community is addicted to classified
intelligence. When he gave a CIA contact some intelligence, the contact refused it.
“The CIA contact refused to pass the information along, saying that he’d
then be expected from then on to provide such high-quality information.”

Course, this kid’s only 19. What does he know?

Democrats Still Don't Get It

Democrats are working hard on making a comeback in 2006 and 2008. But it is not clear that
they really have something new to excite the voters.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, there may be a lot for Republicans to be gloomy about
right now, what with scandals as far as the eye can see, high gas prices, and a bulge in inflation.
But Democrats really haven’t come up with anything new. With the encouragement of the progressive
George Lakoff, they have gotten the idea that their problem is that they have been stuck
with the wrong metaphors. “Trial lawyers” should really be called “public protection attorneys.”
Good try, George. Your Philosophy in the Flesh was a great introduction to your day job, as a
professor of cognitive science at Berkeley. But the metaphor game in politics needs to start after
you have come up with some good ideas, not before.

It is Third Way analysts Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck that have a better take on the Democratic problem. They argue in
The Politics of Polarization
(pdf here)
that the Democrat problem is too much metaphoric polarization and not enough
thoughtful analysis of the needs of the American people. They identify four myths that have stymied
the Democrats.

• The myth of mobilization is the belief that the key to Democratic victory is to energize the base and bring them to the polls in record numbers.
  
  
• The myth of demography is the view that long-term, ongoing changes in the U.S. population - such as an increase in the number of Hispanic voters and female professionals - will secure a Democratic majority for decades to come.
  
  
• The myth of language holds that the problem with the Democratic Party is not what it advocates, but rather how it speaks.
  
  
• The myth of prescription drugs is shorthand for the theory that the Party can win national elections by avoiding cultural issues, downplaying national security, and changing the subject to domestic issues such as health care, education, and job security in the post-9/11 world.
  

In other words, they are in a whole heap of trouble.

"Harmless" Drugs

As parents and teachers coke our children up on Ritalin, retired
physician
Theodore Dalrymple recalls that it was ever thus. There
is always a convenient and harmless drug floating around to take care of our mood or
keep children quiet.

Back in the 19th century parents dosed their children up with laudanum (that’s
a solution of opium) to keep them quiet. Then in the 1960s there was
“Phenergan, an antihistamine with tranquillising effects.”

I think I must have prescribed the stuff myself in the
mid-1970s to the children of mothers who said they were going to kill
their offspring if they did not soon get a good night’s sleep.
Better a drugged baby, I thought, than a murderous mother.

There is always a fashionable drug with magical properties for setting
the world to rights.

In fact, there is a pattern in such fashions, a pattern
from which we never seem to learn. A drug that acts on the brain is
first heralded not only as a miraculous cure of some psychological ill
or other, but harmless to boot; it is later learned that not only have
its miraculous therapeutic properties been much exaggerated, but
that it is not at all harmless either.

Now, of course, the drug is Ritalin, a powerful amphetamine that we
use on our children to make them more tractable and to curb their
attention deficit disorder.

Media Loses Heart

Back in the good old days, when Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce,” was president, and when Republicans first took over Congress after the mid-term elections of 1994, conservatives used to fulminate over the gross misrepresentation of conservative policies in the media, writes Tony Blankley, former aide to Newt Gingrich.

But now, they just don’t seem to have the same old fire.

Today, big media has lost interest in policy substance almost altogether. Analysis of major policy announcements is viewed almost exclusively through the prism of polling numbers.

If the president were to call for two plus two to equal four, the media would report that such a proposal had the support of only 42 percent of likely voters, and a slippage of even conservative support from 87 percent to 63 percent. Perhaps on the jump page, in the 38th inch of the story in the New York Times, they might get around to quoting a professor of mathematics from MIT to the effect that in fact the president was right that two plus two still equals four.

And in reporting the president’s speech on the Global War on Terror recently, the mainstream media reported that it contained nothing new and would not likely raise the president’s poll numbers In fact, the speech did contain something new.

For the first time the president of the United States named the enemy: "Islamofascist" and "radical, militant Islam." He compared it to the Nazi and Communist ideological threat of the previous century.

Blankley complains that the MSM are not just b*st*rds, but dumb b*st*rds. But he should see it as good news. Behind the rage and the frenzy of the young angry left there is in fact nothing. No new ideas, no vision of the future, just an attempt to hang on.

It’s time for a big conservative offensive, to get conservative ideas out before the American people, now that the opposition, so spirited for so many years, is losing heart.

Iraqis Vote For Constitution

Early returns show that the Iraqi people
approved
a new constitution on October 15, 2005, with only
two provinces appearing to vote against approval. So the Bush strategy seems to have cleared another
hurdle.

For now at least, the program of bringing consensual government to the Middle East goes on. And
the Bush plan to inject a blocking regime against the militant and expansionist Islamist regime in
Iran remains a success.

That’s the plan, in case you are wondering. In case you are one of the folks buying into the notion
that the Bush administration had “no plan” after they got to Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
It’s not that different from the containment strategy
that ended up succeeding against the Soviet Union. In 1947 the need was to block the expansion of the
murderous Stalin regime into western Europe. For 40 years the United States through Republican and
Democratic administrations held the line in Europe until the Soviet Union and its old-fashioned
empire collapsed from its internal contradictions.

Now a new force has arisen to oppose the irresistible force of democratic capitalism, this time
in the Muslim
Middle East. And so the United States once again has mobilized to oppose it.

Thatcher's 80th Birthday

They celebrated the 80th birthday last night of
Margaret Thatcher, the other half
of the tag team of Reagan and Thatcher. She was a scholarship girl, daughter of the corner
grocer who went to Cambridge University and then into national politics.

Her great life achievement was to turn Britain away from the disastrous expert-led death
spiral of the 1970s when the economy was utterly devastated by political power and rent-seeking,
all in the name of social progress and compassion.

Now she is 80 and we all live in the afterglow of her hard-won achievements. The success of the
New Labour Blair government is based on the continuing good economic growth that was founded
in the hard years of 1979-1984.

But the hard truth is that, while the British Conservative Party solved the economic problem of
productivity in the private sector the British Labour Party under Tony Blair has failed to solve
the economic problem of productivity in the public sector. And that is too bad for the British people.

It is said that you only get strong leaders when you need them. At least, the Anglosphere seems to
throw up strong leaders in a time of need. The British certainly got their strong leader
when they needed one in Margaret Thatcher, and just in the nick
of time.

Bush's Plan on Track in Iraq

For about a couple of years now Democrats have pushed the line that the Bush administration
had no plan for Iraq. It sent the US armed forces into Baghdad and then and then stood around
wondering, Now what do we do?

The Bush plan was, and is, to replace the terror regime of Saddam Hussein with some sort of
consensual regime. The plan was to replace one-man rule with Iraqi rule. It was to replace the politics
of the gun with the politics of the negotiation.

So with two major Sunni parties signing onto the proposed Iraq constitution things are looking up
for the election Saturday October 15 in which the Iraqi people get to approve the constitution that
was drafted for them. You could say that Bush’s plan is working.

And as James S. Robbins observes, the Al Qaeda chaps are facing a bit of a problem
with their executioner public face. They are wondering whether they need to tone it down a bit.

With the Iraqi army growing in strengh and the constitution approved, what will the pessimists
hang their hats on next?

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reforms

What does the recent German election mean, in which the two main parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU basically
ended in a dead heat?
Anatole Kaletsky reckons it means that the three great nations of Europe, Germany, France,
and Italy, are checking out. First in France with the rejection of the EU constitution and now
with the German rejection of reform, the Europeans are saying that they don’t want any stinking
reforms. They just want to go on as they are. According to

Wolfgang Münchau, a German commentator in the Financial Times: “The
German electorate has launched a new era in European economic policy — the post-reform era.
After ten years of
economic reforms, the Germans decided they had had enough.”

I know, I know. What planet are these Germans on? What reforms? From this side of the Atlantic
there is no sense that the German government has been enacting bold reforms. What they have been
doing is avoiding reform, talking about the noble European “Social Model” and making rude
remarks about the Anglo-Saxon economic model. (By the way, where do the Irish with their world-beating
Celtic Model fit in all this?)

Well, it’s a shame. For all their rascally behavior over the centuries, we owe a lot to the French
and the Germans. Montesquieu taught us how to write our constitution, and the Germans invented the
research university. And Hitler thoughtfully ripped the brain out of Germany and sent it over here.

But still, it’s a shame.

Low US Savings: Is It a Problem?

One of the concerns of enlightened elite opinion recently has been a worry over the lagging US savings
rate. Compared against any nation you like, the US savings rate comes in at the bottom. But like
the balance of payments problem, another worry of concerned elitists, the question is: Is “the problem” a problem?

The balance of payments is always in balance, wrote Ludwig von Mises half a century ago. He meant
that if the US runs a balance of payments deficit in, say, merchandise, it merely reflected the
choice of millions of consumers and thousands of producers. It means that Americans want to buy goods, and foreigners want
to hold American paper: dollars, debt, and equity.

In NRO, John Tamny weighs into The Wall Street Journal’s
David Wessel for worrying about
the savings deficit, that we need to wean ourselves from “from growing dependence on the savings of Asians and Europeans,”
and that the US “consumes more than it makes.”

The problem with this received elite opinion is that is flies in the face of some awkward facts. If
we are dangerously dependent on foreign capital, why are interest rates so low? And if low savings
is such a problem, why does US national wealth keep going up?

The answer is that the US does not have to save because our economy generates wealth.

[Data] last month from the Federal Reserve show that U.S. household net worth hit a
record of $49.8 trillion, up roughly $5 trillion in the last year alone. Notably, those gains
were split
almost equally between residential real estate and financial assets.

High savings rate is an indication that the economy is not throwing off the increase in wealth that
people need to provide for the future.

the best way to boost the savings rate would be for both the housing and stock
markets to collapse. Americans experienced just such a thing in the early 1980s when stocks
were still mired in a multi-year slump and home prices were crashing. Amidst those capital
losses, the savings rate unsurprisingly reached double digits.

To put it bluntly, Americans save when the economy is in the tank.

The bigger question is: Why do foreigners want to put their money into American debt with its
low returns? Why aren’t there better risk-reward propositions out there?

Who Lost Delphi?

On October 8, 2005,
Delphi, the auto parts supplier, became
the largest US manufacturer to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Delphi is
the parts division
that General Motors spun off a few years ago.

The bankruptcy of Delphi will have serious consequences even if it survives. It will no doubt eliminate
shareholders’ equity. It will severely cut workers’ wages and benefits. It will likely throw the
company’s pension plan into the hands of the federal pension insurance system, resulting in
major cuts in retiree pensions.

And, of course, there is the potential for a disruption in parts supplies to U.S. automakers.

Delphi is under criticism for awarding bonuses to its top executives before announcing bankruptcy. But
CEO Steve Miller defends his actions saying

it was the only way to keep talented management needed to complete the restructuring.

"We pay hourly workers three times the market rate; salaried staff are paid
a market rate and execs are paid below market," said Mr Miller.

So who lost Delphi? Was it greedy management asleep at the switch? Was it greedy unions that
negotiated unsustainable wages and benefits by using their muscle power to intimidate the auto manufacturers?
Is it the fault of foreign automakers competing with slave or sweated labor? Is it the fault of
Congress that has given the labor unions monopoly powers that would never have been given to a corporation?
Is it the fault of labor activists that have polished the image of labor unions over the years?
Is it the fault of workers who insisted that their union leaders negotiate for wages and benefits
that could never be sustained over the long term?

Or is it just the way of the world? Corporations are born, they grow and prosper, spinning out products
to consumers and income to stakeholders. And then they grow old and die.

So which is it?

The New Tory Prince

As the song goes, “I been down so long that down don’t worry me.” That
is what the British Conservative Party has been singing after three successive
defeats at the polls. But in last week’s party conference a new star was born singing a new
song: David Cameron,
who electrified the Tory Party with the best speech of the week.

In this opinion article in The Daily Telegraph
Cameron
attempts to advance his campaign to be party leader in Parliament, and hopefully Prime Minister at
the next general election.

Happy Columbus Day

How should we celebrate Columbus Day? As a celebration of western European values and expansion?
Or as a shameful conquest of noble savages that lived in harmony with nature?

Edward Hudgins celebrates the ordinary people that came out from Europe to America.
It may have been that the stout Cortez and his ilk enslaved the Meso and South Americans. But
in North America, the conquerors were workers who came to carve a new life out of the wilderness.

They had to clear the land, plant and sow crops. They had to practice
the trades of carpenters, masons, loggers, miners, blacksmiths and tailors to build
their towns and to create the necessities for life and prosperity. In the centuries that
followed, their descendants -- including Americans today -- built the richest, most prosperous
country on Earth.

Instapundit, on the other hand celebrates the change that Columbus’s discoveries
had on the Europeans back in Europe. Quoting Samual Eliot Morison:

"A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after
the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating
as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future."

In all this celebration though, we should remember those swept away in the triumphant European
expansion as its adventurers spread out across the oceans
and the continents of the world, trading, dominating, killing,
and ruling. The victims. It ain’t fun when your world gets turned upside down by strangers that
suddenly appear over the horizon.

We like to present history as a triumphant narrative of progress from darkness to light, from
simplicity to sophistication, from cruelty to compassion. Others like to present it as a
death spiral of evil and despair.

But the big question is: What does it all mean?

The President Plants a Stake in Iraq

In his speech on Iraq on October 6, 2005,
President Bush
clarified, finally, the war aims of the
United States in the global war on terror. It is to oppose and neutralize the forces that
“call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.”

But how? That was the meat of the president’s speech. What he called the fifth element of his
strategy is in fact the centerpiece of his strategy, which the other elements support:

to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred
and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East

We can understand this better by turning to political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel.
For him, the point of a successful politics is to create a mild and friendly politics of civility in place of
the alternative, a ruthless and murderous politics of hate. Every faction is “some part of a people... joined together in a bellicose spirit against
some other part.” The intent of leaders of sects and factions is to set citizens at war with each other. The goal of
friendly politics is to set citizens to work with each other.

The point of modern democracy is to reduce revolutionary combat and assassination with symbolic combat,
and replace battle with friendly rivalry.

Maybe that is why President Bush is avoiding a knock-down drag-out fight over his Supreme Court nominations.
Maybe he wants the culture wars of the last decade to cool off a bit—lest they escalate into real war.

Ronnie Barker R.I.P.

They don’t make them like that any more, certainly not like
Ronnie Barker, the British
TV comedian and writer who died October 3, 2005, aged 76.

American public TV viewers will remember Barker as the fat half of The Two Ronnies,
a show characterized by wordplay, stock British caricatures, and the “honest vulgarity” of
double-entendres. He
also exceled as the crafty imprisoned career criminal Fletcher in Porridge, and the corner
shopkeeper in Open All Hours:

Arkwright, the waddling, stammering
Yorkshire shopkeeper who divided his time between satisfying his roaring avarice and
attempting to control his lust for the district nurse, Gladys.

Barker was a modest man who began as a bank clerk and looked like one, but who slowly created a
career for himself in the theater the hard way by climbing up through regional repertory until he
caught the eye of rising stars like Peter Hall and David Frost.

Then, in 1988, in his late fifties, he gave it all up.

On New Year’s Day 1988 Barker retired to his converted
watermill in Oxfordshire, devoting his energies to ordering his collection of 70,000
Edwardian and Victorian picture postcards (some of the saucier ones were published in
anthologies such as his Book of Bathing Beauties), and to running his antique shop,
The Emporium, in Chipping Norton High Street.

After all, somebody has to do it.

August Wilson R.I.P.

In an era in which American theater has driven theatergoers to despair as it
panders to
elite fashions about race, class, and sexual orientation, there
is at least August Wilson. But not any more. The African American playwright who died October 2, 2005 aged 60.

The question about any lionized African American in the United States
at the turn of the twenty-first century is: Was he any good, or was he just
another average performer boosted into celebrity by fawning liberals? It’s
a pity, but that’s the reality.

Having seen Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jitney I’d say that the
answer is a definite Yes. Wilson did not serve up received liberal notions
about race, but human drama about real people.

So in Ma Rainey we may see condescension from the white recording studio
execs, but we also see them cowering and accommodating the prima-donna rages
of the impossible singer Ma Rainey. And we see the destructive rage of the strutting
black trumpeter.

In Jitney we see an African American father and son battle it out. The son gets sent
up to jail for murdering a white man, father of the white girl he’s been seeing, and
returns twenty years later seething with rage. Meanwhile his father has learned to live
under law. So when the city wants to raze the shopfront and redevelop the shopfront
he’s using he sends for a lawyer to deal with his conflicts instead of reaching
for his gun. And he’s become a respectable member of the community, a deacon
at his church. How do we deal with power, Wilson asks. With a lawyer or with a gun?

You can find lots of obituaries. Here’s one by
Joe Adcock.
There’s a better one at The Daily Telegraph.

The Chavez Plan to Wreck Venezuela

As we thrill to the excitements of US politics, let us not forget Venezuela as Hugo Chávez flushes
it down the toilet.
As Carlos Alberto Montaner
writes: “The raid on private property in Venezuela has begun.”

Chávez and his thugs are moving in “factories and large land tracts that are supposedly unproductive.”
That is Spanish for pouring oil money in and fat salaries and wages out—for Chávez supporters.

Anyone who knows a lick of economics knows where that leads. It leads to economic stagnation or worse.
And above all, it leads to dependency. When the government runs everything, then everyone is dependent
on the political process to put bread on the table. How is it possible, we might ask, that
leaders that advocate government control of everything are so often praised as noble souls that
care for the people?

Political leaders like government control because it makes them very powerful. It
allows them to reward their supporters and punish their enemies. Just ask Lenin and Mao and Castro. But it
slowly strangles the well-being of its people. That’s what happened to the Soviet Union. That’s what
happened to the Peoples Republic of China under Mao. That’s what has happened to the unfortunate
Cuban people. Now Chávez wants to try it out on the Venezuelans.

49 Up: Oral History as it Happens

Forty years ago Granada TV in Britain broadcast a documentary, Seven Up, about the lives of twenty children, then aged seven. It was to be a narrative about class, showing how class was destiny. To make the point absolutely clear they anchored the show around three boys and three girls. They showed us three dreadfully conceited boys from a fancy London private school and three charming working class girls from the East End of London.

Last month in Britain they broadcast 49 Up, interviewing the same children at the age of 49. Jonathan Freedland reviews it in The Guardian. Here in the United States we will probably have to wait for the DVD. You can get the DVD of the previous five episodes, The Up Series, at Amazon.

Of course, the hoary left-wing narrative about class has been utterly demolished, not least because Britain has become overwhelmingly middle class in the last half century. Instead what emerges unbidden in every frame is a completely different narrative: “The Consequences of the Welfare State.” You can say, roughly speaking, that the closer each child lived to the welfare state, the more their life suffered. All the middle-class children that went to private school have done well. But the kids that went to government schools, or bust up their marriages and went on welfare—they have not done so well.

So the question is: what was all the money and all the promises and all the social programs about? When it has all led to blighted lives and social decay?

But that is a conversation the producers of The Up Series are not willing to have. They may not even be aware that it is a conversation it is possible to have.

Miers or Less: The Fight Goes On

President Bush
nominated
White House counsel Harriet Miers this morning to be an Associate Justice on the United States
Supreme Court. And conservatives are underwhelmed.

Conservatives want a nominee that can stick it to the Democrats and teach them a lesson. But the
President is clearly signaling that he doesn’t want a knockdown drag out fight. The Roberts nomination
seemed to have been made on the basis of going as conservative as possible without provoking the
Democrats to a fight. And the Miers nomination has to be seen in the same light.

Conservatives should understand that the big problem on the Supreme Court is not in the
character and beliefs of individual
nominees and whether they get turned into liberals by their years on the court and by the need
to be liked and win
“Strange New Respect” from the Washington media. The challenge is for conservatives to create the judicial atmosphere that makes
the conservative philosophy the default position for a go-along-to-get-along justice.

If conservatives want to win on the court, year in year out, no matter who gets on the court, then
we must win in the battle of ideas. When that happens the swing votes on the court, the Souters and
the Kennedys, will weathervane over to our side.

It is easy, when your guy is in the White House, to imagine that he can fire a magic bullet and
change the court to your liking. Reality is not so easy.

Reality is getting up every morning and going to work, determined to change hearts and minds, one at a time, issue by
issue.

The Underclass: Remember Them?

Charles Murray published Losing Ground twenty years ago. In it he told how social policy had created the non-working underclass out of the old working class, a world of fatherless families that lived without working.

Now with Hurricane Katrina we have suddenly rediscovered the underclass. And we will likely pull out a few of the old palliatives to make it go away.

The underclass is not going away. It is still getting bigger, Murray writes. The measure of the size of the underclass is the rate of criminality. “The crime rate has been dropping for 13 years. But the proportion of young men who grow up unsocialized and who, given the opportunity, commit crimes, has not.” The crime rate is down because we have tripled the population of our prisons.

Criminality is the most extreme manifestation of the unsocialized young male. Another is the proportion of young males who choose not to work. Among black males ages 20-24, for example, the percentage who were not working or looking for work when the first numbers were gathered in 1954 was 9%. That figure grew during the 1960s and 1970s, stabilizing at around 20% during the 1980s. The proportion rose again, reaching 30% in 1999, a year when employers were frantically seeking workers for every level of job.

Although we have reformed welfare, we have not shrunk the underclass. That is because we have not shrunk the number of fatherless families.

Think of this. In the United States we have our unsocialized underclass males. In China they have the surplus males from the folly of the One Child policy. In Eurabia they have millions of disaffected males: underclass European males and alienated Muslim males. What do you think will become of all those angry males?