2006: How Many Unsung Heroes Died?

The year 2006 saw the deaths of many famous people, from Robert Altman to Al Zarqawi, as Mark Steyn relates. It saw the death of a decent man, in Gerald Ford, a brilliant man, in Milton Friedman, and an evil man, in Saddam Hussein.

But what are you to say of the deaths of the countless unsung heroes, such as Richard Milward, “Schoolmaster whose history lessons, and whose goodness, inspired generations of pupils at Wimbledon College?”

According to the obituary in the Daily Telegraph he spent his entire working adult life teaching history at a Jesuit secondary school in Wimbledon, England. Sir John Keegan, the British historian, was one of his students and “left the College with a good history A-level and a place at Balliol [College, Oxford.]”

This was a man who contracted polio at age 15 and “suffered a crippling back condition for the rest of his life.”

How do we measure the contribution of a man like Richard Milward, unable to serve in World War II, unable to become a member of the Society of Jesus, yet devoting his life to teaching history and coaching cricket?

Just Don't Say the M-Word

American-in-London Janet Daley, like us at Road to the Middle Class, is hungrily devouring the new Tory research paper “Breakdown Britain.”

But, she says, we know all this. We know that the social breakdown and feral behavior we see all around us is due to one thing:

That is, [many young people] lack what were once considered to be the basic provisions of family life: two parents, a sense of belonging to a stable household (even if it was poor) and a belief that their lives were tied into some wider network of relationships with adults.

So why do we need a new report, when we know it already?

Now we have another report to say it all again. This time it has been commissioned directly by the Conservative Party, which is a hopeful sign. But I am not blown away by optimism. Not that I am disparaging the project. Iain Duncan Smith's social justice policy unit has done some splendid work: not only in reiterating all that evidence again about how much more likely the children of lone parents are to have poor outcomes in terms of education, mental health, drug abuse and criminal offending, but also in demonstrating how effective local voluntary organisations can be in confronting these problems.

We know all this. Why do we need to chew over it again.

And this very day Rich Lowry is saying the same thing. He is looking at presidential candidate John “Two Americas” Edwards anti-poverty proposals and he is saying: So?

Edwards' anti-poverty proposals aren't compelling because they fail to acknowledge a basic truth: It is impossible "to grow the middle class," as he puts it, without spreading middle-class values.

Tell you what, Lowry writes, there really are Two Americas.

In one America, by and large, women find a suitable mate, marry him and then have a baby. In the other America, by and large, women have the baby first, creating nearly insurmountable difficulties for themselves on the path to the middle class.

What a concept! But John Edwards “refuses to offer as the obvious solution the M-word that rhymes with carriage.”

The root cause of the social breakdown we see all around us is all tied to the liberal taboo around the M-word (rhymes with carriage).

So why do we have to say this again and again, and why is the M-word still taboo (except when we are talking about the gay M-word)? And why has nothing happened, nothing changed?

I will tell you why. It comes out in Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, the story of the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

The Great Society folks were supremely confident that their programs were going to end poverty as we know it. So they set up a whole bunch of assessment projects to measure the progress that was sure to come.

The only problem was that already by the end of the 1960s the results of the assessment progams were in. And the War-on-Poverty liberals knew that their programs weren’t working.

So what did they do? Did they say: OK chaps, sorry about that, a bit of a cock-up on the social science front. We’ll have to terminate all those programs. They simply aren’t working.

They did not. And we know why. The answer is political power. The Democratic Party derives its support from the people who benefit from government programs. They cannot afford to close them down for then they would lose political power.

That is why, ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have perfected the politics of personal destruction against anyone who dares to lay a finger on any of their precious programs.

People Have Needs, they say. You Just Don’t Care About Kids, they say.

So they do. But good people can disagree about how to get there.

Like the postmodernists say: It’s all about power.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Until the day that the welfare-state liberals cry “Uncle” we are going to stay right here, chewing over the same reports and findings and unescapable truths and spitting them out into the public square.

The left has a phrase for what we are doing. It is called: Speaking Truth to Power.

David Cameron Exposes "Breakdown Britain"

For over a year people in Britain have been wondering if the new leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is for real.

He began by demonstrating that he would be different, by bicycling to work and by installing a wind turbine on his house.

So much so that traditional Tories have been completely put off by him. But he has brought the Tories into a lead over the Labour Party in the opinion polls for the first time since the early 1990s, whatever that is worth.

His strategy has been to appeal to the secular metropolitan voters who have deserted the Conservative Party for the Lib-Dems, the center party in Britain. He wants to make the Conservative Party acceptable to voters who have bought into the idea, bruited in the left-wing media, that the Tory Party is the “nasty” party. As we know, metropolitan secular elites are the most enlightened people in the world, and it will certainly help the Tories if “enlightened” people decide that the Conservative Party is no longer beyond the Pale for “people like us.”

But now the Conservative Party is starting to put rubber on the road, and the most clear sign of this Breakdown Britain, an interim policy report lead by former party leader Iain Duncan Smith. A summary of the talking points can be found here (pdf).

Breakdown Britain is a devastating report of social disintegration in Britain. It is like Charles Murray’s Losing Ground on steroids.
It contains the following sections:

• Breakdown Britain - an interim report on the state of the nation
  
  
• Volume 1- Economic Dependence and Worklessness
  
  
• Volume 2 - Family Breakdown
  
  
• Volume 3 - Addictions
  
  
• Volume 4 - Educational Failure
  
  
• Volume 5 - Consumer Indebtedness
  
  
• Volume 6 - Third Sector
  

By “Third Sector” the Conservatives mean the non-profit, social enterprise sector that is neither business nor government. In his introduction of the report Conservative leader David Cameron openly attributed F.A. Hayek as the inspiration for the focus on the Third Sector. He said:

To me those 700,000 [non-profit] organisations prove that there is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state. The term "the third sector" was first coined by the liberal economist Friedrich von Hayek, the intellectual guru of Thatcherism. In Law, Legislation and Liberty Hayek wrote that "it is most important for a healthy society that we preserve between the commercial and the governmental sector a third, independent sector."

This is a vital distinction that conservatives have been trying to bring into the public square for the last half-century. When we say “society” we do not just mean “government.”

It is worth noting that Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism also writes of three sectors, the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector. And we can assume that he is talking about the same thing.

If you take a look at the talking points link you can find some pretty horrifying statistics.

8.2 million people in the UK have an alcohol disorder and over a million children are living in
homes with alcoholics.


Some 10.7 million people in Britain suffer relationship problems as a result of debt.


Levels of giving [to charity] among the wealthier members of society are surprisi
ngly low.


Children from white working-class backgrounds are the most under-performing ethnic
group [in school]; just 17 per cent of disadvantaged white boys attain 5 or more A*-Cs at GCSE [i.e. graduate from high school]
compared to a 56 per cent national average.

This sort of comprehensive policy analysis by a political party is impressive. You can see its purpose.

Firstly, it is setting up the idea that the Conservative Party is thinking seriously about the problems of the British nation.

Secondly, it provides a narrative, a framework of thought, for Conservative Party activists and politicians, and also conservative opinion makers in the media.

The contrast with the U.S. Democratic Party, just restored to power in Congress couldn’t be more clear. Democrats have done no thinking in the past twelve years when they have been out of power in Congress. The results will start to show up rather quickly in 2007.

Is David Cameron for real? It is beginning to look as if he really is.

We are far too severe on good honest chaps like Ebenezer Scrooge who refuse to celebrate Christmas, writes Spengler.

[Dickens'] Scrooge is a vicious caricature of the Puritan position. Considering that America is the last Christian nation thanks in large measure to the accomplishments of the Puritans, we should reconsider Scrooge's point of view.

Christmas is a children’s celebration and Puritans, like
“[t]he Jews[,] are too old to play at being children, and always have been.”

But Christmas is not just a time for childish joy, it is also a time when we remember the poor. And the Puritans, with their devotion to work, have something to teach us in that department as well. It is faith and work and enterprise that ultimately helps the poor.

But maybe you are not inclined to listen to the advice of the Puritans. You can, if you prefer, learn instead, as Thomas Sowell writes, from the studied unwillingness of progressives to show an “interest in economic history or in economics in general.”

Progressives show a remarkable interest in doing something about disparities in income and in ending poverty, but they resist what we might call a rational or empirical investigation into the actual record on eliminating poverty.

For instance, in the last twenty years the people of India and China have made startling progress in eliminating poverty.

An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?

On the contrary, they are mounting an attack on Wal-Mart, a corporation heroically dedicated to selling the products of Chinese workers in the US retail marketplace at Always Low Prices, Always.

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.



The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives.

Er, yes. Because progressives insist on doing for people what they ought to be doing for themselves. And progressives insist on doing it using other peoples’ money.

So how are a million Chinese a month rising out of poverty? The world wants to know.

But the great question remains, for Puritans and for progressives. What have you done to help the poor? Today.

Mr Populist wants Privilege and Subsidy

Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been getting nice coverage as moderates, even though their ADA ratings for 2005 are both 100 per cent perfect liberal.

Now millionaire lawyer John Edwards is getting a reputation as a populist. He’s running for president on the following five headline issues on his campaign website:

• 
  Provide moral leadership in the world
  



• 
  Strengthen our middle class and end poverty
  



• 
  Guarantee universal health care for every American
  



• 
  
  Lead the fight against global warming
  



• 
  Get America and other countries off our addiction to oil
  

So let’s just look at one issue. Ending poverty. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Jackie Calmes

[I]n an address in June at Washington's National Press Club...
he set a national goal of ending poverty in 30 years for the 37 million Americans living below the poverty line, lifting one-third of them above it in each of the next three decades. His "Working Society" agenda would mean a higher federal minimum wage, reduced taxes for low-income workers, universal health care, and one million new housing vouchers for working families, to help them find homes in neighborhoods with better schools.

But is there any indication that those proposals would do anything to end poverty? Let’s look at the economics:

1. Higher minimum wage: throws people out of work.
   
2. Reduced taxes for low-income workers: would help, but taxes on low-income workers are already heavily rebated by the Low Income Tax Credit.
   
3. Universal health care: doesn’t actually help much, because most of the uninsured are single people in their twenties.
   
4. Housing vouchers: but we already have that, big time.
   

In other words, John Edwards wants to increase the power of government over peoples’s lives with new subsidies and privileges.

If Edwards wants a “Working Society” he should propose a reduction in the disincentives for people to work. People in the lowest quintile work about half the hours that people in the higher quintiles. Maybe that’s why they don’t earn much money.

The way to strengthen the middle class is to make them independent of government and corporations, with their own jobs, their own savings, their own houses, their own health insurance, and a much smaller government taking money out of their paychecks.

But why would a Democrat help them do that? Why, with jobs, savings, houses, and smaller government, pretty soon they’d be turning into Republicans.

To Help The Poor

We are far too severe on good honest chaps like Ebenezer Scrooge who refuse to celebrate Christmas, writes Spengler.

[Dickens'] Scrooge is a vicious caricature of the Puritan position. Considering that America is the last Christian nation thanks in large measure to the accomplishments of the Puritans, we should reconsider Scrooge's point of view.

Christmas is a children’s celebration and Puritans, like “[t]he Jews[,] are too old to play at being children, and always have been.”

But Christmas is not just a time for childish joy, it is also a time when we remember the poor. And the Puritans, with their devotion to work, have something to teach us in that department as well. It is faith and work and enterprise that ultimately helps the poor.

But maybe you are not inclined to listen to the advice of the Puritans. You can, if you prefer, learn instead, as Thomas Sowell writes, from the studied unwillingness of progressives to show an “interest in economic history or in economics in general.”

Progressives show a remarkable interest in doing something about disparities in income and in ending poverty, but they resist what we might call a rational or empirical investigation into the actual record on eliminating poverty.

For instance, in the last twenty years the people of India and China have made startling progress in eliminating poverty.

An estimated 20 million people in India rose out of destitution in just one decade and more than a million Chinese per month have risen out of poverty. But have you heard any progressive intellectuals explaining how such a dramatic change for the better came about?

On the contrary, they are mounting an attack on Wal-Mart, a corporation heroically dedicated to selling the products of Chinese workers in the US retail marketplace at Always Low Prices, Always.

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing -- as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.

The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people’s lives.

Er, yes. Because progressives insist on doing for people what they ought to be doing for themselves. And progressives insist on doing it using other peoples’ money.

So how are a million Chinese a month rising out of poverty? The world wants to know.

But the great question remains, for Puritans and for progressives. What have you done to help the poor? Today.

How Certain Are You?

The forces of ant-religious bigotry have been developing a nice little meme lately about certainty. They have been telling all their freinds that they stand nobly for skepticism against the rigid certainties of religious fundamentalism and superstition.

Columnist Jonah Goldberg has a technique for dealing with these professional skeptics.

Whenever I hear people say such things, I like to ask them, "Are you sure about that?" When they say yes, which they always do, I follow up by asking, "No, no: Are you really, really certain that certainty is bad?" At some point even the irony-deficient get the joke.

That’s the point. There seem to be a lot of people in the United States right now that have pretty rigid opinions about the rigidity of people whose ideas they don’t like.

Of course, back in the Nineties conservatives made a pretty good book complaining about the slipperiness of Slick Willie.

But which is it? How certain do you get to be without being dogmatically rigid? And how flexible can you be without being a wet noodle?

The answer is: It depends.

Virtually every hero in human history has been driven by certainty, by the courage of their convictions. Sir Thomas More and Socrates chose certain death, pun intended, over uncertain life. Martin Luther King Jr. -- to pick liberalism's most iconic hero -- was hardly plagued with doubt about the rightness of his cause.

And the villains of the world, when they weren’t outrageously shifty, were monstrously certain. Think H-word, Stalin, Mao, Torquemada, Genghis Khan.

In our current American culture, of course, the rage against certainty is really nothing more than the Pharisaic disdain of the creative classes for the rule-following traditional classes.

Of course, we all feel disdain for the fools that surround us. If only we weren’t so sure.

Gerald Ford, RIP

President Gerald Ford, who died December 26, represented the minority Republican Party of the post-war era. While living a decent, play-by-the-rules life, Ford was part of a generation of Republicans playing strategic defense against the militant expansion of progressive politics and its product the government welfare state.

A man who lost his father and his name in divorce, Ford married a divorced woman and then shared his life with Betty Bloomer Warren Ford, fathering four children and fifteen grandchildren.

Serving as president in the edgy 1970s, a decade of folly that included the retreat from Vietnam, wage-and-price controls, a vast increase in government social spending, the turn of the Democrats from an American party to a trans-national party, and a double dose of inflation, Ford was the completely normal man, who always did the right thing.

Now he is gone, at 93 past the age when life has any savor. We shall look in vain for a politician with the decency that he projected and practiced all his life.

The Popeye Moment on Single-Parent Families

And while we are at it, let’s get serious about single-parent families. As the climate enthusiasts like to say, the science is in.
Single-parent families are a very bad idea. So why don’t CNN and Fox News run single-parent horror stories 24-7? They could, you know, without breaking a sweat. And I’ll bet there are enough single-parent horror stories out there that they could change the story every hour if they had the budget for it.

Now that would be something.

Janice Shaw, director and senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, the policy institute of Concerned Women for America, thinks that, when it comes to single parents, it is time we had a “Popeye Moment,” the point in a Popeye cartoon where Popeye says: "I've had all I can stand. I can't stands no more."

Are we there yet on single-parent families? Why not? It’s not just a moral question, or, if you prefer a question of rational ethics. It’s a safety question.

Children are much safer living with their married biological parents than any other arrangement.

Sorry, that’s not quite true. Adopted children living with their married adoptive parents are even safer than children living with their natural married parents.

Which is an argument, if we needed one, for getting tough on non-performing single parents. If you can’t get your act together, fast, Ms. Single Mom, then we are going to put your kid up for adoption. Fast.

That’s another subject on which the science is in. The worst thing you can do to a child is to have her hanging around in foster families while her single parent leisurely gets her life together.

A kid needs a permanent home. Fast.

You see, when a single mom doesn’t get her act together, fast, it shows that she just doesn’t care about kids.

Is Racism a Fact or a Faith?

Let’s talk about racism. Well, it’s the day after Christmas, and time to take up weighty subjects.

Asks Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt:

A recent CNN poll tells us that 84% of blacks and 66% of whites think racism is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem in American life. Is this true?

Since it’s Steele asking the question, you know what the answer is going to be.

[W]e must acknowledge one of the most profound achievements in recent human history: the death of white supremacy. Here was an event far more world-altering than the collapse of communism, and yet, out of a truly extraordinary historical blindness, it has gone utterly unnoticed.
...
It was defeated by revolutions in the last half of the 20th century that spanned the globe from India to Algeria to the United States. It was defeated by the people who had suffered it. And even if it survives in some quarters as an idea, as a speculation, it now stigmatizes anyone associated with it to the point of ruin.

That is why when a comedian like Michael Richards uses the N-word in a comedy routine, he gets handed his guts for garters. Obviously, racism still exists, but racists have a pretty hard time of it these days. That is, of course, white racists. Racism florishes in non-white lands, including most particularly the lands of the House of Submission.

So the question is whether racism is a fact or a faith.

The great mistake Americans made after the civil rights victories of the '60s was to allow race to become a government-approved means to power. Here was the incentive to make racism into a faith. And its subsequent life as a faith has destroyed our ability to know the reality of racism in America. Today we live in a terrible ignorance that will no doubt last until we take race out of every aspect of public life -- until we learn, as we did with religion, to separate it from the state.

Now that’s an interesting concept, the separation of race and state. And it is not some vague constitutional penumbra, but actually written into the constitution as an Amendment. Actually, two Amendments. And then it was written into law in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Fonz Moves In On British "Panto"

If it’s Christmas it must be time for “panto,” the deliciously vulgar British holiday entertainment. Its eternal subjects are Cinderella, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Dick Whittington and His Cat, and Mother Goose. The leading man is always a girl in tights and there is always a “dame” part, played by a man. Only in Cinderella there are two dame parts, the two Ugly Sisters.

Another thing about the pantos is that there is always audience participation, a pleasure very thin on the ground in our modern age.

Still, as Michael Henderson relates, it’s a wonder that panto works at all.

Men dressing up as women, risqué jokes in front of young children, unfunny catch-phrases, audience participation in nonsense songs, and the willful stupidity of performers who can't see what is visible to everybody else. And you expect people to pay good money to watch this every Christmas? No wonder you lot lost the colonies.

Well, I remember with some pleasure the pantos I saw as a child in London. But I remember that I did not like the idea of the leading man, Aladdin, played by a girl in tights. What was the point of all that female leg, I fumed. Little did I know.

Panto is experiencing something of a boomlet these days. Sir Ian McKellen appeared in one last year and now we Yanks are getting in on the act. The Fonz, Henry Winkler, is appearing as Captain Hook at Wimbledon this season.

On a whim, I decided to Google panto and immediately found that all the British newspapers have a panto article running today.

The Times’s Janice Turner strongly disapproves of panto going upmarket. She went to a panto at the Barbican and declares

This will be the last time I attend “posh panto”... It looks like panto, it just doesn’t feel like panto.

And off she goes to tell her readers exactly why the downscale panto at Wimbledon is much better than the posh panto in the City and the West End. Among other things,

At Wimbledon the dancing girls are comely and well drilled, at the Barbican they are chunky and half-arsed.

And really, how dumb can you be to put good money out to see chunky and half-arsed dancing girls?

Tis The Season

It’s the season, and time for a cheery round of carols under the Christmas Tree.

Of course, Some People don’t know to leave well enough alone, and we at the Road to the Middle Class have this week, I am afraid, put out a modest effort in this direction:

God rest ye merry, bureaucrats,
Let nothing you dismay.
For Christopher Columbus
Was born on Fitzmas Day.
To save us all from Satan’s power,
When we were gone astray.

O tidings of comfort and joy,
For Christopher Columbus
Was born on Fitzmas Day.

That is bad enough, but now John Derbyshire has gone and fractured several carols and Christmas songs, as in:

Jingle Mel, Jingle Mel, Jingle Mel rock,
Jingle Mel drink and Jingle Mel drive.
Cops pulled him over and asked him to breathe &mdash
That made Jingle Mel start to seethe.

Well you know the rest of the story. Then there’s “Rudy the Red-State Nightmare, ” and the incomparable “Bimbo Wonderland.”

Bimbos sing, are you listening,
See the lip gloss is glistening.
Their talents are slight,
They’re out clubbing every night,
Living in a bimbo wonderland.

How does he do it? Talent, I suppose. Talent and hard work.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers.

The Peace Party vs. The Power Party

For some time many people have defined the main political division in the United States as the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party. Democrats represent people who believe that the government should mother the American people. And Republicans represent people who believe that the government should be a strict father.

But now comes Matthew Continetti with the news that the real cleavage between the parties is on peace vs. war. The Democratic Party is the Peace Party and the Republican Party is the War Party.

[The] invasion of Iraq seem to have accelerated a shift begun some 30 years ago: The Democratic party is increasingly linked with the attitudes, tendencies, and policies of peace, whereas the Republican party is increasingly linked with the maintenance and projection of American military power.

Using this analysis the mid-term election of 2006 represents a collapse in support for the war among independents.

Continetti finds that partisan discord over foreign policy has been the norm in US history. The relative agreement during the early Cold War period was unique, and did not really start to break down until after the Vietnam War, really taking off in the Reagan years when Democrats began to identify against the Reagan military buildup.

To Continetti, the new divide between the Peace Party and the Power Party raises all sorts of questions.

But what happens when the peace party holds power of its own and faces a world in which illiberalism is on the march? What happens when the power party faces a revolt in its own ranks? What does it mean when the party of the social elite identifies more closely with those who wish to constrain American power than with those who wish to use it? Will an American failure in Iraq discredit the power party, just as the urban riots and other social dislocations of the late 1960s discredited the party of the Great Society?

The divide promises an interesting political future. The Democrats believe that war is never the answer. We shall see. On the other hand the Republicans have clearly burned their fingers in the mess in Iraq. Projection of power is not always the answer.

It seems fairly obvious that the mess in Iraq is going to discredit the Power Party. For now. The question is, what comes next?

Skills Commission Wants to Centralize Education

The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has issued a report on the nation’s education system, entitled “Tough Choices or Tough Times.” Recognizing that the bureaucratic system set up a century ago is not exactly best practice, the report admits that

our education and transing systems were built for another era, an era in which workers needed only a rudimentary education.

So the commissioners do not propose just a modest reform of the current system. Oh no.

The one thing that is indispensible is a new system.

Brilliant, eh? After the total politicization of the education process into systematized bureaucracy for the last century, after a radical restructuring of big business into flattened, responsive, agile market-driven value maximizers, a blue-ribbon commission proposes for education: Centralization!

The core of their proposals is to cut back compulsory school attendance to 16. But to get out of high school students will need to pass a State Board Qualifying Examination. Then they will either go to an Upper Secondary Academic Program or a Regional Vocational School, Community or Technical College. After 2-3 years of study, students will take another examination, their choice of one of the following:

1. International Baccalaureate Exams
   
2. State Board Transfer Examination
   
3. Advanced Placement Exams
   
4. Technical Exams
   

So, in recognition that the current system of high school graduation is meaningless, because schools allow children to graduate who are not up to standard, we will replace the broken tests with new ones.

Given the current uproar over “high-stakes” testing, we can anticipate that the minute the new tests are in place teachers and parents will start to complain that the tests are too hard and that they are hurting little Johnny’s positive self-esteem.

The problem with the current system is the problem with all bureaucratic systems. First of all, it assumes that we know what kind of education system we need. That’s why it is such a failure. And being a government program it has been completely captured by the producer interest of administrators and teachers.

The reason that business reformed out of the Detroit Behemoth model of organization into the the flexible, decentralized model is that nobody knows where the market is going next. If you have a big ponderous system in place you will never be able to adapt to new market conditions in time.

So why does the commission want to repeat the error of the twentieth century with a new rigid centralized, politicized system?

Here’s a clue for the commissioners. The great corporations of 1900 are almost all gone. Disappeared. Broke. Liquidated. That’s why the United States is the most productive country in the world. But the great educational institutions are all still here. Oh, they’ve merged and combined somewhat, but they remain essentially unreformed. That’s why the US educational system is a vast, centralized, subsidized failure.

If you want a modern, flexible educational system that adapts itself every day to the challenge of the twenty-first century, then you need a private-sector business model.

It’s no mystery. The private-sector business model is what you must use if you want to serve the consumer and adapt quickly to changing market conditions.

The same applies to education. We want the educational equivalent of the Toyotas, the Hondas, the Microsofts, the Wal-Marts and the Googles to emerge from nowhere and beat the educational competition to a pulp.

Of course, that’s the one thing that the New Commission on The Skills of The American Workforce didn’t consider.

President Bush Wants To Compromise

President Bush says he’s all in favor of working with Democrats in the new Congress. As Stephen Dinan reports,

"I don't expect Democratic leaders to compromise on their principles, and they don't expect me to compromise on mine. But the American people do expect us to compromise on legislation that will benefit the country," he said.

The president says he is willing to raise

the minimum wage to $7.25 as long as that doesn't hurt businesses. He said the way to protect businesses is to combine the increase "with targeted tax and regulatory relief to help these small businesses stay competitive and to help keep our economy growing."

The president also called for progress on other issues,

renewing the No Child Left Behind education act, boosting energy alternatives to oil and completing an overhaul of the immigration system that includes a guest-worker program.

And the president is also calling for manpower increases in the Army and the Marine Corps. That seems to indicate a certain strategic sense. The president understood that while Republicans controlled the Congress, the Democrats could always put up a huge stink about increasing the size of the armed forces. But now that Democrats are in control of Congress, he can put them in a box if they oppose his efforts to “make us safe.”

What we don’t yet know is how much backbone the president will have in developing the deals with the Democrats. Will he stick to his guns on the minimum wage or cave to Sen. Kennedy, who demands a clean bill?

You’d think he would have learned from the No Child Left Behind Act in which Democrats utterly refused any reform of the monopoly government school system. If you can’t get at least a teeny-weeny bit of reform what’s the point of any legislation to throw more money at the problem?

And then there is the 800 lb elephant in the back of the room, Social Security. If there is to be a deal on Social Security, will it include a provision for individual accounts?

I’d say no accounts, no deal. But what do I know?

Of Course Blogs are Boring and Predictable...

What exactly was the point of Joseph Rago’s rant in today’s Opinion Journal? I read it through twice and I’m still not sure of the point.

Unless the point is that Joseph Rago is thankful that he is an “assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal” by virtue of being editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Review, you know, like the Pharisee, who was thankful he was not like other men, publicans and sinners.

When someone drags Henry James into the argument, then you know that it’s time to check Weather.com for snow warnings.

Rego makes the startling point that political blogs are “predictable,” and therefore “excruciatingly boring.” “[R]ight-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions... Leftward fatuities too are easily found.” No kidding!

Of course blogs are derivative; of course they rely on the mainstream media for their reportage; of course 97.8 percent of blog content is pure dreck. Yet blogs themselves are not the worst of the worst. I would suggest that the comments section of blogs is where you go if you really want to wallow in the gutter.

The great boon of the blogosphere, for conservatives, is that for the first time we have a political community, a place where we can rehearse conservative opinions and find a resonance. It’s something that liberals have had for decades with the MSM, National Public Radio, and the faculty lounge. It’s a link in the food chain between genuinely original thinkers, best-selling popularizers, politicians, and the voters. It gets conservative ideas worked over and given life.

So it’s all boring and predictable. But then so, if you like, is a baseball game, and so is religious ritual. So also is the monthly non-profit board meeting you faithfully attend.

Blogs are like every other technical advance of the modern era. No advance ever solves anything. It just raises the stakes.

Blogs may be boring and predictable. But then so are editorials at the New York Times.

Blogs are now part of the national political conversation.

Watch Your Wallet Says Pete Du Pont

Wondering what the new Congress will mean? Pete Du Pont gives us a quick rundown in today’s Opinion Journal

• Tax Increases Democrats will be delighted to let the Bush tax rate cuts expire in the next couple of years.
  
• Spending Increases Although House Democrats say they will let spending stay flat this year, don’t forget that Democrats believe that more government spending is good for America. And if the leaders don’t, the rank-and-file certainly does.
  
• Alternative Minimum Tax This one is a doozy, and is going to bite a bunch of taxpayers in the next few years.
  
• Protectionism Liberals are big on limiting imports.
  
  

It’s easy, and great fun, to criticize the Republicans for all their peccadillos and missed opportunities over the past twelve years. But at least their hearts are in the right place.

But the Democrats actually believe these stupid ideas. They believe that a high tax, high spending state makes for a better America. They believe in steeply progressive taxes. They believe in protecting American workers against foreign competition.

And unfortunately they have The New York Times to play back their stupid ideas to them as the height of sophistication and compassion. And they have a political base that earns its livelihood in the implementation and maintenance of stupid ideas.

The question always is: What do the voters want?

Or more directly, how long will it take for the voters to vomit the Democrats out again?

The Child of a Sperm Donor

Suppose you decided that you wanted a child and you got yourself inseminated by anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank. You’d be exercising your reproductive choice, of course, as guaranteed by a penumbra of the constitution.

There’s just one thing, and it’s something that we adults tend to forget as we forge ahead on our “sexual choices.”

What does the kid, the issue from such a union, think about having an anonymous sperm donor as a father?

Not much, according to Katrina Clark, the grown child of a sperm donor.

When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.

...

As long as [the] adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?

Well, not exactly. What about the kid in question?

Of course, she and her mother are proud liberals. Why wouldn’t they be, as a single-parent family? But there’s a question of rights.

I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.

So Katrina decided to try and find out who her sperm-donor father was, and quickly found out. Wonderful!

Only, of course, the sperm donor really didn’t want to be an actual “father.” After the excitement of discovering her father and sharing her feelings about being donor conceived,

I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing."

We humans wouldn’t be humans without our searing combination of ruthless selfishness and genuine caring. But wouldn’t a system of rational ethics have something to say about the ethics of having a child when one of the parents was just an anonymous cipher? Wouldn’t it at least recognize that every child wants a mother and a father: her mother and her father?

There’s one good thing. Katrina isn’t angry at her mother.

I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything.

Thank goodness for that.

The Widening Middle Eastern War

Jordan’s King Abdullah recently warned of three developing civil wars in the Middle East. There’s the headline war in Iraq. But there is also a developing civil war in Lebanon. And now there is the growing likelihood of civil war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories between the forces of Fatah and Hamas, reports Claude Salhani.

According to Laurie King-Irani, "The Palestinians have let themselves fall right into the trap set for them by the Israeli extreme right."

Well maybe, whatever a remark like that is supposed to mean.

But for us the Middle East is probably more like the Germany of the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. There is a religious conflict between Sunni and Shia. There are great powers around the periphery, each with their interests. And there is plenty of money to keep soldiers in the field.

The immediate consequence of the Thirty Years War was to promote France to the front rank of the great powers, and to delay for 200 years the emergence of Germany as the pivot of Europe.

None of that was obvious at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. So we may be surprised by the outcome of the eternal Middle East conflict.

But it is clear that the articifial borders created by the western powers in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I are creaking and crumbling—as they were bound to do sooner or later. Nobody would care about that, were it not for Israel and oil.

Before the Great Middle Eastern War is over, the Middle East will probably end up as devastated as Germany in the middle of the seventeenth century.

And then there is Somalia.

Middle Class Muscle in South China

Everybody wonders what is going to happen in China. Will it reform out of its Communist Party monopoly? Or will it come to a smash-up as the irresistible force of a vibrant economy collides with the immovable object of an ossified political system?

Our friend at the New York Times, Howard W. French, reports that things are starting to move in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong.

When citizens found out about a plan to build a highway through their middle-class neighborhood they decided to fight.

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway.

There are numerous similar stories. Of course a lot of the stories are NIMBY-style activism. But the movement goes beyond that. Citizens formed an internet group Interhoo,

an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.

Even in Communist dominated China, Interhoo is making a difference.

“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”

Of course, the New York Times being what it is, we get the story presented as a case of community activism.

But the larger question gets back to the basic Hayekian argument about spontaneous order. Society is just too big and complicated to be governed top down. Continued prosperity requires horizontal relationships, contractual give-and-take.

Can the authoritarian political class in China resist the competence and the energy of the burgeoning middle class? And, deep down, does it want to?

That will be the great question for China and the Chinese people.

It's The Anti-Semitic Violence That's The Problem

In Britain right now, one in 400 Jews is likely to be the victim of a “faith-related” attack in Britain every year.

One in 1,700 Muslims is likely to be a victim of a faith-related attack, according to Tom Harper and Ben Leapman.

In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses. The figures do not record the faith of the offenders.

Here is the record of merely one anti-Semitic incident.

Rabbi Alex Chapper, 33, was the victim of a faith-related hate crime in July 2005.
He was returning from a synagogue in Ilford, East London, with three Jewish friends after conducting a service. Seven Asian teenagers followed them down the road shouting "Yehudi," which means Jew in Arabic and Urdu. One of them shouted, "We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you," before punching Mr. Chapper in the face and hitting one of his friends over the head with a bottle.
The youths ran off when someone threatened to call the police. Mr. Chapper and his friends identified the youths to the police, but they were never prosecuted.
"They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down," he said.

Oh well, they were probably asking for it. And anyway, they were infidels. What do you expect good young Muslim youths to do?

The fact is that young men have a predilection for violence. It is the duty of society, through families, churches, associations, and government to socialize them away from violence into more beneficial channels.

Somehow it doesn’t seem like the welfare-state societies of Europe are doing a very good job of this.

After The Great Seattle Windstorm

The Great Seattle Windstorm is now just a memory. But this morning it was kind of a mess after a night in which winds were reported to exceed 70 miles per hour, according to the Seattle Times.

I know. 70 miles per hour? One to two inches of rain? What kind of wimps are we in Western Washington? Nevertheless, downed powerlines are downed powerlines. And closed bridges are closed bridges.

But that sort of stuff doesn’t bother me! I decided to try to get to work, traveling across Lake Washington from Seattle to my office in Redmond near the Microsoft campus.

Not a good idea. First of all the Evergreen Point bridge was closed. The State Department of Transportation had closed it during the high winds of the previous night. Reported WSDOT:

When crews opened the drawspan of the SR 520 Bridge on Thursday, three of the hooks that connect the spans were sheared off by wave action. This is not unusual and is easily repaired. When winds decreased crews started repair work and scanning the bridge for damage. Crews found no significant damage and replaced the hooks.

No problem. I diverted and crossed Lake Washington using the I-90 bridge. But as I drove north on I-405 I observed very heavy southbound traffic. So when I gave up trying to get to my office, what with no power east of Lake Washington and downed trees everywhere, I had to drive north around Lake Washington to avoid the slow southbound traffic on I-405.

Lessons Learned: Always fill your car up with gasoline on the day before a reported storm. You’d think that half a tank would be plenty. But when you are out and about, subject to delays and traffic congestion, and you don’t know where there is a gas station that is open for business, you need to start out with a full tank. My car was only half full this morning and that is not enough.

Now the only question is: Will the office annual holiday party be on this evening?

So Bush Created a Catastrophe

We are at an inflection point in the War on Terror. Three years of effort to produce democracy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion has demonstrated that the forces of chaos in Iraq are stronger than the move to democracy. “Bush Has Created a Catastrophe,” complains Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian.

Yes, of course. The Middle East is a catastrophe, and Bush created it. That was always understood as a possibility from the beginning.

Back in 2003, some unnamed Bushie said that the administration was throwing all the balls up in the air in the Middle East. He was right, and they have come down in a right mess.

So what? Suppose that Iraq is a catastrophe? What does that mean for us?

The answer is: Not much.

The first best outcome in the Middle East is for democracy to flourish. The next best outcome is for the Middle East to be divided between Sunni and Shia, and for the Sunnis under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the expansionist Shia of Iran.

The one thing we do not want is for the Middle East, its oil, and its oil money to be united under the control of a single murderous dictator.

The reason that progressives like Timothy Garton Ash are upset is that the War on Terror upsets the business-as-usual of the worldwide bureaucratic welfare state.

In the minds of progressives the story, er, the narrative, is supposed to go like this. Progressives discover a festing sore of inequality and oppression and write brilliant manifestos demanding its immediate remediation through the means of a bureaucratic government program funded by tax monies. Then everyone goes back to a life of writing works of creative intellectual brilliance punctuated by the occasional sexual adventure.

But this fantasy becomes impossible when there are young Muslim men running around the world blowing themselves up and beheading people. When that is happening, you must call up young western men of a martial disposition, furnish them with abundant materiel and leadership, and tell them to go at it.

And the progressives of the world hate that more than death itself.

Because they thought that, after a century of work, they had completely extinguished the martial instinct in the young men of North America and Europe.

Yes. They were wrong about that, too.

The Lessons of Pinochet

Former President Auguste Pinochet of Chile, who died last week, was a dictator who toppled a would-be Marxist dictator. With all this dictator-ology going on, his life offers many lessons to us, writes Peruvian Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

• “The first lesson is that social utopias always end in tears.”
  
• “The second lesson is that there is no such thing as an ‘emergency’ dictatorship.”
  
• “The third lesson is that free markets and dictatorial governments are ultimately incompatible.” Dictatorship is about power, and the free market is about the regulation of power.
  
• “The fourth lesson is that human rights are not an invention of human rights groups[.]” The rule of law was developed for a good reason, that all power corrupts and usually results in a reduction of the welfare of the people.
  

The story of Chile and General Pinochet had a happy ending. Pinochet gave up power and returned democracy to Chile.

But as we tut-tut about the abuses of Pinochet let us not forget the unhappy people of Cuba, still under the rule of the ruthless dictator Fidel Castro and still getting poorer by the day.

The Great Sexual Taboo

It’s the great taboo of our time. It’s eating away at half the population. It’s a political issue waiting for some brave political entrepreneur to grasp. You know what it is.

"I want to spend more time with him, and do stuff like go shopping or see a movie. That would make it a friendship for me. But he says no, because if we do those things, then in his opinion we'd have a relationship--and that's more than he wants. And I'm confused, because it seems like I don't get the 'friend' part, but he still gets the 'benefits.'" It finally dawns on her: "I'm really unhappy about that. It's hard to be with him and then go home and be alone."

Those are the words of “Heather” in Unprotected by Anonymous, MD reviewed by Danielle Crittenden.

The patients of Anomymous, MD, are hurting, but what can she do? She can advise them on eating disorders and substance abuse. She can opine about the evils of tanning beds. But there is one subject that she cannot be judgmental about.

You see, young college women all over the nation are hurting themselves because of their “sexual choices.” Unfortunately, when it comes to sexual choices, “few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.” Boys, of course, are instinctively avoiding the modern university, as the male/female ratio keep dipping towards 40/60. In the rebellious way of the male, they naturally rebel against the advice of their betters. But girls are different.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong.

The fact is that, whatever they may think they want, most girls do not do well with sexual freedom, sexual experimentation, sexual self-discovery. That is because the sexual life of a woman is not a journey of practice and creative experimentation. The sexual life of a woman is for real.

This is the great question of our age. We have decided that we need to transcend the simple world of rules and traditional roles. People cannot attain their full potential as human beings unless they transcend the rules in original, creative work. In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asserted that the same applies to women. But what about sex in the life of this “independent woman?”

A woman.. needs... not only to satisfy her sexual desires, but also to enjoy the relaxation and diversion provided by agreeable sexual adventures.

That’s easy to write, but the Beaver understands that this is more easily said than done. She writes for pages about the difficulties of the sexual life of the independent woman.

But we have proceeded in the past half-century on the assumption that there is no problem here, that women can indulge in “agreeable sexual adventures” like any man. And more than that, we have erected a taboo around the question. You are not allowed to discuss it.

This question of women’s sexuality and the agony of the young woman trying to experiment just like she is supposed to is, I suspect, the key political question of the age. If conservatives can understand the question and speak to women about it so that we show that we understand and they feel that we understand, then it’s Katy bar the door.

Oh House! Not Another Anti-hero

Oh no! Last night on Fox Dr. Gregory House just decided to cop a plea on his forging of prescriptions for the prescription painkiller Vikodin, but when he turned up at the detective’s office, it was no deal.

Why? Because the acerbic House had signed for a dead patient’s prescription for painkiller, and the DA was going to hang him on that instead of the testimony of colleague Dr. James Wilson.

But the next exciting episode of Fox’s hit series House M.D. won’t be aired until January! How are House fans supposed to wait until then?

OK, so this was my first experience of House, on account of visiting my sister in Colorado to celebrate the 90th birthday of our mother. I had no idea, no idea about House at all, until she introduced me to her addiction. Of course, I never watch network TV. Never.

House M.D. is certainly a fully modern TV experience. It has an anti-hero in the title role, a crew of main characters right out of diversity camp, and the eternal chick draw of loved ones with their lives at stake.

Gregory House is said to be modeled on Sherlock Holmes (Holmes, House, get it?) and that raises the interesting idea that Arthur Conan Doyle was a writer before his time. Who thought about anti-heroes in Britland back at the turn of the twentieth century? Well, Conan Doyle did.

But I am underwhelmed by yet another anti-hero. I mean, haven’t we done that already?

Instead I am waiting with baited breath for the end of the anti-hero era. What is it that makes the anti-hero such a necessity in our era? Is it the pervasive power of government, the endless rules, that Gregory House must overturn if he is to get anything done?

And we will leave aside the utterly unbelievable careerist female physicians in the series. Sorry, pal. Women just aren’t like that. Never were, never will be.

Here is the nagging question for me. Why are we lying to ourselves so compulsively, lying about the provenance of anti-heroes in an age of stifling conformism, and lying about women who act and talk just like men—except when the plot requires a dose of tear-jerking emotion?

What is it? And what will it take to break out of the Age of Lies into a new age?

I know. Every age is an age of lies, because life is a lie: the eternal hope that rises irrepressibly every morning against the inescapable fact of death.

But I’m ready for the dawning of the age of the New Hero, whatever that may be, and whoever he may be.

God Bless the Secular Fundamentalists

Did you know that we live in an age when the achievements of science and technology are under attack from religious extremism as never before? Then the Center for Enquiry (CFI) is for you. As CFI’s home page puts it:

Although modern world civilization is based upon the achievements of science and technology, until this time there has been no authoritative and credible voice defending the scientific outlook in examining religion, human values, and the borderlands of science.

Oh dear, writes Father Thomas Berg on NRO. Where do we start? The fact is that religion is not necessarily opposed to science and reason. Catholicism, for instance, is a 2000-year-old effort to develop a reasoned religion. And anyway, Berg writes,

it may come as a surprise to many secularists that their unquestioned faith in the possibility of an objective, “scientific” approach to life, cleansed of “religious ideology”, is itself an ideological hangover from the Enlightenment, one that has been long since de-legitimized by contemporary thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty.

Secularists miss the big point, and make the fundamental category error of conflating the “Is” and the “Ought.” Science can do wonders illuminating the “Is,” but it has little to tell us about the “Ought.” RMC Chappie F.S.C. Northrop has a whole book devoted to this problem. It is called The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experience. He was a professor of law and philosophy at Yale who flourished in the mid-twentieth century.

We know, as well as we can know, that we live in an amazing universe, and we know how it works, especially in the realm close to our everyday lives. But the big question is: What does it all mean? And closely allied to that question is: How should we live?

The basic problem is that science cannot provide answers to these questions. To know the answers would be to know the destiny of the human race, to have reduced the universe to a deterministic problem. Hence religion; hence “belief systems.” Berg again:

If secularists want to have a meaningful voice in the public square — and not a preposterous one — then we invite them to be attentive students of history, and with intellectual honesty to recognize that Christianity in particular has a lengthy track record of contributing to the very goals that secularists profess to be seeking: beliefs grounded in reason, an ethics sustained by reasonable moral discourse, advances in human knowledge, and the general betterment of human life.

Of course, monstrous things have been done in the name of religion. But then monstrous things have been done in the name of science and reason.

The basic problem with the secularists is that they are utterly unreflective on the basic articles of their faith. (And yes, they do have a faith.) Their faith is so immediate and obvious to them that they aren’t even aware of their assumptions. They bandy about terms like “medical ethics” and “ethical foreign policy” as if these concepts were fully decided and that all reasonable people agreed upon them.

What do you call a faith like that? How about “secular fundamentalism?”

The Hydra-headed Diversity Monster

Maybe it would help if the United States Supreme Court would make up its mind one way or another. And maybe it will in the next few years.
Unfortunately, right now, diversity is metastasizing like cancer, as articles in NRO by Frederick M. Hess make only too clear.

It’s an irony, if you like, that back in 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that it was unjust for a little black girl to be bussed across town instead of attending the school near her home. Now the highly advanced educationists of the twenty-first century are doing the same as the segregationists of the Old South. They are bussing little kids around in accordance with their race theories. Writes Thomas Sowell:

The racial dogmas have changed since 1954 but they are still dogmas. And flesh-and-blood children are still being sacrificed on the altar to those dogmas.

In the Solid South, the dogma was that little white children shouldn’t be soiled with black children in their class. Now the dogma is racial “diversity,” that children benefit from a critical mass of racial diversity in their class.

What are those “compelling” benefits of “diversity”? They are as invisible as the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Yet everyone has to pretend to believe in those benefits, as they pretended to admire the naked emperor’s wardrobe.

The trouble is that diversity is digging deep roots in the educational bureaucracy. In Washington State, where voters passed a law forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, diversity is big business.

In 2004, Washington State University created an office of the “vice president for equity and diversity” that has an annual budget of $3 million and a full-time staff of 55.

...

Washington State’s equal-employment office (called the Center for Human Rights) coordinates with faculty committees to encourage minority hiring.

To show how big all this is, there is now a National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

Well, call it what you will, diversity or a racial spoils system, it isn’t going to improve relations between the races. What encourages amity between the races is the knowledge that race will not be a factor in hiring and promotion, that people will be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character.

The only good thing is that the people of the United States of America hate racial preferences, even if their lords and master love them.

And why wouldn’t they? When you run a government bureaucracy it is too much like hard work to be held accountable for the quality of your hires. Much better to be required to hire women and minorities according to quotas or diversity criteria. Then, so long as you keep your quotas up, nobody can blame you if your little fiefdom doesn’t actually do anything useful.

Home Mortgage Market: Crash or Bounce?

Perhaps the most radical change in the financial markets in the last generation has been the securitizing of home mortgages, the bundling of home mortgage obligations into mortgage bonds which are then sold to investors.

But Lewis Ranieri, the Wall Street guy who is credited with creating the market is worried that risky mortgages are creating a problem, according to Patrice Hill.

Banks and mortgage brokers have been passing along to unwary investors as much as $600 billion a year in risky mortgages they made through untested channels in the junk-bond market. That raises the threat of a financial crisis beyond the ability of the Federal Reserve to remedy.

Now the point here is that this is not the same as banks holding risky mortgages. Banks are uniquely vulnerable financial institutions because they inherently make promises they cannot keep. They promise to pay to their lenders (depositors) on demand monies that they have lent out long term. They cannot pay back all their creditors at once. If mortgages held by a bank go bad then there is a risk of systemic financial failure, like in the Great Depression.

But mortgage bonds are different. If the mortgages behind an issue of mortgage bonds go bad then only the bondholders suffer the losses. There just isn’t the same level of systemic risk.

Obviously, there is still risk.

Bank regulators told the National Housing Forum here yesterday that they have found major banks punting to investors questionable mortgages they could not legally keep in their own loan portfolios. Mr. Ranieri said brokers on Wall Street have raised the risks by repackaging the mortgages in deceptive and opaque ways so that the small investors and foreigners who buy them are unable to understand the risks.



"No securities market can stand if we do not have true disclosure, and we do not have true disclosure" of the growing risks of exotic mortgages whose payments can double overnight and force buyers into default, said Mr. Ranieri.

The financial markets are in the business of selling paper. And they do what it takes to get the paper out there. No doubt, stuff “gets sold to the public and to foreign investors who don't have a clue what to look for.” Happens all the time. And willy-nilly, the fact that a mortgage bond has junk-bond status should be telling the investor something.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, seems unconcerns about the risks. “If a few speculators get burned, that's just icing on the cake.”

Probably the big take-away is that

Some banks are selling the questionable loans to investors to avoid keeping them in their portfolios, where they would be unacceptable to regulators.

That is exactly what bank regulation is supposed to do. The systemic risk of bank default is due to the concentration of risk in a few financial insstitutions. But when the risky mortgages are sold to investors then the systemic risk is removed. The concentrated risk proposition is diluted as the risk is allocated to thousands of bond holders.

Of course, the question: is how many public employee pension funds have picked up the risky mortgage bonds? And then there are Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage-bond issuers, who are already in trouble with their financial shenanigans. But then in the worst case taxpayers would have to pick up the shortfall. And who cares about them?

The real risk is that if the sub-prime mortage market contracts sharply then the reduced supply of mortages will be reflected in further house price declines. That would turn off the home equity ATMS. And that could spread to the whole economy.

Bush Pulls Iraqi Puppet-strings

Is this the light at the end of the tunnel, or too little too late?

The New York Times reports that the Iraqi political parties are in talks to limit the power of militia leader Moktada al-Sadr.

According to Edward Wong, the US is “working hard to help build the coalition” to dislodge al-Sadr.

This is not good news. What we would like to hear is that the Iraqi politicians are fed up to the back teeth with al-Sadr and are determined to put him out of the magic circle of power in Iraq. Instead, reading between the lines, we are led to believe that the Iraqis would be doing nothing without the prodding of the US. The puppet does not move until the puppet-master pulls the strings. Writes Wong:

President Bush met last week in the White House with the leader of the Iranian-backed Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and is to meet this week with the head of the Sunni Arab party, Tariq al-Hashemi.

The problem is that a lasting political solution in Iraq must come from the Iraqis, not from American politicians who want a solution, any solution, so they can get the troops out.

And the nasty truth is that most successful political arrangements issue from the victory of a successful insurgency, not the manipulations of a foreign power. It is unfortunate but true that al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army sounds like the most likely candidate to win the right to rule Iraq.

Auguste Pinochet, Chile's Departed Embarrassment

Who was Auguste Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died last week? Was he a fascist dictator, as the left believes, or a man who rescued his nation from a Marxist maelstrom?

The facts are that Pinochet, after violently suppressing the socialist Allende government in a 1973 coup, slowly rebuilt Chile economically, and returned the nation to democratic rule, while carefully maintaining immunity for any improper acts committed while he was in power.

But, as the Economist reminds us, even his most fervent supporters are turning away from him, especially after revelations that he “had secretly stuffed $27m in a number of foreign bank accounts.”

Probably we would not care a whit about Pinochet were it not that the left had appointed him as their global fascist monster-in-chief. In 1973 Salvador Allende was the Great Red Hope, combining socialism and revolution in an intoxicating mixture that had lefties worked up into a fever of excitement worldwide. But in reality Allende was trampling on the political and economic rights of Chileans, wrecking the economy, and salting every institution in the country with political activists. So the army felt obliged to put a stop to it.

But now everyone wants to forget Pinochet and put him behind them.

[C]onservative opposition parties which largely supported his dictatorship realised soon after his arrest in London that he had become an electoral liability. Neither they nor the centre-left Concertacion coalition, which has governed Chile since 1990, have any intention of changing the free-market policies which have underpinned Chile’s economic growth for the past 16 years. But nor do they wish to remember that the policies had their origin in his regime’s structural reforms.

So was Pinochet an evil monster or the savior of his nation? Who knows. Today he is just an embarrassment.

Men Are Funnier Than Women. Discuss

Why are men funnier than women? Christopher Hitchens wants to know.

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.

He means, no doubt, im-pressing that into the opposite sex. And the most effective way of dissolving the natural reticence and modesty of women into passionate acceptance is by making them laugh, with

that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth

which is so rewarding to the eyes and ears of a man cherchant la femme.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

The fact is that women are more serious than men. A study of TV commercials has found that commercials aimed at women are much more serious than commercials aimed at men. And we know why women are more serious. Rudyard Kipling put it to rhyme in “The Female of the Species”:

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,

And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

Stirring stuff, eh? It all leads to the central fact of the War between the Sexes:

Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.

The trouble is that some gullible people actually believe all this pretence, women like Simone de Beauvoir who wrote in The Second Sex that the “female is the victim of the species.” She meant that females had to be birthing and suckling, an imperative that really cuts into the opportunity to create orginal works of intellect like The Second Sex.

But Beauvoir should have understood, as the student of Hegel she was, that there is always a question in the relationship between Master and Slave as to who really is the Master and who is the Slave.

Still, there is a nagging question about all this. Men may be funnier than women, but it is a fact that women laugh more than men. Is this because they are provoked to laugh by the funny men in their lives, or because, deadlier than the male, they are laughing at the men in their lives?

Jean Kirkpatrick, Great American

As you would expect, when the Associated Press announced the news of the death of Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick at the age of 80 the one thing it did not mention was the greatest moment in her life.

It was the “Blame America First” speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention.

You remember. She famously connected the “San Francisco Democrats” with the instinct, so common among liberals then and now to “Blame America First,” as in:

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.



But then, they always blame America first.

How we roared with delight at her speech. It was almost as glorious as the moment at the 1992 Republican National Convention when President Reagan advised the delegates what to do about Candidate Clinton. “Don’t. Inhale.” It brought the house down.

Jean Kirkpatrick distinguished herself with a 1979 article in Commentary magazine “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she differentiated between authoritarian dictators (who were often US allies) and totalitarian dictators (who were usually not).

It was a differentiation that Democrats did not enjoy, because they preferred to make an opposite inference, the moral equivalence argument. They preferred to rail at the US support for fascist dictators and remain silent about communist totalitarianism.

The Commentary article brought her to the notice of President Reagan and an appointment to the United Nations as US Ambassador.

Needless to say, Ambassador Kirkpatrick was forever after damaged goods to the mainstream media, and you can get the flavor of their distaste in the AP news item announcing her death. It describes her as “an unabashed apostle of Reagan era conservatism,” a woman with “a reputation as a blunt and acerbic advocate,” and “a controversial figure like [UN Ambassador John] Bolton.” Well, you would think that—if you were a Democrat.

In fact Jean Kirkpatrick was a great American who served with distinction in the pivotal first term of the Reagan administration. It was a time when the failed economic policies of the 1970s were reversed and the present prosperity was founded. And it was the period when the failed Carter administration foreign policy was replaced with a robust foreign policy that won the Cold War without a shot being fired.

And that, according to theorist of war Sun Tzu, is hands-down the best way to win a war.

What could be more unabashed, more un-blunt, un-acerbic, and more uncontroversial than that?

The Education Solution is Privatization

In case you haven’t noticed, the Brits are having a little firestorm about the governance at the University of Oxford.

A new Vice Chancellor, John Hood, has recommended “replacing the traditional system of governance with a more ‘top-down’ managerial approach,” according to Martin Jacomb in The Spectator. But the professors voted Hood’s proposals down 730 votes to 456. Shades of Larry Summers and Harvard faculty.

The problem at Oxford is money. It relies enormously on government money, and the government money isn’t enough to fund competitive salaries for academic superstars and for decent undergraduate education.

John Hood wants to beef up the central administration so that it can start doing some serious fundraising, after the example of US universities. And he wants to increase student fees and put the money into undergraduate teaching.

But to Jacomb, that is only dealing with half of the problem. It is not just shortage of money from the government that is hurting Oxford. It is the government control. And the record of government control of universities is not reassuring.

[R]eliance on government money inevitably brings with it a reluctance to reject the orthodox thinking of the day. We all learnt how Pope Urban VIII (who was the government) dealt with Galileo when he produced some thinking which the Pope did not like... Does anyone doubt that Milton Friedman could have achieved what he did anywhere other than in a truly independent university; in his case, Chicago?

...

And history also tells a frightening story. German universities, which included some of the best in the world a century ago, became totally dependent on government money after the inflation of the 1920s; and, sure enough, most appointed posts were already held by Nazi sympathisers before the First Supplemental Decree (Aryans only) came into force in 1935.

Even in the United States the universities are far too dependent on the government. For one thing, most of the research money comes from outfits like the National Science Foundation. Then there is a lot of research in the social sciences for which the only purpose is to assist the government in the expansion of its programs of social control.

What will it take for the professors to decide that they would rather be independent and free than dependent and subservient to the government?

It’s the great question of the age. Up to now, the professors have positively luxuriated in their lapdog relation to the corridors of political power. They accept the dictates of government and think up rationales to justify them, and happily assist the government in its attack on private institutions from corporations to churches and college fraternities.

That means that We the People are going to have to separate the universities from the government. That ain’t gonna be easy.

More Iraq Study Needed

What is it exactly that the Iraq Study Group is proposing? A drawdown in troop strength in 2008? An approach to Syria and Iran?

The Bush administration and the Congress must work together in forging a new course in Iraq despite partisan differences over how to end U.S. involvement in the long-running war, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group said Thursday.

The basic recommendation is probably true.

The panel's 96-page report said flatly that the administration's approach was not working and recommended that the U.S. military accelerate a change in its main mission so that most combat troops can be withdrawn by spring 2008.

The question is how to continue the basic strategic interest of the United States, which is to maintain a divided Middle East. The idea is that no one power obtains control over all the oil. At the same time we want to hinder the use of the Middle East as a training ground for Islamist terror raids into Europe and North America.

For this strategy Iraq needs to be stabilized without becoming a client state of Iran.

We could well listen to the pungent views of Asia Times columnist Spengler, who perceives at the Middle East as an Arab civil war similar to the German civil war we call the Thirty Years War.

In those days France had an interest in a weak and divided Germany, and succeeded in exhausting Germany because Cardinal Richelieu throughout the war “sneakily shifted resources to whichever side seemed likely to fold.”

I have contended for years that the United States ultimately will adopt the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so well served Cardinal Richelieu and made France the master of Europe for a century.

Clearly, Iraq is not ready to be a mult-party democracy. The central error of the Bush policy was to hope that it could be ready, or made ready, for democracy. It was a noble error, but it was an error. Sorry. No can do.

The interest of the United States is now to promote a government in Iraq that reflects the power of the Shia but which is independent of Iran. Then it needs to back the Sunnis to counterbalance the power of Iran.

Here’s a prediction. We will see the United States in the next months muddling through to this policy. One warning. It won’t be pretty.

The Working Poor Are Different From You and Me

It’s pretty sobering, isn’t it, to read that the most charitable people in the United States are the working poor. I mean, they don’t exactly have a lot of spare cash lying around. Not like some people I know.

But then neither do your average middle-class homeowner sup to their ears in mortgage debt. They say: “I don't have enough money to spare,” according to John Stossel. And of course, they (make that we) don’t. We already spent it on our houses, our cars, our shopping, ourselves... You get the point.

Actually it is religious people who give most to charity. First of all they give to their church, and then they give to a lot of other places too. Here are the stats.

1. Religious people give more than non-religious people.
2. The working poor give more than the middle class.
3. The rich give more than the middle class.
4. The working poor give more than the non-working poor.
5. Conservatives give more than liberals.

John Stossel ran a test. He had the Salvation Army put a bucket outside a store in Sious Falls, South Dakota, and another one outside a store in San Francisco. What were the results?

Well, even though people in Sioux Falls make, on average, half as much money as people in San Francisco, and even though the San Francisco location was much busier -- three times as many people were within reach of the bucket -- by the end of the second day, the Sioux Falls bucket held twice as much money.

It’s good to know stuff like that.

Suppose There Was a Government Apple Industry

Imagine this, writes Terence P. Jeffrey. “Suppose there were a law that forced you to pay a government agency for apples you were supposed to feed your children.”

And suppose it turned out that some of the government apples were bad. What should parents do?

When they complained to the public-apple agencies, agency bureaucrats and their union would say: "Excuse me, the bad apples are not our fault. You need to give us more money so we can build better apple storage facilities, and so we can pay better wages to apple handlers."

But the apples still didn’t improve. Eventually we get to a federal Department of Apples. And apple quality still doesn’t improve.

You know what this parable is all about. In the matter of the education of our children we have a system exactly like the government apple system. And the price is going up all the time.

Between the 1970 and 2002 school years, average per-pupil spending in public elementary and secondary schools rose 111 percent, from $4,170 (in constant 2001-2002 dollars) to $8,802.

But the performance of the nation’s students is not going up. Only 29 percent of eighth-graders are rated “proficient” in math and reading.

What do you think we should do, fellow Americans? Increase spending? Increase federal oversight? Start criminalizing underperformance of teachers and principals?

Or shall we use the apple industry as a model, and leave the market to decide how to produce, distribute, and deliver good wholesome apples to parents and children?

Bush Nominates a Theocratic Abstinence Advocate

Oh no, the theocrats in the Bush administration have nominated an abstinence advocate to head up the federal Office of Population Affairs.

Dr. Eric Keroack “advocates abstinence as the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention,” according to Jennifer Roback Morse author of Love and Economics and Smart Sex.

Why are the theocrats still trying to frighten kids when everybody knows that the universal solution to contraception and STD infection is condoms?

But that is not the real problem with Keroack, writes Morse.

Evidently, Keroack has given lectures in which he claims that there are long-term emotional costs to non-marital sexual activity.

According to Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, Keroack said this: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”

Yes. That is a real problem. He is suggesting that
people who sleep around risk becoming “emotionally wounded.” And studies show that teenage girls who have sex with multiple partners suffer from depression.

But we can’t go too far down that road. Back at the dawn of the feminist age Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the “independent woman” needed the physical release of a love affair or two to refresh herself in her intellectual labors.

Suppose that we concede that “science” has established that what is euphemistically called “a sexual life” is bad for the mental health of women? Then what is left of the whole sexual revolution and the war against marriage—or indeed the whole feminist project?

What indeed?

Honor Friedman With Choice in Education and Health Care

As we mourn the passing of Milton Friedman, American hero, we must painfully recognize that much of what he urged upon the United States as beneficial reform remains to be realized, particularly, write Newt Gingrich and David Merrit, in education and health care.

Milton Friedman stood courageously for choice in education and health care against all the special interests of the nation. What better memorial to the great man could we build than a real reform in education and health care.

The status quo is failing our students, and to truly see real change, we need to enact real change. The simplest and surest way to transform education is to give students and parents the freedom to choose where they will go to school. This means eliminating restrictive zoning laws that force kids into schools simply because they live nearby. This means introducing free-market forces into education, encouraging schools to compete for students, much like businesses compete for customers. This means that schools that do not perform will either improve or close their doors -- which is as it should be. There is no middle ground.

And here is the bottom line. If they submitted to the discipline of parental choice, our nation’s educators would feel better about themselves. Instead of acting like dogs-in-the-manger, they would accept the gospel of accountability and would experience an amazing improvement in their positive self-esteem.

Then there is health care. And here choice and transparency could transform 14 percent of the nation’s economy.

We need to put the consumer at the center of the health-care system, just as we do in every other market. And the surest way to do this is by creating a national market to purchase health insurance.
...
[G]overnment must allow competition to flourish. More competition among insurers in a national market will encourage more creative products, better services and lower prices -- just as it always does wherever competition thrives -- and every American will be able to find affordable coverage. The Health Choice Act, which was introduced by Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, will go a long way toward creating a rational, working market in health care.

A vital part of this rational market is the availability of information. Information on performance, cost, and quality allows consumers to make informed decisions, but health care is perhaps the only market in which consumers have virtually no access to this information.

There’s a simple way to understand all of this: shopping. Ruthlessly and consistently, America’s shoppers have promoted corporations that are willing to commit themselves to nothing but the interest of the consumer. And they have demoted corporations that faltered in their dedication to the consumer. That is why Wal-Mart is the king of retail and Starbucks is the king of coffee.

When are we going to free our education shoppers and health-care shoppers to work their magic on education and health care?