The Culture of Violence in Britain

We've known for a while that the nostalgically remembered Britain of Bobbies and the stiff upper lip are gone forever. Today's Britain is a violent place, more violent than New York City, according to many accounts.

For one thing there is now a knife culture. Writes Shaun Bailey, a charity worker and author of No Man's Land: How Britain's Inner-City Young Are Being Failed,

Where I work, in the estates of west London, youngsters as young as nine or 10 talk to me about "shanking" each other over any kind of "beef". "Shanking" is stabbing. "Beef" means to have a problem or misunderstanding with someone.

And then in the London Times Damian Whitworth relates the story of a friend attacked 20 feet from his front door by an assailant with a knuckle-duster. And he writes also of witnessing violence between a young man and a woman just in front of his front door.

How could this happen in welfare-state Britain, governed for years by a mommy welfare state?

I mean, there's no gun culture, no wild west tradition like in the cowboy United States. How could this happen?

Of course, we are asking the wrong question. We know exactly what is wrong. The violence is not happening in spite of the welfare state. It is a product of the welfare state, and arises wherever people excuse bad behavior with a “root causes” analysis, as in, we have to expect rage until we have solved the root causes of poverty.

On the contrary. Poverty doesn't cause violence. Violence arises when it is tolerated. People who are allowed to be not-responsible in their lives will soon learn to act in a not-responsible manner. People that are allowed to be violent will soon learn to be violent. It happens everywhere the welfare state is tried.

And it can be stopped, any time the political elite is ready to do it. Police Chief Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani did it in New York City.

Meanshile, the kids are knifing each other in jolly old England. Until their elders get a clue.

Let's Celebrate the World Congress of Families

With Google in trouble for skipping observance of Memorial Day—we only do light-hearted observances, they say—here’s a light-hearted event for them to celebrate.

It’s the World Congress of Families, being held in Warsaw on May 11-13, 2007.

I know. In your dreams. Especially given the attitude of Ms Magazine.

But lefty outfits like Google should do some thinking about population. After all, the result of lefty politics and consciousness raising on population has been calamitous. As Don Feder writes, everything the left celebrates leads to an empty cradle.

Selfishness was celebrated. Marriage and children were downgraded to lifestyle options. Women who stayed at home to raise and nurture a family were derided. The importance of fathers was downplayed. Abortion was enshrined as a "human right." And contraception was ubiquitous.

Just think. If lefties continue, as in Europe, to embrace diverse family forms that don’t usually have children, pretty soon there won’t be any lefties.

The World Congress of Families is different. Held provocatively in the center of depopulating Europe, it

will address such timely issues as: the importance of marriage, fecundity as a natural expression of family love and hope for the future, how to counter assaults on the family (including pornography, drugs, a hostile media, cohabitation, divorce and marriage-substitutes), rejecting the contraceptive mentality, promoting pro-family policies, building a new culture of marriage and strengthening the vital bond of faith and family.

Sounds like a light-hearted affirmation of life. Just the sort of light-hearted event that Google likes to celebrate with a goofy version of their logo.

Mixed Reviews on the Paulson Nomination

On Monday, May 30, President Bush nominated Henry M. Paulson Jr., CEO of Goldman Sachs, as Secretary of the Treasury to replace John Snow.

So what does it mean, for the dollar, for economic policy, and for the administration?

In the London Times Gerard Baker sees his role as essentially defensive. Given that income tax reform and Social Security reform look to be dead, the only place where he can make a mark is on the dollar.

Will Mr Paulson be content to go along with the odd twin-track approach of the past few years — publicly expressing support for a “strong dollar” while in practice happily acquiescing in the US currency’s decline?

A Wall Street man may not like having the dollar depreciate on his watch.

In fact his main task may be to prevent the dollar decline turning into a rout.

But the MSM is ready to cheer. In Time Mike Allen echoed the White House line that they had “landed a whale.”

In the strict sense, he is right. Goldman Sachs today sits at the pinnacle of Wall Street. But can he make a difference as the Bush administration tries to deal with the triple threat of high oil prices, declining dollar, and rising interest rates?

The conservative base is sounding an alarm. In Human Events Robert B. Bluey notes that while Paulson has contributed to Republicans his wife Wendy is a financial supporter of Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

And there is the question of the Nature Conservancy. Both Paulsons are active in this conservation group that buys up land to transmit to the federal government. But there have been questions about the Nature Conservancy. That Hank Paulson is

chairman of the board of the Nature Conservancy, which is under investigation for financial misdealings that benefited some of its officers and donors, should automatically disqualify him for the top Treasury job.

Goldman Sachs also has dealings with the mortgage giant, the Federal National Mortage Assocation.

According to last week's report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), Fannie Mae managers engaged in a series of questionable transactions, including two with Goldman Sachs, which improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years.

Maybe all this explains why the markets took a dive on the day that Hank Paulson was nominated to be Treasury Secretary.

Who Is Stupid Now?

Everyone knows that the Democratic Party is the smart party and the Republican Party is the stupid party. We know this because liberals and journalists keep telling us. We keep hearing, for instance how smart FDR and JFK and Clinton were. And how dumb Coolidge and Reagan and Bush were.

But if Democrats are so smart, how come that their Culture of Corruption campaign is going off the rails. Remember? Republicans represented a culture of corruption. Tom DeLay and Duke Cunningham and all.

But now all we seem to hear about is the Jefferson bribery affair and the $90,000 in cold hard cash hidden in the freezer.

Oh and did you hear about Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) accepting free tickets to a boxing match from a state agency that was lobbying him?

The thing is that somehow those stupid Republicans have managed to remove their embarrassments from the limelight whereas the Jefferson scandal and the Reid boxing fixture look like gifts that keep on giving.

You have to wonder. Was Denny Hastert as dumb as everyone thinks when he complained about the search of Rep. Jefferson’s (D-LA) congressional office? And how is it that Sen. Reid’s boxing exploits are appearing in the public print?

Now Sen. Reid says that it’s his official duty to attend boxing matches, according to Kathleen Hennessey of the Associated Press.

As they say, never underestimate your opponent.

To Understand Our Liberal Friends

You’ll remember that in the twenty years before the 1960s black poverty declined by 50 percent. You’ll remember that crime was down. You’ll remember that unwed births were down. You’ll remember that more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Acts in Congress.

Then why, as Thomas Sowell reports, could a liberal colleague of conservative writer Shelby Steele have a such an emphatically different opinion?

"Damn it, we saved this country!" he all but shouted. "This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend."

Now there are many of us who, while conceding the importance of the civil rights revolution, recall that many things got worse in the 1960s: crime, violence, education, dependency. It goes on and on.

Then why would liberals insist that they saved the country?

This is a vision of the world more precious than gold. To those who believe it, this vision is a treasure beyond price because it is also a wonderful vision of themselves.

Liberals came into the 1960s believing that they needed to rescue the country, and nothing is going to change their minds that the country needed changing or that they succeeded in rescuing it from a fate worse than death. Nothing can be allowed to shatter “the beautiful picture of themselves as wise and compassionate saviors of society.”

Remember this, and keep it in a special place in your mind, for use in emergency. If liberals ever came to doubt their role as saviors in the 1960s it would kill them.

English is Like an Ocean Tide

A century ago, writes Richard Cohen, his ancestors were squeezed into the Lower East Side. They “did Kosher” and spoke Yiddish. And historian Henry Adams, descendent of presidents, was sickened by all those Jews. But now, of course,

The grandchildren of those who did Kosher there have scattered throughout the country and the English their grandparents did not speak has been mastered and enriched by Bellow and Roth and Chabon and Ephron, not to mention Irving Berlin.

Now, as then, we worry about the immigrants learning English. We shouldn’t. The pull of the English-speaking culture is “like an ocean tide.”

In Los Angeles, for instance, radio station KDL shifted in 2003 from Spanish to English because the Latino audience it wanted -- the young -- was increasingly bilingual and what's called “English dominant.” English was cooler, hipper and younger, younger, younger. Spanish was the language of mom and dad, and nothing could be fustier -- or, in some cases, embarrassing.

That is just what Cohen thought when he refused to speak Yiddish to his grandmother. Sooner or later, everyone is sucked into English speaking.

The richness of Shakespeare's tongue, its universality in commerce and business and, above all, in entertainment, makes it unavoidable. Few things in life are certain, but death, taxes and English certainly are.

We should have faith in the power of our language and our culture.

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling: Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish

That is a British colloquialism, if you were wondering, and that is what capitalist cheerleader Larry Kudlow is saying as he commends the vital work of the Justice Department prosecutors in bringing corporate crooks like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling to justice—and hopefully to jail.

And, we hope, scaring a million other businessmen who might be tempted. For who is as pure as Caesar’s wife?

I’d say that a major motion picture jail term for major motion picture fraud ought to send a message.

But in the glow of our continuing Reagan economy, now restored after the crisis of confidence in the wake of the Enrons and their frauds, let us not forget, says Kudlow, the nadir of our great US economy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the murderer’s row of economic morons &mdas; LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter — in allegiance with their liberal Keynesian advisors, concocted a socialist policy mix that ultimately led to wealth-destroying big-government stagflation.

Yeah, thanks for nothing, pals. But then came the reign of Ronaldus Magnus, and the US economy “became the envy of the world.”

Since the early 1980s, more than 46 million new jobs have been created, with inflation-adjusted GDP increasing $6.2 trillion, or 120 percent.

And stock prices are up 900 percent since 1980.

There’s a downside to all this, of course. That giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of the blindingly successful US economy sucking workers in from all over the world, and in particular from Mexico, an unhappy land of corruption and incompetence in economic governance.

And there is no excuse, not any more, for economic incompetence. The chaps in Estonia read Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, implemented its policy recommendations, and shortly thereafter became e-Stonia, doubling GDP in a decade.

Of course, they made one little mistake, the silly naifs. They thought that the west had actually implemented Friedman’s ideas. Little did they know, as they implemented a flat tax, that they were the first, after Hong Kong, to try it out!

Pentecostals Experiencing Possibilities and Breakthroughs in Nigeria

We hear a lot about the lovely Muslims doing a spot of genocide on the Dinka tribes in South Sudan. And we hear about Muslim gangs burning Christian churches in Nigeria. But we don’t often hear about the Christians themselves.

Here is a report on the Pentecostals in Nigeria, led by “Daddy,” Rev. Enoch Adejare Adeboye. His church is about 5 million strong, and its growing. In Nigeria, in China, and in South Korea.

Here’s how it feels to attend a service of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, reported by Brian Murphy of the Associated Press.

It's eight hours into the service, and the congregation is still dancing. Shout, they're told. Yell out to the Lord. Their cries melt into a muggy night with the odor of sweating bodies, jasmine and the tropical musk of the Nigerian bush land.



"Hallelujah," rumbles the head pastor as the church band kicks into a new number. "Hal-le-luuuuuuu-jah."

Yes, it’s not really approved of by the World Council of Churches, but Christianity is alive and well in Africa. There were an estimated 300,000 people at that all-night service.

What is the attraction of Pentecostalism, now estimated by some at 500 million out of a total of 2.2 billion Christians worldwide?

Eve Akindabe, a 35-year-old seamstress who was raised as an Anglican, does some hemming work as she waits to worship. She's been giving a monthly tithe -- worth about $10 -- for five years.



"Why did I join Daddy's church? Take a look around," she says, waving her hands at the crowds. "Daddy inspires. Daddy tell us Jesus is right here to help improve our lives. The Anglican church was all about, 'Don't do this, don't do that.' Daddy is all about possibilities and making breakthroughs. It deals with heaven, but also the here and now."

Possibilities, breakthroughs. You chaps familiar with modern American pschology like Spiral Dynamics will know what that is about. It is the orange world of creativity, beyond red power gods, beyond blue discipline and purpose, to orange creativity, and life as a game to be won.

The thing is, it’s almost miraculous. Why would the struggling masses in third-world cities be responding to a Gospel of Prosperity? Not red victimization, not blue rules and roles, but possibilities and breakthroughs. It is a testament to the eternal hope breaking through in the human spirit.

On This Memorial Day...

As the United States continues its Long War against the axis of petroleum-fueled warlords, the USS Kearsarge trains for another tour in the Middle East and a wife mourns her fallen husband.

The USS Kearsarge is an Amphibious Assault Ship, really a converted aircraft carrier, that is “designed to put troops on hostile shores.” As Rear Adm. Garry Hall tells Bob McManus: “There’s no beach beyond our reach.”

It’s a ship with over a thousand sailors and 2,000 marines, and the crew is holding up “amazingly well” according to Hall.

But this Memorial Day, writes Jennifer Fermino, Sharon Engeldrum is getting ready to celebrate the first birthday of her daughter Kristian, who was born seven months after her husband, National Guardsman Christian Engeldrum was killed in an ambush in Iraq.

The widow said her heart breaks every time she hears of another casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan - which means another family shattered.



"It's hard, absolutely," she said.

Sharon is participating in Memorial Day celebrations in Washington DC, which this year will be the first year that the parade will honor the GIs returning from the war on terror.

Later today, Sharon said, she'll lay flowers on the Arlington National Cemetery grave of her husband, whom she met in 1983 when he worked at a Bronx gas station.

And so the nation honors those who serve and those who have fallen. And it also honors those who have lost their loved ones in the nation’s service.

After Bush and Blair We'll Still Have to Fight Terror

With Prime Minister Blair on his way out and President Bush on his way down, some folks think that pretty soon we can get back to business as usual in international affairs.

Not so, writes Janet Daley.

Maybe it was OK back in the Cold War that “We kept our sons-of-bitches under control and they kept their sons-of-bitches under control.” But now it is the sons-of-bitches that are the problem. And they insist that we pay attention to them.

It is the little dictators and the rogue states, with their access to nuclear weapons and their terrorist networks, who are the threat now.

So after Bush and Blair are gone we will still have to deal with the sons-of-bitches.

What really went wrong in Iraq was a failure of the US to grasp that not everyone would seize the gift of freedom with both hands and make it work...

...

[Americans] just don't get it when nations, given the choice, opt for dictatorship, theocracy or the tribalism of warlords.

That is where Europe comes in, Daley advises. Europeans understand about “ancient hatreds and peoples who fear liberty.” But so far, except for Tony Blair, the Europeans haven’t stepped up to the plate. They have prefered to barrack from the sidelines. So what is the answer?

In the West, we have learned how to eradicate mass starvation and gross inequality. There is no mystery: the answer is liberal democratic government and free market economics.

In the future the United States is going to need some help from its friends in the effort to export this answer to the oppressed peoples of the world.

SAT Scores Down This Year

Colleges are reporting that SAT scores of students are down this year, and David S. Kahn, who has been tutoring kids for the SAT test since 1989, confirms the drop in OpinionJournal.com.

[T]he scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800).

So what is going wrong? Is the test different? Are the kids less prepared? What’s the problem?

The test has been rejiggered, Kahn explains, and is probably more difficult. It includes a longer reading section. the result is that

Studying vocabulary lists before the test--a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores--just won't cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don't--and can't develop them in a cram course.

The math section is also more challenging, including some pre-calculus for the first time, as well as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry it tested before.

Quite simply, this is not the same SAT. Students, anxious parents and college admissions officers... need to adjust our expectations accordingly.


People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true--it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated.

So maybe people will start to sit up and pay attention. They might figure out “that their children are not getting good educations.”

That would be a start. Then we could all decide what to do about the great big flabby education system we have tolerated these many years.

Why do we put up with it? Is it because it really doesn’t matter to us if the school system is a mess? That kids can sleepwalk through their school days and it doesn’t make any difference?

Immigration Bill Will Expand Welfare State

Some of us are wondering why the United States Senate seems to be in such a hurry to shower the nation’s illegal immigrants with forgiveness on back taxes owed and credit for Social Security taxes paid. And why rush to normalize their status? There are tons of immigrants who have crossed every T in the immigration regulations who seem to be relegated to the back of the line.

Maybe Robert Rector has the answer. Only not quite in the way he thinks.

By his reckoning the newly regularized immigrants will be eligible for a feast of benefits. And when they bring their parents in, they will be eligible for benefits too.

In the long run, the Hagel-Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.

So that’s what it’s all about. Jobs for liberals. Imagine. The stunning success of welfare reform has thrown millions of people out of poverty. And that threatens the jobs of millions of liberals who depend on the existence of millions of helpless victims for their livelihood.

What could be more beneficial than to find a whole new stash of helpless victims, people with little experience of thriving in an advanced economy. They would be just what the doctor ordered. They could give the welfare state another lease on life.

So liberals will get bigger budgets and Democrats will get more votes. Why do Republicans put up with this stuff. Aren’t we supposed to control Congress?

Enron Guys Convicted. How about Fannie Mae?

Good. Enron’s crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, have been convicted in federal court of lying to investors in the meltdown of Enron back in 2000. Writes Greg Farrell in USATODAY:

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling said they always relied on the lawyers and accountants who signed off on Enron's earnings statements. Jurors said they should have relied on the truth.

This is a principle that goes to the foundation of law. People have an obligation to know what the law is and what is going on in the institutions they lead. If you are CEO of a major company about half of your job should be checking up on what people are telling you. Otherwise you are not doing your job.

So now the federal government has got convictions in nearly all of the headline corporate scandals that surfaced when the economy went south in 2000.

Last year, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers of encouraging his subordinates to cook his company's books. The year before, former Adelphia CEO John Rigas was convicted of fraud and misuse of investor funds. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau won a conviction last year of former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski and his CFO, Mark Swartz.

Now, could we please deal with the government’s rotten apples?

For a start there is Fannie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage bond issuer. The Wall Street Journal opines that the regulator’s report on FNMA’s tangled accounting indicates that “the internal rot is even worse than we ever imagined.”

Then there is the outrage in Congress that the executive branch, backed up by a warrant from the judicial branch, dared to execute a search warrant on a congressman’s Capitol Hill office. Excuse me, but I don’t see the problem with this. I seem to remember a Contract With America twelve years ago that declared that Congress should obey the same laws as the rest of America.

It’s easy to rag on business, and many people do. But business is continually reinventing itself. You could say that it has reinvented itself at least twice in the last century. And whenever it is a little slow to clean up, why there are a dozen sleek United States Senators ready to do it for them.

But government doesn’t seem to get it. Nor does education, a vast rent-seeking monster. Nor does the non-profit sector, a vast mirror of vanity.

Some of us are getting a little impatient out here. Putting corporate crooks in jail is just a start. We want the same enthusiasm for catching government crooks.

Bush and Blair Admit Mistakes!

It can’t be a coincidence that the first time that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have “admitted mistakes” on Iraq is the week after the installation of a unity government following the national Iraqi elections back in January.

As reported by Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times, Bush and Blair admitted mistakes in not finding WMDs and taunting the Ba’athists to “bring it on.” Said Blair:

The chance of a major insurgency "should have been very obvious to us" from the beginning.

Bush admitted that Abu Ghraib was a major mistake. So that’s all right.

The problem that the coalition has faced from the beginning is that the government of almost every nation state has been defined and legitimized by war. Britain was defined in its Civil War, and the United States in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

The new Iraqi nation needs to define itself and its legitimacy in the same way. It must establish a “king’s peace” by defeating all the contending centers of power: in the insurgents, the Ba’athists, and all the war lords and barons with their private militias.

But it would be useless if the United States and its allies did all the work of pacification. The Iraqis must do that, the new Iraqi government, its new army, and its new police force. It must prove to the Iraqis, to the Middle East, and to the world that it deserves to govern the Land Between the Rivers. And to deserve to govern it must demonstrate that it has the toughness and power to defeat its enemies.

That is the challenge that the new government of Prime Minister al-Maliki must meet. It must pacify, and be seen to pacify, the roiling powers that contest for power in Iraq today. From that all else follows.

Gay Marriage and the "Pure Relationship"

What would legalization of gay marriage mean? Is it just a matter of human rights or does it interfere with the institution of marriage, that is the union between a man and a woman? Or even further, the basic equilibrium of society?

NRO’s Stanley Kurtz has written a number of articles on the subject, attempting to show that, based upon the European experience, gay marriage is part of a general movement to loosen the institution of marriage and to divorce the identity between marriage and children.

But here in the United States the advocates of gay marriage argue that it would strengthen marriage, since it would regularize gay unions and encourage long-term relationships among gays.

Now Kurtz has taken a look at the theorists behind the movement away from marriage. He’s provided us with a booklist that makes the case for sexual relations between any kind of partners for any kind of reason.

Most notably, Kurtz offers the work of Anthony Giddens, and his The Transformation of Intimacy as Exhibit A.

Anthony Giddens is no extremist. He is Director of the London School of Economics and a major influence on Tony Blair.

By looking at the implication of Giddens’ main argument, the idea of a secular movement from conventional marriage towards a “pure relationship,” Kurtz sees that the gay marriage advocates are either mistaken or dissembling.

Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”

If you look at the psychological model of Spiral Dynamics you can see that this approach is characteristic of the orange, creative level, where people experience life as a game to be won, and rules as something you make up as you go along. For instance:

[M]onogamy, Giddens says, should be adopted, if at all, as a result of negotiation and understanding between two particular partners, and not because of some institutional obligation embedded in marriage itself.

Leave aside Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, that you should ask the question: What if everyone did this? We already know what happens when a society implements this kind of radical individualism. It stops having children.

The reason is pretty straight forward. If you have no children, or one child, you can create an individual “lifestyle” in which you balance all your interests and activities. But if you have two or three children, then what you have is a life raising children.

The problem with gay marriage, with the pure relationship, and with “lifestyles” is that you devote your life to tangents instead of the mainstream of life. Which is generation. The generation of the next generation.

It is curious that our lefty friends, the ones pushing the elimination of conventional marriage are the ones who demand we live simply so that others may simply live, the ones who want organic, natural foods.
They are also the ones who are most likely to be childless. What is so natural about that?

The Energy Price Calculator

Where are energy prices going? Crude oil seems to have come off its highs at $75 per barrel. But is it finished yet?

In NRO Thomas E. Nugent takes a look at natural gas prices. They exploded last year around the time of Hurricane Katrina, peaking at about $15 per million btu. Now natural gas prices are down at about $6 per million btu. He thinks that the same decline is likely to happen to crude oil. Maybe it is already happening.

But what everyone wants to know is: How does crude oil at $70 per barrel compare with other energy prices? With gasoline, with natural gas, with electrity. Even with coal.

Road to the Middle Class is proud to bring you your very own energy price calculator that we stole off the Department of Energy EIA Energy Kids Page.

Go ahead. Enter the current crude oil price in the crude oil box and press “Calculate.”

Energy Price Conversion Calculator (thanks to Robert Collette)
Crude Oil	Gasoline	Natural Gas	Electricity	Coal
$	$	$	$	$
$/bbl	$/gal (w/o tax)	$/mmbtu	$/Kwh	$/short ton

Here are some other useful resources on the energy price front.

• Monthly Natural Gas Price
  
• Monthly Crude Oil Price
  
• Annual Electricity Price
  

Enjoy!

Hot-head McCain Cool At New School

United States Senator John McCain may have a reputation as a hot-head. He may be deeply mistrusted by the conservative base. But he certainly struck the right note when he gave a commencement speech at the New School for Social Research in New York City on May 19, 2006.

You’ll remember that the open-minded faculty and students at the New School, noted for its tolerance for diverse viewpoints, demonstrated against Sen. McCain during his speech. And let us not forget, writes conservative Ann Coulter,

the raw heroism of Jean Rohe, the student at the New School who gave a speech attacking the commencement speaker, Republican Sen. John McCain, at the commencement ceremony.

Yes, it must have taken courage to make a speech echoing the sentiments of the students and faculty at the School. In what league, then, would we put Ann Coulter, who is regularly heckled and abused when she gives speeches at college campuses? Not to mention the College Republicans who invite her?

But John McCain gave a speech exactly tailored to his audience. said he:

[W]e love our liberties much. And among those liberties we love most, particularly so when we are young, is our right to self-expression. That passion for self-expression sometimes overwhelms our civility, and our presumption that those with whom we have strong disagreements, wrong as they might be, believe that they, too, are answering the demands of their conscience.

After mentioning Vietnam, Darfur, and Rwanda, he tells of a young American who went to Hanoi to give an anti-war speech during the Vietnam war. McCain got the chance to listen to it on the radio in his prisoner-of-war cell in Hanoi.

We met some years later. He approached me and asked to apologize for the mistake he believed he had made as a young man.

Thank you, Senator McCain for saying those things at the New School for Social Research. Some day, an ordinary American kid like Jean Rohe, who grew up singing folk songs, spent a year at Smith College, and counts among her dearest friends the people she met at a summer studying at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba, may also apologize to you for her gross insult.

But then again, maybe not.

Media Navel-gazing In NY

They had a navel-gazing session on new media vs. old media today at the Museum of Television and Radio Media Center in NYC, blogged by Jeff Jarvis and also attended by Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt said

I came away impressed by the talent and seriousness of the news professionals, but also convinced that they simply will never see that the source of their dissolving credibility is the ideological imbalance in their journalist workforce. I brought this point up a couple of times, but it was rejected as was the relevance individual writers/reporters/editors' political positions, voting records, and world views.

The problem is trust, Hewitt went on to say on his radio show, and the problem with the MSM is that the center-right audience of the MSM does not feel that it gets a fair hearing from the MSM. So they are drifting away.

Hewitt also planted a bomb by saying that

that the biggest sustained audience in broadcast is Rush Limbaugh at 20 million a week and because those people trust him. He says Rush is rebranding himself as “America’s anchor in contrast to drive-by media.”

Rush is important because he created his format and his audience himself, Hewitt said. Walter Cronkite happened along as just the right guy in the right place at the right time. But Rush has created something that they said couldn’t be done.

Why won’t the MSM admit their bias and become “transparent?” What do they gain by their absolute claim of objectivity? I suspect the answer is that if they admitted their bias then they’d have to hire people from the other side of the room. That would be OK; it might after all be interesting to have the odd conservative knocking around the newsroon. But it would mean less jobs for them and their pals. That is the real sticking point. It’s about the jobs and the glittering prizes.

It's OK to Fib About Global Warming

The thing about movements is that the truth tends to get lost in the campaign to tell the world about the Greater Truth. And that is certainly true about the Global Warming Movement.

For those of us who haven’t been heard, Patrick J. Michaels has been keeping an ear to the ground and also on Al Gore.

So here's what Al told Grist Magazine about global warming: "I believe it is appropriate to have an overrepresentation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

Then there is NASA’s James Hansen.

He also started the whole global warming hysteria, with some remarkably inflammatory congressional testimony in 1988, and he is Al Gore's climate guru. Here's what he wrote in 2003 from his Broadway office, in the online journal Natural Science: "Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decisionmakers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue."

The problem with all this scare stuff is that there’s a good chance we’ll be basing public policy on a lie. There’s a lot of scare stuff going on. There’s the danger of nuclear power, the danger of drilling for oil, the danger of building highways, and the danger of eating food with pesticide residues. How dangerous are these threats, really?

We’ll never know, because the science got buried by the politics.

And we really can’t say anything about man-made global warming until we really understand the fluctuation in energy output from the sun.

It does fluctuate, you know. Scientists think that solar energy output is high when sunspot activity is high (like right now) and low when sunspot activity is down (like during the Maunder minimum half a millennium ago during the, er, Little Ice Age).

It's The Children, Stupid

The problem with Old Europe is that it is literally getting old. That’s because the Europeans aren’t having many children, writes Robert Samuelson.

The number of children per woman is called the “total fertility rate,” or TFR. Here are the estimated 2005 TFRs for some major countries: Germany, 1.4; Greece, 1.3; Italy, 1.3; Japan, 1.4; Spain, 1.3; and Russia, 1.3.

The low fertility rates translate into declining population. Here is a table of population predictions from Samuelson’s article.

POPULATION (Millions) 2005 2050 Germany 82.4 73.6 Italy 58.1 50.4 Japan 127.4 99.9 Spain 40.3 35.6

But there’s an exception to this trend of population decline. The United States. In the US the fertility rate is 2.1, exactly at replacement rate.

Nor does the U.S. rate merely reflect, as some think, a higher rate among Hispanic Americans. The fertility rate is 1.9 for non-Hispanic whites and about 2 for African-Americans, reports demographer Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. What explains the American exception? Eberstadt cites three differences with Europe and most other advanced countries: greater optimism, greater patriotism and stronger religious values.

And don’t forget that the low fertility rate for whites includes childless liberal cities like San Francisco and Seattle.

We’ve looked at this issue here at the Road to the Middle Class before, and we’ll look at it again. One reason for high birth rates in the US may be patriarchy. You need to give people a reason to knuckle down to the hard work of raising children in a family and patriarchy is one way to mobilize both men and women to the task. As Phillip Longman argues:

Patriarchy may have its privileges, but they may pale in comparison to the joys of bachelorhood in a luxurious society — nights spent enjoyably at banquets with friends discussing sports, war stories, or philosophy, or with alluring mistresses, flute girls, or clever courtesans.

It’s a constant struggle for young men to decide between the demands of society and the allure of those flute girls. The way that society puts a finger on the scales to push young men and women towards child production is by promoting patriarchy.

Let's Hear It For Capitalism

When your kid comes home from her government school today, she will probably be parroting some nonsense they taught her. At school these days, writes James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State We’re In,

They teach that capitalists destroy rainforests, insidiously control American foreign policy and spread the human vices of greed and selfishness. Anti-capitalism is now the subtext of history and geography lessons, as well as politics, economics and sociology. Capitalism is said to have given rise to slavery. The state is depicted as a hero that has tempered the cruelty of the beast with laws, regulations and interventions.

All lies, of course. Nor is it true that capitalism “promotes inequality” except in the sense that it rewards people who give other people what they want.

Let us rehearse three big things that capitalism has done, in food, clothing, and cars. Capitalism, not government.

Two centuries ago, food was the biggest part in a family's budget. It was hard for a poor family to get enough to eat. Even in the 1920s, people on average spent a third of their income on food.



Now they spend only a tenth... Shortages, hunger and famine became history. That is what capitalism did. To sneer at it is to sneer at the abolition of hunger in this country.

Then there is clothing. Used to be that the poor could hardly afford any clothes. Today,

new and much cheaper methods of production have been put in place by individuals importing cotton, improving textile production techniques, deploying new kinds of transport and distributing the raw material and final products more cheaply. No longer do children share shoes.

Not government. Capitalism. And as for cars. Well, we know how many cars they had in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and today in Castro’s Cuba.

Who invented cars? Who refined their design and manufacture to the point where they are affordable by millions of people? Not governments. The diverse, resourceful, determined power of capitalism.

And it goes on and on. The astonishing thing is that, in the light of this overwhelming evidence, there are still so many people that worship the state and their benefits. What are they thinking?

They are thinking that it is much easier to demand your rights using the political system than to earn it by serving the consumer.

At Least President Bush is Brave

Nobody can tell if President Bush will turn out to be one of our greatest presidents, writes Michael Novak. But we do know one thing. He has to be our bravest president.

He has faced the most intense fire, hatred, contempt, heavily moneyed and bitterly acidic partisan opposition, underhandedness, betrayal, of any president in the last hundred years...



He has faced almost unbroken contempt from the academy, from the mainstream press, from Democratic elites, from Moveon and all the other holders of the Democratic-party purse strings, from the Democratic Congress, from his treacherous (if not treasonous) Central Intelligence Agency, and from many levels of the permanent State Department. Almost every day, he has been pummeled and undermined by powerful forces of American power. Still, he has stayed firm, with clear arguments, and an even clearer vision.

And now, of course, we conservatives are getting tired of him, tired of defending him, and tired of the dangers of the times.

It takes more bravery to continue walking calmly through immense hostility at home, than to face down a foreign foe, with a united nation at one's back. This, as I say, is a very brave president.

After all the rage and the invective they have indulged themselves in over the last six years, the Democrats are going to face a problem when they return to power and return to the only politics they know: patronage and pensions. If President Bush that was so dreadful and the nation was in such a mess, how come it’s just back to politics as usual?

Government That Just Doesn't Care

In the last century the people of the European nations have conducted a great experiment. Upon the advice of experts they demolished the “little platoons” between the individual and government that provided support and aid when times were hard. Instead they bought into the idea that government programs could look after the poor and the unfortunate much better than private charity and mutual aid.

The driving force behind this great social experiment was an elite that assured the people that “we care.” In particular, we “care about people like you.”

There is one problem with this idea. Governments don’t care. People who work for government and who have lifetime employment tenure don’t care about you or anything else except their paycheck and the number of days till retirement.

The result of 100 years of caring is a government that just doesn’t care. Libby Purves in the London Times writes about how this works in detail.

Good Morning. Here is the news. Owing to a bank error, several thousand people have had their accounts emptied and credit barred, in some cases losing a job or university place. The bank refused to apologise, pointing out that it put the money back within three weeks — well, in 90 per cent of cases. It added that it is better to be on the safe side. In a separate incident, 2,700 blameless householders returned home to find bailiffs removing their furniture, owing to an IT error at a [finance] company that assumed the stuff belonged to them. The company expresses no regret, saying that errors must be kept “in context” because sometimes two houses look similar. It added that “customer satisfaction” with its activities is “at an all-time high”.

Imagine that! Imagine the outrage! But government does that all the time.

Here’s a horror story from Robert L. Woodson, Sr’s The Triumphs of Joseph. A woman in Philadelphia had her pregnant teenaged daughter give up her baby for adoption. Years later this woman had become commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Welfare. She found out that her grandson had just been “aged out” of the foster care system. In eighteen years the public welfare system had failed to arrange for an adoption for this child. The government just didn’t care. They allowed the child to bang around in the foster care system for eighteen years.

In the current sour political mood the American people are right to feel that, if the Republicans don’t have the competence to keep gas prices under control, what is the point of them?

But if the welfare state sponsored and defended by the Democratic Party just doesn’t care about kids, then what is the point of Democrats?

Irate Homeowners are Attacking Garbage Drivers Over Recycling

How long do you think it takes you each week to sort the garbage, toseparate the trash from the recyclables? An hour? Half an hour? Let’s say fifteen minutes.

So what is the cost to the nation, the compulsory unpaid labor, the corvée as the French called it before the Revolution, of separating out the garbage?

There’s a danger, you see. There’s a danger that the cost of separating the trash from the recyclables might be more than the savings.

That is what is going on in Britain. Tim Worstall ran the numbers, and this what he found.

By 2020 it will cost about £3.2bn a year to dispose of solid waste. Er, but that doesn’t include the 15 minutes per household in waste sepration. If you figure paying people an minimum wage, that means an additional cost of £1.6 billion.

Is anyone really suggesting that recycling can recapture the £1.6 billion cost in unpaid corvée labor by the citizenry?

There’s another cost, of course. The garbage collectors are getting attacked by irate citizens.

Binmen say recycling schemes have led to a surge in attacks by householders who find their rubbish uncollected when they fail to follow strict rules.

(Here in left-coast Seattle we are getting ready to fine people for improper recycling practices.)

Unions for refuse collectors are threatening to strike over what they say is a rising tide of violence that has seen one in five of Britain's 40,000 binmen injured in physical attacks at work and more than two thirds verbally abused.

Did you read that? One in five have suffered physical attacks at work and two thirds verbally abused.

Is recycling worth the life of a single garbage truck driver?

Education is Failing in Britain, Too

Back in the mid 1980s the experts decided, in “A Nation at Risk,” that the American school system was failing its children.

In Britain the school system is failing the children too.

Back in the 1960s the British replaced their ancient system of grammar schools with “comprehensives.” The idea was to eliminate the social evil of streaming, where intelligent students went to government grammar schools in their teens and the lesser lights went to “secondary modern” schools.

Well, thanks very much, says a graduate of the first crop that spent their teen years in comprehensives. Writes Robert Crampton in the London Times, about the kids who went to his school in Hull:

We arrived bright-eyed and keen, and we left, five or seven years later, well entertained, but not especially well educated. Yeah, we had a laugh, but we didn’t learn much. Enough to get by. Your status depended on your looks, your athleticism and your willingness to be disruptive. Academic ability was an irrelevance at best, a hindrance at worst.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.

In Britain the great leaders of the nation since World War II on the left almost all went to a grammar school. Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan and many of their ministers went to grammar schools.

But no longer. In 1965 the Labour government legislated a policy to push away the ladder on which many of their members had climbed from poverty to eminence. They replaced almost all the grammar schools with comprehensives. What was the result?

The people I was at school with have done OK. That’s what they always say about bright kids in comps, isn’t it? Oh, they’ll be OK. But we haven’t done as well as we could have done if we hadn’t been — there’s no polite way of putting this — shafted by Labour ideology for the past 40 years.

That’s about the long and the short of it. Government schools, coasting to a stop on more and more money, are shafting the children of Britain and the United States. In particular they are denying the bright children of the poor in the inner city of breaking free of the culture of helplessness and victimization.

How much longer will we allow this injustice to continue?

It's Easy for George McGovern to Praise Wal-Mart and Bash Unions

Good old liberal George McGovern can easily afford to praise Wal-Mart. He can praise if for its low prices. He san say that if you take the $27 million that Wal-Mart’s CEO took home and gave it to the hourly workers, that would only add up to $20.

The trouble is that “More” became “Too Much.” Look at parts marker Delphi. Delphi is in trouble, he writes.

One big reason is that the company's unionized workers earn $64 an hour in wages and benefits — more than twice what some of its competitors pay.

Of course, it’s easy for him to talk. He’s a Democrat-emeritus. He’s not running for anything. But still. Somebody has to say this sort of thing, and it might as well be George McGovern, the founder of the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. But here’s the money graf.

Universal healthcare provided by the federal government is one way to supplement income. It is also a way of relieving hard-pressed businesses of one of their highest cost burdens.

You can see where this is going. Bail out the auto companies with national health insurance. But let us get back to the high ground.

“Liberals,” he writes, “must never abandon their core principles of justice and equality.”

We can all agree on that. And how about starting with the unjust and inegalitarian fact that liberal Democrat union members working for state and local governments earn about 40-50 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector?

Where’s the justice in that?

Opus Dei: "It is Gruesome"

Should Christians emulate the Muslims? Should they tear the place up and burn a few multiplexes when Hollywood produces a blasphemous movie like The Da Vinci Code?

Mary Wakefield went to see the movie and found herself cringing after about fifteen minutes.

Five minutes into the film, I began to squint with embarrassment, and after 15 I slid down in my seat so as not to catch a Christian eye. The flick itself is daft... but the attack on Christianity is breathtaking.

After the movie she exchanged a couple of words with Jack Valero, PR man for Opus Dei, “for once without his trademark grin.”

"It is gruesome to see my brothers and sisters represented in this awful way, it bears no relation to reality," he said.

Hollywood is, after all, just a bunch of artists. They get their anti-religious bigotry because it is in the air. Anti-religious bigotry is in the air because believers in our modern secular religions higher up the food chain, the MSM and the universities, fill the public square with their secular culture and their secular religion. Hollywood types pick it up and turn it into movies.

How can you blame them? They experience their anti-religious art as an enlightened and creative challenge to a backward superstition. They want to enlighten the world and convert it to their secular religion of government-run compassion and sensitivity and individual creativity, and they are completely right to understand Christianity as a stake poised above their beautiful prostrate bodies, about to be driven into their enlightened secular hearts.

(Yes, of course history is witness to countless religious wars conducted in the name of God. But what do you think the great wars of the twentieth century were all about? They were wars provoked by militant secular religions.)

The culture war is a religious war. It is a war between a God-based religion and a secular religion. It probably won’t come to an end until one side wins.

Nobody can know who will come out on top. But there is this to think about. The secular world view may be helpful and beneficial to an educated, creative elite. It is, after all, their religion. But the record shows that it is utter ruin to the folk trying to make it in the city. That is why the welfare state has made the inner city into a war zone of joblessness, helplessness, and hopelessness—and brutal violence. The people who have just arrived in the city need not so much material as spiritual aid.

That is something that our secular elite just cannot understand.

Put a Stake Through Freud's Heart

What should we do about Freud to celebrate his 150th birthday? Dig him up and “put a stake through his heart,” writes Spengler in Asia Times.

No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body.

That’s why there’s an epidemic of eating disorders and “self-harming,” the practice of cutting yourself with razor blades.

But why? “Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido.” This seems to be harmless enough on the face of it. But today

Women enter adolescence with the expectation that they will be used but not loved. Men no longer need to feign affection to receive sexual favors; they merely need ask. It is no surprise that young women have come to despise their bodies, some to the point of destroying them.

So the old system whereby women gave sex to receive love is broken. And not just that.

All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper's nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father.

On top of that, the mother gave sexual pleasure to the infant through the breast, the father repressed the son’s interest in his mother, and the daughter bemoaned the lack of a penis. Ever seem a family like that? No? Really.

The indesdructible fact that we moderns have rebeled against is that marriage is society’s clever little dodge to keep men attached to the mother of their children way after the collapse of their physical beauty.

The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty.

We’ve thrown all that away, and none more completely and more emphatically than secular, liberal women. And then we wonder why girls are cutting themselves up.

Read the whole thing.

Opus Dei Finds Coded Message in Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown must be laughing all the way to the bank. His Da Vinci Code has got everyone talking, and that is what you need to sell books and movies.

To all those out there outraged by the eruption of the Arian heresy, Fr. John Wauck (of Opus Dei!) says to cool it. Writer Dan Brown obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, so neither should we. On the contrary, a coded look at DVC shows that Brown is having a grand old time with his book, even laughing at himself as a hack writer.

He sits his hero Robert Langdon down to a power lunch with his editor Faukman (an anagram of Brown’s own editor Kaufman) who is worried about whether Langdon’s book about the divinity of Christ is real scholarship. The editor,

worried by the manuscript’s daring conjectures about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and the Holy Grail, wants to make sure that Langdon has scholarly support for his theory, so he reminds him: “You’re a Harvard historian, for God’s sake, not a pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck.”

Ahem. No professional writer of thrillers could doubt what business he was in. And it does not take a genius to figure out that secular educated women, the major buyers of fiction, would could easily warm to a novel about the sacred feminine that interprets 2,000 years of history as a male patriarchal conspiracy. So Fr. Wauck advises us all to lighten up:

Brown is clearly a good sport who knows perfectly well what he’s up to, and he can’t resist tipping his hand to let us in on the joke. So hats off to an author who’s not ashamed of coming across as a “pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck” — and, as we now know, finding it with a vengeance — literally.

But the big question is really, will the movie sell tickets? The schlockmeister made his quick buck, and good luck to him. But can Hollywood make its buck too?

South Americans Wary of Chavez

How dangerous is Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez? Everybody is suddenly getting anxious about lefty dictators taking over in South America. But one result of his saber-rattling is that other South American leaders are moving closer to the United States, according to Martin Krause.

South American leaders have been meeting in Vienna to negotiate with the European Union about a free-trade pact. And it turns out that many of the leaders are less than elated with the Venezuelan’s bully-boy tactics.

Chávez did a great job breaking up the Summit of the Americas in November 2005, but the result seems to have been to encourage leaders to move more towards a private economy and expanded trade. Writes Krause:

The socialist Chilean president Michelle Bachelet continues and deepens the reforms of past decades, they are now even considering the privatization of jails. The socialist Uruguayan president is asking for bilateral trade negotiations with the US.

The Peruvians sent home the Venezuelan ambassador for meddling in their election. And the Brazilians aren’t too happy about Bolivia expropriating their state oil company, Petrobras.

And what happens to Venezuela’s big stick when oil prices go back down again?

It's the Law and Order, Stupid

The boast of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party was “joined-up” government, a government that would communicate with itself and get things done.

And the British people believed it.

Unfortunately bureaucratic organizations are designed for precisely the opposite purpose, for imposing top-down strategy. It is like an army. The general at the top issues the order and the underlings all execute his plan.

That means if you want to do something more flexible than fight battles and march from A to B, the bureaucratic model is not the best fit.

If you want a flexible, responsive system then you must choose the market as your organizational model. A market, need we add, in which people spend their own money buying goods and services. Other Peoples’ Money need not apply.

The ruin of New Labour was inevitable. You can’t make government bureaucracies into flexible, responsive, “joined-up” organisms. And the more you try, the more the bureaucracy just slows down to a stop, and ceases doing anything.

So now, nine years after being swept into office on a platform to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” and after egregious failures to keep the peace, Blair is reduced, according to the London Spectator, to asserting that

the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’.

Well, do tell. The criminal justice system is just about the only thing that government should be doing.

But modern progressive government doesn’t care about that. Its bureaucracies are too busy handing out loot to the government’s supporters in the name of compassion and sensitivity to care about law and order. Anyway, you can’t do anything about crime until you have corrected the root causes of crime in poverty and alienation.

So Britain is sitting about where the US was back in 1990 when 30 years of liberal policing had reduced the inner cities to a violent hell.

On Immigration, Just Keep the Economy Growing

So which is it? Robert Samuelson says that immigration is a problem because there’s a conflict coming between a burgeoning Hispanic immigrant population of the less-educated and retiring baby-boomers who are going to want their benefits.

The American Immigration Law Foundation says that the Hispanic immigrants are doing fine and that

Latinos experience substantial socioeconomic progress across generations compared to both their immigrant forefathers and native Anglos.

Let’s face it. There has been a conflict between established Americans and immigrants since the founding. The common school movement was founded in part to force assimilation of the dangerous Catholic Irish that were emerging in the 1830s. Then we were worried about Jews in 1900, blacks in the 1960s, and now Hispanics in the 21st century.

The problem is always the same. Will the uneducated, unadapted immigrants trash the America that we higher-toned Americans have so tenderly built?

Then answer always is: We can’t be sure. Up to now, immigrants have always assimilated into the spirit of democratic capitalism, more or less, sooner or later. But will they assimilate this time?

In The New Americans Michael Barone shows how Jews, Italians, and Irish were the problem immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, just as East Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks are the problem now. Their success in assimilation depended upon their exposure, before arrival in the urban economy, to the culture of the rule of law.

Then as now the Democrats latched onto the new immigrants for their votes and also because Democrats believe in race, class, and ethnic politics.

What will happen this time? We don’t know. But we can help things along by making sure that there are jobs, jobs, jobs. As long as there are jobs, then people can rub along.

It is when the economy goes seriously south, as during the Great Depression when the suits totally screwed things up, that you need to watch out.

So while it is sensible to worry about resentful immigrants and selfish baby-boomers, the big thing is to keep the economy in good shape. You do that and a lot of problems just look after themselves.

Bush Signs Tax Cut and Market Falls Out of Bed

President Bush signed today the tax cut extensions recently passed by Congress. At the signing ceremony he said that

Our pro-growth policies stand in stark contrast to those in Washington who believe you grow your economy by raising taxes and centralizing power.

Meanwhile the stock market fell out of bed with the Dow declining by over 200 points to 11,205.61, down over 400 points since May 10. And the dollar has declined. And interest rates are going up.

Is this the end of the Goldilocks economy of the last three years? Or is the market testing new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has waffled about future interest rate increases.

In the United Kingdom, Anatole Kaletsky thinks the problem is that Bernanke has been too clear about his policy, reversing the deliberate obfuscation of Alan Greenspan.

He started off by emphasising, quite rightly, his strong belief in the Fed’s dual mandate: to maintain price stability and achieve the highest possible rate of economic growth. He then promised to call a halt to monetary tightening and do everything to keep the economy growing, even if inflation continued to accelerate “temporarily” in the months ahead. When currency and bond investors, whose wealth is decimated by inflation, quite predictably took umbrage and started selling their dollar holdings, Mr Bernanke quickly changed his tune and started presenting himself as an aggressive inflation-foe. He then “clarified” this apparently hawkish message by repeating that he might call a “pause” in the Fed’s rate hikes if that was what the economic statistics dictated.

Is that clear?

The truth probably is that the runup in oil prices has finally started to bite on economic growth. People at my local Arco gas station aren’t quite as eager to fill ’em up as they were back in January.

Could it be that investors are looking at future earnings and don’t think the future is quite as rosy as it was a few months ago?

Migration and Mexican Politics

What do the Mexicans think of Mexicans emigrating from their homeland to the jobs, jobs, jobs in the United States? We looked at this here at the Road to the Middle Class back in April.

Migration just entered Mexican presidential politics as lefty PRD candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador called it “`Mexico's disgrace,’ caused by the government's failure to create enough jobs,” according to Alistair Bell of Reuters.

Well, that’s for sure. But what standing has any leftist anywhere to talk about jobs, apart from low-productivity government jobs financed by taxpayers’ money? Lopez wants to cancel Fox’s attempt to bring a free market to corrupt Mexico.

He vows to boost employment and cut poverty by slashing government spending, launching large infrastructure projects and introducing welfare programs for Mexico's poorest.

Oh good. That will really help.

President Vicente Fox promised to create “1 million jobs a year and oil-rich Mexico's economy has grown only slowly in his 5 1/2 years in office.”

Lopez also wants the US to help in Mexico’s development. As if we hadn’t, by pushing NAFTA and encouraging Mexico to lose its patronage economy.

The fact is that we know how to grow an economy. Ask the Chinese. Ask the Irish. Ask the Estonians. Ask Vaclav Kraus, former President of the Czech Republic, who just got an award from the Foundation for Economic Education.

But here’s a tip for you folks in Mexico. Don’t ask a lefty.

Let's Make a Deal on Immigration

Everyone has had their say after President Bush’s so-so speech on Monday. Conservatives have groused and grumbled; the MSM has grunted approvingly. Dick Morris seems to think the speech was great, which is really troubling.

Now Tony Blankley comes along and says: OK fellahs. Don’t forget, politics is about compromise. Let’s not make the mistake of picking up our dollies and going to play in the corner. Let’s make a deal today, and come back for more later if we need to.

[W]hen in negotiations, if he with whom you are negotiating is moving in your direction, don't walk out of the room. As a final proposition: In politics, as in life, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you can get what you need

For those that believe that the central issue is a secure border, the fact is that President Bush “has moved measurably, but insufficiently, toward that position.” Now let’s capitalize on that movement and nail down a deal.

Ultimately, we need to control illegal immigration. We can and we should allow a strong flow of immigrants into the country, but let us be clear. Immigrants compete with the American working poor. And, echoing what Charles Murray said twenty years ago in Losing Ground, it is unjust to make patsies out of the working poor by favoring illegals and wasters over the hard, not very rewarding life of the lower middle-class striver. That is what was wrong with the War on Poverty, and that is what is wrong with turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants and workers.

There is a feeling of a sea change happening in conservative politics right now, a sense that we are moving on from the Reagan-Bush years. But let us nail down the best compromise we can get on immigratioin while we still can.

After November, we may have to deal with a Democratic Senate or Congress, and we know where they stand: Immigrants equals votes, and forget about the American people.

Strong Families Means Small Government

As we conservatives mumble around about doing something about the welfare state there are people out there with and idea to really do something about it.

After reading Love and Economics by Jennifer Roback Morse, Arnold Kling is inspired to write:

Single moms and the welfare state go together. Strong families and free markets go together.

What could be simpler? If you like strong families, then you should argue for a smaller state. If you like big government then you better understand that you are in favor of single moms and the destruction of the family.

But think of the implications. If you think that a strong state and strong families are incompatible, then you have to think about how to resolve problems without having the big powerful state step in and solve it.

If people know that they cannot rely on the state to arbitrate these issues, then they will turn to families, religious institutions, and other associations within communities to help strengthen our values.

What could be wrong with that? Well, top-down conservative government by Republicans, for one thing. After ten years of a Republican Congress we can see that Republicans aren’t going to do anything about big government. If there is to be a change, it will have to come from below.

Those who wish to be part of the solution should focus on strengthening our own families. The lesson of Morse's book is that strong families are the only antidote to the nanny state.

But that, of course, means work.

Iran's War on US Costs It a Bundle

Ever since the Khomeini revolution in Iran the mullahs have been running a low-grade war against the United States. We often complain about the annoyance and the cost of Iran and its Islamist terrorism. But Amir Taheri gives us a glimpse of the cost to Iran.

Nowhere is the cost of the so-called "War against the Infidel" more apparent than in Iran's oil industry. Projections made in 1977 envisaged the Iranian oil off-take to reach a daily capacity of 6.5 million barrels, with another 1.5 million available as emergency reserves. The capacity of the Kharg terminal, the chief export facility for Iranian oil, was increased from 5.5 million barrels a day to 8 million.



But lack of investment, and the virtual impossibility of accessing highly complex technology, has meant a steady decline. Today, the Islamic Republic produces something like 3.8 million barrels a day - a level Iran had surpassed in 1973.

And that is saying nothing about the cost of having the economy run by a bunch of politicians and activists. We arranged the 20th century, remember, as a demonstration of the economic ability of politicians vs. businessmen.

But what has Iran gained strategically? It is true that Iran has obtained a foothold in Lebanon and in Palestine.

The United States, on the other hand, has made a spectacular incursion in what could be regarded as Iran's geopolitical habitat in West and Central Asia, the Caspian Basin, Transcaucasia and the Middle East. The Americans are now militarily present in all but two of Iran's 15 neighboring countries.

Where have we seen that before? Didn’t the Soviet Union boast that it would bury the US and find itself, in the end, surrounded by the US and its clients?

Shelby Steele Goes to San Francisco

You wouldn’t think that libertarian conservative Shelby Steele would get a fair shake for his White Guilt in the San
Francisco Chronicle. You know what they are like in San Francisco. But he does.

Unlike many over-the-top liberal writers Edward Guthmann is almost generous to the writer who has written that black rage and white guilt have wrecked the civil rights revolution.

Unlike so many conservative pundits, the ones who bait their liberal opposition with inflamed rhetoric, Steele is soft-spoken, avuncular in his approach.

Well, Guthmann is writing for San Francisco Democrats, after all. But he does allow Steele’s argument to be made:

What sets Steele apart is that he's saying things many people, even those who secretly agree with him, would rather not hear. He says that blacks should take responsibility for their own disproportionate crime rates and poor academic performance and not blame a system imposed on them by whites; that whites support affirmative action and other "silly racial policies" out of fear, to avoid accusations of racism.

Steele acknowledges that he’s caught his “share of hell” from his writing. But

one of the great benefits is that I can talk now to anybody about anything, racially and otherwise. And people feel comfortable with me: They know I'm not going to hold it against them if they make some sort of little faux pas. I'm not going to take a knife out and tell them they've defamed my whole race.

It’s an interesting point. If you are talking to someone of a different race, you are almost certain to “step on his sensitivities without knowing it.” But imagine if people just quietly informed you of your faux pas instead of putting you down by playing the victim card. It’s a thought.

But that would collapse the whole race game, in which a lot of people are making a lot of money.

Tired Bush Not Leading

President Bush tonight offered a quick fix to the immigration issue. More border enforcement, an amnesty program, and a biometric ID card “for every legal foreign worker” as part of a vague promise to build ”a better system for verifying documents and work eligibility.”

Will it be enough to bring the Republican base onside? Hard to say.

It would be more comforting if the president had proposed something to put the Democrats on the spot. For instance, if he had proposed a program to deport all illegal immigrants arrested in the United States for ordinary infractions of the law, it would put liberal jurisdictions that ignore illegals on the spot. And it would distance Democrats from the American people.

And it would be nice to put the bite on Mexico, whose corrupt, unreformed economy is at the base of the illegal immigration problem.

But this commentator can’t get away from the feeling that Bush is sleepwalking. Nothing wrong with that: he’s had a rough time as president. But we Republicans need fresh leaders. We need people brimming with energy and eager to lead. And that is something we ain’t got right now.

Don't Be Downhearted, Writes Barone

If you are a conservative this morning you are probably feeling downhearted. After all the heavy lifting that conservatives have done, since 9/11 under George W. Bush, and back in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, how come conservatives don’t get no respect? Here we are with $3.00 gasoline, no end in sight in Iraq, a big immigration problem, a spendthrift Congress, and the president’s poll numbers are down in the low 30s.

Just don’t forget, writes Michael Barone, that despite all the gloom and doon we are living the legacy of Reagan and Thatcher and that they were never that popular.

Clinton and Blair, the center-left response to Reagan and Thatcher, were popular because they didn’t challenge the status quo, the status quo created by the hard work of Reagan and Thatcher.

It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.

The other thing to remember is that the left can’t deal with criticism. Bill O’Reilly reports on efforts to disinvite mainstream conservative politicians from giving commencement speeches at two major universities. What are we to think of the professors and students at the New School in New York who want to disinvite Senator John McCain from the school’s commencement, and at Boston College who want to disinvite Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from attending?

Ex-Brit conservative writer John Derbyshire tells the awful truth about liberals who don’t want to pollute their delicate minds with the voice of the other side.

Here you see one of the paradoxes of our strange times. Our women dress like sluts; our kids are taught about buggery in elementary school... yet so far as anything to do with the actual reality of actual human nature is concerned, we are as prim and shockable as a bunch of Quaker schoolmarms. After 40 years of lying to ourselves, we are now terrified of the truth.

Let us admit that we conservatives lie to ourselves. And we deserve to face the consequences. But imagine you are a liberal. Think of all the things that liberals have been lying about to themselves for the last 40 years. And then think about how it makes complete sense for liberals to be shouting down and disinviting distinguished conservative visitors to the university, and forbidding uncomfortable ideas from seeing the light of day on campus.

If you had got everything wrong for 40 years, how would you react to disturbing and frightening ideas?

Chavez Wows Economic Fundamentalists in London

They had a grand old-time revival last week in London. Pastor “Red Ken” Livinstone had Venezuelan pastor Hugo Chávez in town for a rousing witness to the faithful. Said host Livingstone to the assembled faithful, according to Richard Beeston in the London Times:

“Those who a decade ago said that socialism was dead, see it now very much alive in Venezuela,” Mr Livingstone said, adding that the march against capitalism was now too strong for America to resist.



“When they predicted the death of socialism they could not have predicted what was to come,” he said. “It is not that socialism failed, it is that socialism has not come.”

Yep. Those economic fundamentalists certainly have a way with words. Here’s George Anthony, a retired engineer:

“I think Chávez is doing a great job for the people of Venezuela,” he said. “He is showing that socialism works in Latin America and the rest of the world.”

But Edward Lucas, in an address during Christian Aid Week, had another take.

Christian Aid Week is rightly a time for warmheartedness. But that is no excuse for softheadedness. It is sloppy thinking, for example, to believe poverty in one place is caused by wealth in another.

...

Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has shown convincingly how abuse of property rights by the powerful and corrupt prevents subsistence farmers and shantytown dwellers from getting on to the first rung of the wealth-creating ladder. No property rights mean no collateral for loans, no mobility and no investment.



That still eludes much of the anti-poverty lobby.

Shall I go on?

Without enforceable contracts, the rich and powerful are free to plunder the poor and weak. Debts are uncollectable; assets unprotectable.

Commentators have been remarking for some years about the decline of property rights under the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez.

[T]ragically, anti-poverty campaigners in the West have allowed themselves to be conned by the protectionist arguments of rich people in poor countries. The protection of corrupt, incompetent and uncompetitive producers and providers of goods and services in poor countries levies yet another tax on the weakest.

And of course the most corrupt, incompetent and uncompetitive producers can be found in thug oil regimes from Saudi Arabia to Iran to Venezuela.

Meanwhile the thug dictator Chávez today

will be the guest of honour at City Hall, visit the House of Commons and deliver a speech in Whitehall before departing for Libya to meet his fellow revolutionary, Colonel Gaddafi.

And when the thug regime of Bolivarian socialism collapses in misery and violence will Pastor Red Ken and his followers still be saying that socialism has not been tried?

"Connect the Dots" but Don't "Collect The Dots"

Do you mean to say, Senator Leahy, that you had no idea that the NSA was doing data mining on phone records? That you, as the ranking minority member on the Judiciary Committee have never been briefed on this program?

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida? These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything. ... Where does it stop?" _ Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Notice that the Senator did not express suprise. He just expressed shock and outrage. His words are, if you can believe it, rather artfully chosen.

And Senator Leahy, if you are shocked and appalled by the efforts of the NSA to “collect the dots” about terrorists operations are you going to remain respectfully silent the next time that the government fails to “connect the dots?” What would be your position on that?

This business of “collect the dots” vs. “connect the dots” is the idea of columnist and humorist James Lileks, interviewed here (perm) by Hugh Hewitt. It’s nonsense, says Lileks,

because what they're telling you, essentially, is that the Democratic platform is not to do any data mining, any sort of pattern matching. They want us to connect the dots, but they do not want us to collect the dots. The dots should apparently just walk up and volunteer, here I am. I'm a dot. And that's the extent of the War On Terror.

The liberal obsession with government eavesdropping is intriguing. For this conservative, the government eavesdropping on all my financial transactions and complete access to all my salary records is profoundly disturbing. But really, I should care about the government listening in on my phone conversations?

Liberals think differently. They imagine themselves involved at some future time in some political conspiracy, valiantly battling against the fascist US government, and dissenting against its illegal and immoral foreign policy. One thinks of John Kerry negotiating with the North Vietnamese back during the Vietnam War. Imagining such a heroic future for themselves they want the rules set up now so they can conspire against the government of the United States in the future without being monitored. But finances? Well, they work for the government, and the government is going to be paying ttheir pension.

But the rest of us who are not liberals have to wonder. Is this liberal concern for “privacy” real, or is it just liberal conceit?

What's In a Name?

The Social Security Adminstration recently announced the most popular names given to American children.

Emily is the top name for girls. Again. And Jacob is the most popular name for boys. Again.

Things aren’t changing at the top very much. Emily has been the top name for girls every year since 1996, and Jacob has been the top name for boys every year since 1999.

Here is the top twenty for 2005.

Rank Male name Female name 1 Jacob Emily 2 Michael Emma 3 Joshua Madison 4 Matthew Abigail 5 Ethan Olivia 6 Andrew Isabella 7 Daniel Hannah 8 Anthony Samantha 9 Christopher Ava 10 Joseph Ashley 11 William Sophia 12 Alexander Elizabeth 13 Ryan Alexis 14 David Grace 15 Nicholas Sarah 16 Tyler Alyssa 17 James Mia 18 John Natalie 19 Jonathan Chloe 20 Nathan Brianna Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth.

What is really interesting is how the Briannas and Alexises have gone right down. It’s back to the good old names, just like George M. Cohan said it.

For it is Mary, Mary

Plain as any name can be

But with propriety, society will say Marie

But it was Mary, Mary

Long before the fashions came

And there is something there that sounds so square

It's a grand old name

George M. Cohan says you better watch out for that Marie.

Don't ever fear sweet Mary

Beware of sweet Marie

That high-falutin Marie is trouble.