What is "Price Gouging?"

You’d expect economist Thomas Sowell to be annoyed by the concept of “price gouging.”  And he is.  Just what exactly is "price gouging," anyway, he asks?

The phrase is used when prices are higher than most people are used to. But there is nothing special or magic about what we happen to be used to.
When the conditions that determined the old prices change, the new prices are likely to be very different. That is not rocket science.

OK.  Quite right, Dr. Sowell.  So they complain to their congressman.

But let us indulge in a little amateur psychology here.  People don't like unexpected increases in prices.  They don't like them because at some point they are going to have to change their behavior and do something about the increased prices.  They experience a "felt uneasiness," in the words of Ludwig von Mises, and feel called upon to act.  They could act by reducing their consumption, either of the newly expensive product or something else.  Or they could act by writing to their congressman, or bitching at the office about "price gouging."

Acting to change your consumption patterns is hard.  Acting by writing to your congressman is easy.

Congressmen know that it is no good arguing with an irate constituent.  The best thing is to do some arm-waving and pretend to do something by introducing legislation.  Hopefully, by the time you have finished your arm-waving the constituent will have got over his anger.

What is "price gouging?" It is a price increase large enough that doing nothing may not be enough.  And we don’t like it one bit.

Why We Don't Take Comedy Seriously

Back in the good old days of Greek drama, the arts were properly balanced between tragedy and comedy, argues Julian Gough. 

Unfortunately most of the comedies were lost, and only Aristotle’s rules of tragedy were preserved in the Poetics.  His rules of comedy were lost.

Then along came Christianity with an overbalance towards the tragic view of life. So 

western culture since the middle ages has overvalued the tragic and undervalued the comic. We think of tragedy as major, and comedy as minor. Brilliant comedies never win the best film Oscar.

He doesn’t say it, but it’s not just Christians that are too serious.  Your average academic lefty is far too serious too.

And we know why.  When you want political power the last thing you would think of doing is to talk about the Human Comedy.  Power comes from frightening the people and then leading them to safety.

But there’s been plenty of good comedy down the ages.  Gough lists his favorites:

Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

That’s all very well, of course.  I’d reply with Shakepeare’s comedies, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Dorothy Sayers, and Tom Wolfe.  That’s because I’m a guy who celebrates our shared human comedy rather than take a holier-than-thou ironic distance like Heller and Vonnegut.

The problem with the modern arts is, of course, that it has joined the establishment.  All those university professors of English and artists-in-residence create a distance between the creator and the audience.

Probably the best thing for the arts would be for it to be banished from the ivory tower and forced to work for a living.

But that would never happen, because art is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market, old chap.

Iran Tottering on the Edge

How bad are things in Iran?  It’s hard to know.  Our international media are good at showing us made-for-TV bombs in Baghdad, but not very good at peering under the blankets of thug-dictator regimes like Ahmaninejad’s.

According to Spengler, things are in very bad shape.  Inflation is 20 percent, monetary expansion 40 percent, and it is beginning to look as if the regime is faking its economic statistics.  Then there is employment, or lack of it. 

Iranian dissidents put overall unemployment at 30% and youth unemployment at 50%. Government subsidies sustain a very large portion of the population; 42% of the non-agricultural population is employed by the Iranian state, compared with 17% in Pakistan.

 And now Ahmaninejad has passed a decree to roll back interest rates. Yeah.

So what is going to happen?  Is Iran going to stop its imperial program, or go for broke?  Can we talk them out of it?

An old piece of diplomatic wisdom states that one always should give one’s enemy a way out. But I see no way out for the pocket empire of Persia.

That means war, and war sooner rather than later.  Maybe even this very summer.

After all, it is at least 18 months till the Democrats take over in the US and that may be too long.

We Are All in It Together, Clinton Says:

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says that the Bush “ownership society” is really an “on-your-own” society, according to Holly Ramer

"I prefer a ’we’re all in it together’ society," she said. "I believe our government can once again work for all Americans. It can promote the great American tradition of opportunity for all and special privileges for none."

That means pairing growth with fairness, she said.

One of the interesting questions when a Democrat ups and says something like this is: Are you saying that the $2.5 trillion the government spends on social programs from education to training to health care to pensions isn’t working?

Everyone believes is fairness. Everyone believes that we’re all in it together.  The question is what do you define by “fairness” and what do you propose to do about it?

Judging from the content of Clinton’s speech, she wants to jiggle around the various special tax breaks and dodges and increase energy taxes. 

I’m not sure what that has to do with being in it together.

Since Hillary Clinton is a Democrat we assume that what she wants to do is spend more money on Democratic voters, stuff like increasing the earned income tax credit.  But Democratic voters are already drowning under $2.5 trillion a year in government programs.  I don’t know if they can stand any more.

Of course, Clinton also wants to increase income taxes, to restore the tax system of the 1990s.

And when the president’s irresponsible tax breaks for high-income Americans expire, we will return to the income tax rates for upper- income Americans that we had in the 1990s, rates that were consistent with a balanced budget and economic growth.

Funny thing.  AP writer Holly Ramer didn’t mention Clinton’s proposal to increase personal income taxes in her article. You would think that would be the most important “news you can use” and that as a professional journalist, Ramer would be anxious to communicate this to her readers. 

I wonder why.

GOP Tide in Full Ebb

Don’t look now, writes David Frum, but the party of Ronald Reagan is heading into “a horrible Republican defeat in 2008.”

And it’s not going to do any good to invoke the Gipper this time around. 

Ronald Reagan was elected at a time when every social indicator seemed to be moving in the wrong direction: crime up, abortion up, divorce up, welfare dependency up, test scores down.

 Reagan-era politics just isn’t going to cut it in the 21st century.

No doubt.  But let’s not get carried away by the gloom and doom.  It is right and proper for the Democrats to win in 2008.  It is time for a change.  The whole point of democratic politics is that you get to throw the rascals out.  Again and again.

Here’s a cheery thought.  After 1932 and the Great Depression it took 5 presidential terms before the voters upchucked the Democrats.  After 1960 it took 2 terms, after 1976 one term.  Then when Clinton was elected in 1992 it took half a term for the voters to upchuck the Democratic Congress.  Sensibly, Clinton governed like a Republican from then on.

It will be interesting to see how Democrats fare after 2008.  First of all, they’ll want to raise taxes to pay for all their programs.  Then there is the question of the war on terror.  Then there is the Social Security mess, the Medicare mess, the education mess, and the single parent mess (see above) for everyone except college graduates.

All in all, I’d say the Democrats deserve to win in 2008.

As H.L. Mencken said:  “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Marriage in America: It's a Class Thing

As the June wedding season swings around The Economist(sub) is taking a look at marriage in America, keying off Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America.  What do they find?

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing.

They have a handy little graph which shows the percentage of children living with single parents since 1964.  It looks like this:

Mother’s education	1964	1995	2001
Less than high school	13%	42%	37%
High school	7%	27%	29%
Post high school	6%	25%	23%
College degree	5%	11%	10%

 Yes.  It’s special, isn’t it?

Now the question is, why?  How could the child-raising practices of Americans have diverged so much over half a century?  It couldn’t be anything to do with the War on Poverty, could it?

Let us do some reckless speculation.  The reason that college-educated women don’t go in for single parenthood is that you can’t raise a middle-class kid in a neighborhood with decent schools and send them to college if you are a single mother.  The numbers just don’t add up. For college-educated women it just makes sense to dial in a husband and father when you are planning to have children.

But if you have no education then the government offer of support looks pretty good.

But notice that the incidence of single motherhood has been going down among the least educated since 1995.  That’s interesting, isn’t it? 

Now let’s see.  In 1996 Congress enacted welfare reform.  It could be that since the end of welfare-as-we-know-it more under-educated women have been choosing marriage for raising their children. 

It’s a concept.

Down the Memory Hole

Last fall John J. Miller observed that military history is dying out in our nation’s universities.  There are still a few old codgers left, aging professors close to retirement, but they aren’t being replaced.

On this Memorial Day Rich Lowry adds his two cents worth.

John A. Lynn recently looked back at the past 30 years of the prestigious academic journal The American Historical Review. He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars.

We know why wars and military history are marginalized in the modern university.  It is bias, pure and simple.

New Republic contributing editor David A. Bell locates that bias deep in the social sciences: "The origin of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational and alien to modern civilization." This represents a fundamental misapprehension of human nature and thus the nature of history.

That is to say, it goes beyond bias to the fundamental understanding of the world held by Enlightenment-era thinkers and their adepts.

The odd thing is that, in its revolutionary subculture, the Enlightenment folks understand conflict completely.  They understand that marginalized peoples must elbow their way into history or be ground underfoot.  The racism-sexism-classism-homophobia folks experience everything in terms of power and conflict.

And Saul Alinsky famously wrote his Rules for Radicals to teach lefties how to battle the reactionary establishment.

The good thing is that men love studying wars and conflict so much that plenty of military history can go forward outside the academy.  It shows up on the groaning shelves of military history at the local bookstore and on cable’s History Channel which has so much programming about World War II that wags have renamed it the "Hitler" Channel.

Chances are that in the near future we’ll need a generation of leaders well versed in military arts and military history in order to deal effectively with radical Islam.

It’s a pity that our universities won’t be of any help.

Peggy Noonan Against Senate Bill

It’s one thing for your normal right-wing knuckle-dragging yahoos like you and me to be against the Senate Immigration Bill.  But Peggy Noonan?

Naturally I hope the new immigration bill fails. It is less a bill than a big dirty ball of mischief, malfeasance and mendacity, with a touch of class malice, and it’s being pushed by a White House that is at once cynical and inept. The bill’s Capitol Hill supporters have a great vain popinjay’s pride in their own higher compassion. They are inclusive and you’re not, you cur, you gun-totin’ truckdriver’s-hat-wearin’ yahoo. It’s all so complex, and you’d understand this if you weren’t sort of dumb.

Yes.  Nice Peggy Noonan wrote that, including the italics.

Yeah.  Well.  Americans don’t go for that popinjay attitude.  And I’d say that for some time the American people have been looking for a way to blow their political popinjays a raspberry.  We can’t do it on Social Security; we can’t do it on the war.  But we can do it on immigration.

What would Peggy have us do?

We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we’ve eaten.

Close the borders, she says, and have a conversation. That may not be as easy as she thinks, if you read what Alan Reynolds had to say recently. 

While we are having our conversation we should go to work on our existing immigrants.

As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven’t only joined a place of riches, it’s a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they’ve joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed.

And we know who has been stopping the Americanization process in recent decades.

Peggy insists that the solution should not lead to scenes of sobbing families being torn apart and sent away on buses.

But one commentator pointed out that you probably don’t have to do that to call a halt to illegal immigration.  All you have to do is get a bit tougher:  Tougher on apprehending illegals and tougher on employers who hire them.  It really is a dollars and cents thing.  If it costs too much to hire the coyote to get you across the border, then fewer people will come.  If it is too hard to avoid arrest by local law enforcement, fewer people will come.

It’s a control issue. America needs immigration.  It just doesn’t need immigration that swamps the existing culture.  The United States of America is a remarkable society.  Why it should be so favored with staggering prosperity and good government is a question that many people have asked and few have really answered, even the great Tocqueville.

If we wanted to guess how to keep our prosperity and our good government the best answer would probably be: Change things, but don’t change things too fast.

That, of course, has been the conservative prescription ever since Edmund Burke.

Evangelicals Enter Establishment

Lberal religion reporter Hanna Rosin is one of our favorites here at Road to the Middle Class.  Not because she is a liberal but because she gets out and reports on conservative Christians in America.  She doesn’t really like them but she does a professional reporting job on them.

Now she’s taking a look at evangelical lawyers like Laura Goodling, the former Justice Department official who testified on Capitol Hill this week about the US Attorney firings.

Don’t think these are all just hayseeds, warns Rosin.

Goodling is part of a new generation of evangelicals ushered in by Falwell, who insisted that Christians get involved in politics. They are graduates of the exploding number of evangelical colleges, which no longer aim to create a parallel subculture but instead to train "Christian leaders to change the world," as the Regent mission statement reads.

Goodling is a graduate of the law school at Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson.  And she got her bachelor’s degree at Messiah College.  There are 150 graduates of the Regent law school in the White House.

Exactly.  Liberals be afraid; be very afraid. 

These people are all over the place and when the next Democratic administration comes to Washington they will be scattering to Congressional staffs and to conservative think tanks.  Writes Rosin

It took the conservative political movement 30 years to become a fixture in American politics, and it’s taken evangelicals about the same. Like conservatives, evangelicals may remain chronically ambivalent, afflicted with a persecution complex despite their obvious successes. But they are embedded firmly enough into Washington to provide jobs for smart young Christians for generations to come.

Think about that for a moment.  It means that there are now two right-of-center movements that have penetrated into the governing establishment in the last generation: the philosophically-oriented conservative movement; and the spiritually-oriented evangelical movement.

What’s not to like?

Immigration Numbers

Supply-sider Alan Reynolds has had it with all the rhetoric on immigration.  Says he: 

Rational discussion of the Senate immigration bill is being stifled and befuddled by a few misused words and phrases that generate irrational anger and very little understanding.

So he comes up with the numbers.  And they are pretty impressive.

• 175 million foreign visitors per year
• 4.7 million business visitors per year
• 1.25 million new permanent residents per year
• 0.9 million temporary workers per year
• 0.6 million new citizens per year
• 0.5 million illegals per year 
• 56 percent of illegals from Mexico
• 30 percent of illegals from Asia
• 40-50 percent of illegals arrived legally

That is pretty interesting stuff.

"Hook-up" Culture: Girls Still Confused

You can see what a job that feminists have done on our young college women.  When it comes to the hook-up culture they can barely articulate the idea that it is tearing them to bits, as Ashley Herzog illustrates in this quote from an Ohio University co-ed freshman:

I think for guys, it’s a lot about hooking up; for girls it’s more of an emotional thing. Maybe the guy will call you; maybe he’ll just say ‘hi’ on the street. But he sees you as an object, while you’re upset. The guys are over-empowered.

No kidding!  But as a well-indoctrinated young women she can’t bear to be judgmental.

Even at the basic level, the sexual revolution was bad news for women:

While women bear the unwanted pregnancies, abortions, and emotional pain wrought by casual sex, men are free to move on to the next bedmate.

It’s enough to make you realize what the old rules about courting and commitment and marriage were all about.

It wasn’t really about the patriarchy or male power.  It was just about protecting women from male predation.

And, as the co-ed says, the hook-up culture makes the guys “over-empowered.”

Unfortunately, modern woman has to learn this the hard way, individually, in every female life.

And unfortunately, it takes her about half a life to realize that she’s been taken for a ride.

So which is worse: the old patriarchy in which women were chattels or the new hook-archy in which the guys are “over-empowered?”

The Unenforced Immigration Laws

No doubt, as our political leaders insist, there is a major immigration problem that requires an immigration amnesty law to be rushed through Congress.  It’s a pity that we don’t care to enforce the laws already on the books, writes Mark Krikorian:

Let’s look at a few of the initiatives already on the books that have languished in bureaucratic or political purgatory rather than getting done:

First of all, of course, there’s the fence. Only two miles have been built on the southern border yet, and there are 370 miles scheduled to be built before the end of 2008.

There’s the issue of state and local police forces helping to arrest illegals.  In 2002, the Justice Department issued an opinion that clarified the right of state and local law enforcement authorities to detain illegals, but the Bush Administration put it on ice, “keeping in effect a Clinton-era policy directive discouraging state and local use of immigration law.”

There’s the policy of the Treasury Department that has told banks that it’s ok to offer bank accounts to people with Mexican “matricula consular.”  And the IRS allows illegals to use a Tax Identification Number (i.e., a Social Security number in all but name).

Obviously, when the government makes it difficult to arrest illegals and makes it easy to live as an illegal in the United States, then people will come.

That’s fine, as long as it is the official policy of the United States.

Last time I looked, it wasn’t.

Committing Politics in Britain

Here in the United States our leaders are busy rushing a immigration amnesty bill to the president’s desk before the voters notice and get mobilized against it.  The last thing they want is an open discussion of the issues.

But in Britain Conservative Party leader David Cameron is having an open discussion of education policy with his Tory Party rank-and-file.  In an op-ed in the London Times he writes:

This is the week when the Conservative Party got serious about education reform. Our approach rests on two things. First, an instinctive Conservative belief in rigour, parental choice and competition as the best way of raising standards. Secondly, on the evidence of what works — both in Britain and around the world.

That’s a polite way of saying that his spokesman’s speech the previous week about “grammar schools” set off a firestorm of criticism.  Many Tories want a return to academic, selective grammar schools and away from the current system of “bog-standard” comprehensive secondary schools.

But you have to give Cameron a tip of the hat.  He didn’t hide from his critics.  He came right out and confronted them.

First thing he cite in his article is the success of school choice in Sweden, the Netherlands, and “some states in the US.” 

Oh?  You didn’t know that they have school choice in socialist Sweden and liberal Netherlands?  No doubt you get your information from the mainstream media.  But here at Road to the Middle Class we are right on top of it.

Like conservatives in the United States, Cameron wants to avoid “selection” and wants students choosing schools not schools choosing students.

Notice how he gives Tony Blair a half-hearted pat on the back:

David Willetts and I are applying Conservative principles and best-practice education reform from around the world to our schools in England. This is what Tony Blair came to realise was necessary and has been moving towards in the latter stages of his premiership. His education Act last year was a step in the right direction, which is why we backed it.

That issues from his strategic decision to avoid opposition for the sake of opposition.  He wants to support good ideas even if they come from the other party.

Of course, he goes on to say that Blair’s party has since given up on reform.  Only Conservatives can be trusted to have their hearts in the job.  And it doesn’t hurt to talk about discipline in schools.

There’s a word for Cameron’s open advocacy and willingness to debate his party’s critics in public.  Politics.

What a concept.

The Immigration Bill and the Big Picture

 It is, as  writes, an outrage when the governing classes try to rush a major revision of the nation’s immigration law past the voters and past their legislators without what our liberal friends call “a national conversation.”

He has thoughtfully provided a critique of the Senate bill as it became available over the weekend.

Today he has listed a number of proposed amendments to the bill.  One of them is to establish a special category of aliens from jihadist countries.  No quick Z-visa for them!

 In the frenzy of day-to-day political combat, let us not forget the big picture.  It was one of President Eisenhower’s maxims that if he couldn’t see the solution to a problem he tried to make it bigger.

The big picture is that we are in the middle of a great human migration, perhaps the greatest ever since modern humans first crossed the Straits of Hormuz 50,000 years ago and spread across the whole world.

Today’s great migration is from the country to the city.  In China at this moment, about 25 million people are moving to the city each year. 

Not surprisingly, people are migrating to the best city they know about.  For many Mexicans the best place to go is not Mexico City or Monterrey.  As one Mexican immigrant said to me from the driver’s seat of his mammoth Chevy Suburban SUV: “In Mexico you have to pay someone to get a job.”

So they come to the great job-creating cities of the United States.

For us, this is all very well.  Just don’t all come at once.

It is the job of of our government, legislators, executive, and judges, to control the flow of immigration so that it does not create hardships for the American people.  We care about the Mexican people, of course.  But first we must take care of our own.

So the job of the government is to control, channel, and limit the flow.  That is something that the government has clearly not been doing very well at all.

That is why folks like Hugh Hewitt are right when they insist that before we start handing out amnesty to illegal immigrants the government must demonstrate that it has gotten control of the borders. 

How Much Does the Elite Know?

The great presumption of the twentieth century was that an educated elite capable of “rational, factual, socialist argument” was much better way at running the country than the higgling and the chaos of the market.

So it wrong to suggest, Thomas Sowell writes, that either economic interests rule (Marx) or that ideas rule (Keynes).   

My own view is that differences in bedrock assumptions underlying ideas play a major role in determining how people differ in what policies, principles or ideologies they favor.

But suppose that the bedrock assumption of our age, that the best government is government by a rational elite of experts, is wrong? 

No big deal.  It just explains most of the famines and economic disasters of the twentieth century, from the Ukrainian famine to the Great Leap Forward famine, to the extended Great Depression and the stagflation of the 1970s.

Opposed to this conventional wisdom that an educated elite knows best is the insurgent view of people like Thomas Sowell.

If you start from a belief that the most knowledgeable person on Earth does not have even 1 percent of the total knowledge on Earth, that shoots down social engineering, economic central planning, judicial activism and innumerable other ambitious notions favored by the political left.
If no one has even 1 percent of the knowledge available, not counting the vast amount yet to be discovered, imposing from the top of the notions favored by elites convinced of their own superior knowledge and virtue is a formula for disaster.

What Sowell is doing here is dumbing down the central insight of two experts, Lugwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. 

Mises said that the socialist commonwealth would fail because it could not compute prices (i.e., would lack the knowledge to know what to produce and what not to produce). 

Hayek said that the brilliant man in Whitehall or Washington could not outperform the millions of economic actors with their intimate knowledge of economic facts on the ground.

Today we have a report from Peter Ferrara that the Democrats in Congress are ramping up taxes and spending in their budget resolutions.

That is another way of saying that we, the committee of 535 best people assisted by government experts, know what is best for America.  We know how to spend Americans’ money better than they do.

Our Democratic friends are liable to wake up pretty soon with a bad cold.

Who Needs School Anyway?

Pity poor Marilee Jones, formerly Dean of Admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She figured she needed a bushel of degrees to work at MIT so she faked ’em, according to James Taranto.  Fortunately, Taranto only works for The Wall Street Journal edit page.  So he doesn’t need all those sheepskins. 

I feel her pain, for school never agreed with me. I repeatedly found myself in conflict with teachers and professors. I left high school after my sophomore year; and although I spent several years in college, I never bothered to graduate.

Actually, it’s probably true that school disagrees with most boys.  Especially now that school is so feminized and gun-free.  As Ruth Dudley Edwards puts it:

The feminisation of education and the ensuing triumph of political correctness have turned generations of boys off reading, not least by urging them to get in touch with their feelings and despise that part of themselves that wants to see heroes biffing villains.

You mean the way that Brigadier Ritchie Hook used to go on about “biffing” in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour series?

Perhaps they could read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden and

swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera

and so on.  But it’s not just school that boys don’t like.  It’s classes in general.

Women are always going to classes to learn something, even if it is “tennis, wine-tasting, sailing.”  Then they complain because they don’t meet any men there, writes Ann Althouse.  It’s the old story.

Because, after all, you know that if you’re going to explain gender difference, you’ve got to assume that whatever the women are doing is good, and it’s the men who have the problem. So: You know those men. They think they’re so smart. You can’t tell them anything. They won’t ask for directions.

Let’s look at the male side of this, shall we?  Althouse continues.

Men prefer to look at something they have decided to do and figure it out on their own. They like to observe, analyze, and discover. They accept the risks and enjoy the excitement of trial and error. They don’t like sitting around having someone tell them what to do, and they aren’t intrigued by the prospect of meeting women who spend so much time doing something they loathe.

OK, she admits.  She made that up.

Then there’s this from Althouse’s comment section.

My daughter, just yesterday, looks at me as we were watching television and says, "What’s with this stupid female superiority thing?"
She elaborated a little bit... no matter what[,] the girls on TV were always right. Smarter, wiser, etc.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Dems Can't Break the Habit

Despite their promise of moderation and transparency last November the Democrats can’t break the habit of taxing and spending, reports Senate Minority Leader John Boehner writes that the Democrats recently tried to change the House rules to allow them to vote for raising taxes without leaving their fingerprints on the vote.  That’s not what Democrats promised last year.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Ca.) said in December, “[W]e promised the American people that we would have the most honest and most open government and we will.”

It’s sad but true that political parties do not get into office on the strength of their programs.  They get into power because the voters can’t stand the other party for another minute.

Iraq: After the Americans Leave

Conservatives think that when the United States leaves Iraq that all hell will break loose, and maybe it will.

But this article from StrategyPage shows that behind all the bombs and explosions there is a slow motion civil war and sorting out process going on.

Several years of having a Shia majority running the country has instilled a confidence in the Shia community that has not been felt in generations.

Of course there’s the question of Iranian influence.  But the Iraqi Shias  are beginning to think "we can do this."  Maybe they can survive without Iran.

Another interesting thought is what “counter-insurgency” will look like after the Americans leave.  Think Hamat in Syria.

But with U.S. troops gone, the Iraqi security forces will be inclined to wage war the traditional way. That means massive use of firepower against civilians in any neighborhood where the Sunni Arab terrorists show up, or are found. In Syria, the 1982 uprising by Islamic radicals was put down, in part, by the destruction of the town of Hamat, and the massacre of over 10,000 civilians there. That was meant as a message to the rebels.

It’s a message that everyone in the Middle East remembers, and a tradition that everyone understands.  And once the Americans leave, “that will no longer be a problem.”

Who Defeated the Soviet Union?

In hindsight, everyone knew that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse.  Conservatives knew that it was the firmness of Ronald Reagan.  Liberals suddenly discovered that the Soviet Union was bound to collapse anyway—although they had cleverly avoided telling anyone before 1991.

But  Yegor Gaidar in his book, The Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, has a different take.  It all started when the Bolsheviks were deciding how to develop the Soviet Union in 1928-29.  Should they allow peasant argiculture and the market system while still hanging onto political power?  Or should they choose another way?

The solution preferred by Joseph Stalin was the expropriation of peasants’ property, forced collectivization, and extraction of grain. Judging from the available documents, the essence of this decision was relatively simple. Bukharin and Rykov essentially told Stalin: "In a peasant country, it is impossible to extract grain by force. There will be civil war." Stalin answered, "I will do it nonetheless."

The problem was that the forced expropriation of grain to feed the industrialization of the cities (the strategy also used by Mao) resulted in widespread famine in the countryside.

That might be fine, temporarily, while the industrial sector got up to speed, but unfortunately, it never did.  The industrial output of the Soviet Union never came up to world-class standards. As Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, put it

 "No one will take our machinery production. That is why we are exporting mainly raw materials."

And nobody has ever argued that the Soviets had a clue when it came to consumer products.

Fortunately, the Soviets got a lucky break in the 1970s.  The oil price explosion and oil discoveries in western Siberia enabled them to pay for grain imports by exporting oil. Then came the fateful day in 1985.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

It cost the Soviet Union $20 billion a year that it needed by buy grain from abroad.  For a few years the Soviets were able to stay afloat by borrowing money from the West.  Then came the crunch.  The banks refused to continue lending.

Anatoly Cherniayev described the situation in Moscow in March 1991:

If [the grain] cannot be obtained somewhere, famine may come by June. . . . Moscow has probably never seen anything like that throughout its history—even in its hungriest years.

And that was the end of the Soviet Union.

So maybe now we can understand why the United States has had such a chummy relationship with the Saudis.  They threw the switch that ended the Soviet Union.

Now if only they would throw the switch on their Wahabi mosques and their poisonous imams.

Jerry Falwell and Enthusiastic Christianity

What are we to say about Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist Christian pastor who founded the Moral Majority?  Was he a moral hero, pushing back against a culture of immorality?  Or was he a hate-filled bigot?  For a lot of heat, but not much light, you can read the comments section after a recollection of Falwell by R. Albert Mohler Jr. here.

The facts of Falwell’s life, as reported by Kristen Gelineau, are these.

Falwell, who started a fundamentalist church in an abandoned bottling plant in Lynchburg in 1956 with just 35 members, built it into a religious empire that included the 24,000-member Thomas Road Baptist Church, the "Old Time Gospel Hour" carried on TV stations around the country, and 9,600-student Liberty University, which he founded in 1971 as Lynchburg Baptist College.

But what did it all mean?  The best place I have found is James M. Ault, Jr’s Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church—as experienced, we should say, by a liberal sociologist at the very apogee of the Moral Majority in 1983-84.

The pastor of the Shawmut River Baptist Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, was Frank Valenti, who started out as an Italian Catholic.  He’d barely learned to read in school and was badly wounded in Vietnam.  It was when lying wounded that he got religion, and ended up studying to be a pastor at Falwell’s Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg.

The curriculum at the college was heavy on hands-on education and light on academics, but “its modest reading assignments proved too much for Frank.”  But still, he graduated and founded his own Baptist church in Worcester.

Like Frank, the people drawn to fundamentalist Christianity are people on the cusp of literacy.  They are people making the transition from the culture of the spoken word to the culture of the written word.  And Bible study is the center of the experience, for it is through reading and discussing the Bible that fundamentalist Christians negotiate the transition from the world of the spoken word (tradition means passing on knowledge with the spoken word) to the world of the written word.

And reading is a challenge for them. “Wow, I skipped a whole bunch of words there,” says one man at Bible study.

Reading itself proved a challenge for others around the table, too, especially the men, whose time and attention at school had often been more limited than the women’s.

But the combination of reading and discussion creates a new culture. Here is one of the church members, Phil Strong.

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us answers.  He would open up God’s word and say, “OK, here’s what God has for you.’”

It is important to appreciate the radical nature of what has happened to a person who says that.  They are living right at the intersection of the traditional world of the spoken word and the newly experience world of the written word.  It is an experience that we, who cannot imagine an illiterate world, can barely grasp.

But of course to many the culture of the fundamentalist church is something to be stamped out.  As one Newsweek commenter wrote:

Jerry Falwell was a parasite who fed on fear, ignorance, and bigotry.

Well, yes—if you believe that exploration and creativity and tolerance are the most important, maybe the only values.  But fundamentalist Christianity is not for people in that kind of mind space. 

Fundamentalist or enthusiastic Christianity for people experiencing the “leap in being” from the world of power and powerlessness to the world of rules.  That is why it flourishes in the favelas of South America and the slums of southern Africa.

And for millions of people, it is the Bible and the desire to read it and understand it that brings them to literacy.

Entrepreneurs and Media Dinosaurs

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll get to hear.  He can disembowel a pompous MSMer as quick as a Mexican immigrant can dress a chicken in a meat-packing plant.

But he’s also good at interviewing to bring his interviewee out, as in this radio interview with Michael S. Malone, author of Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.  The way Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard did it came to be called the HP Way:

It’s called the HP way, and it’s several things. One of it is it’s a culture built on trust, all the way from the two partners trusting each other completely, down through the entire organization, where you trust people to make their own decisions, and you put the employees first, and innovation right behind, and you drive your way forward by empowering your people to do the right thing. It’s a powerful culture. It’s unbelievable at its peak.

Above all, Bill and Dave had no nostaglia for buildings or for products.

If a product stopped being profitable, they got rid of it. They got rid of buildings, they changed locations. The only continuity in their management career, and the reason they ended up on top, and are as famous as they are, is because they put their employees first.

This has become a commonplace today.  We all say that a company is only as good as its people.  But back in the heyday of the high industrial age, people thought that capital, resources, and labor went together to make prosperity.  Now we know that resources and capital are second-tier.  It is human capital that is everything.

So then we come to the newspaper industry.  Says Malone:

A couple of years ago, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was maybe the first guy to actually come out and say newspapers are all going to die. And luckily, Rupert Murdoch came along two weeks later, and took all the flak from me with his speech. But what set me off was I realized I hadn’t read a newspaper in six months.

In the newspaper they are hanging onto their product, the physical newspaper, and the printing plant out back like grim death.

And what I noticed reading this story about Lileks and the Star Tribune was, and I’m an old newspaper man, 30 years writing for newspapers now, it’s that they’re still attached to the printing plant out back, to the trucks that deliver the newspapers, to the linoleum in the newsroom.

And what are they doing?  They are giving their senior talent golden parachutes and sending them out the door. (Of course, they probably have no option, since newspapers are union shops.)  They are hanging onto the legacy hardware and sending the talent away.

Malone went over to the business school at Oxford University and he gave them a speech.

I gave a big speech on entrepreneurship, and the power of entrepreneurship, and how I thought it was the single most important phenomenon of modern times, and that entrepreneurship needed to be cultivated. It was the source of all the new jobs in the world, the source of almost all the innovation, and yet entrepreneurs had no constituents.

It’s the great issue of our times.  The entrepreneurial model is changing the face of the workplace, but government is still doing the command-and-control thing.

Sooner or later, something’s got to give.

Riling Up the Republican Base

The art of politics is to divide up the electorate neatly into 51-49, with 51 percent for our side.  You want to fire up your base, encourage moderatew with your message of hope, and put the other base to sleep.

But Democrats seem to be working hard to fire up the Republican base.  First of all,  The Prowler reports, the Democrats are planning to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine that requires  “both sides” of an issue to be aired on the public airwaves.  And the reason seems to be pure politics.

"First, [Democrats] failed on the radio airwaves with Air America, no one wanted to listen," says a senior adviser to Pelosi. "Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it. Second, it looks like the Republicans are going to have someone in the presidential race who has access to media in ways our folks don’t want, so we want to make sure the GOP has no advantages going into 2008."

Look Democrats, if you want to do one thing that would really rile up the Republican base, go ahead, make my day.

Then there’s the Democratic plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire.  According to the Heritage Foundation:

As it currently stands, the House budget resolu­tion proposes to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, which could potentially cause the average taxpayer to face an additional $3,026 in taxes. Further, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire could cause great damage to the economy, reducing both job creation and economic growth.

Last time the Democrats increased taxes, in 1993 the result was immediate.  The voters chose in 1994 a Republican Congress.

Maybe the Democrats are doing these things because that’s the only tune they know how to play.

But I’d say that the strategic thing to do would be to keep the Republican base fast asleep and discouraged.

After all, the Democrats spend something like $2.5 trillion in taxes a year on pensions, health care, education, and welfare.  Isn’t that enough to keep their supporters at home?

Let's Throw Good Money After Bad

Yes.  Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the high-school dropout problem.  That’s about what Education Secretary Spellings is proposing, according to Donald Lambro.

Back in the 1960s President Kennedy pointed out that four in ten youngsters did not finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs. Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic

 Secretary Spellings has a solution.

Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization be increased another $1 billion "to improve and strengthen our public high schools serving low-income students."

Like that’s going to help.

Look, we know why kids are failing high school and high schools are failing kids.  It is part of the whole welfare state syndrome.

• Why bother to work in school when many low-income women can use the welfare system to get support?
• Why bother to work in school when women are available to you—without having to demonstrate the ability to get a “decent” job?
• Why bother to educate kids when your job is pretty well guaranteed for life?

And so on.  The problem is that we don’t know what kind of schools low-income parents want.  We don’t know what kind of schools would best prepare low-income kids for a productive life.

All we know is what the experts have told us and what the education monopoly has bullied us into funding.

Imagine that the auto industry had been run by university professors and union leaders for the last 160 years. 

That’s the point.  What schools need is what everyone needs: open competition for the votes of the consumers.

Traditional values down, but not out

Some political actors believe that the Democratic capture of Congress in 2006 represents the end of the traditional values movement in America, reports Cheryl Welzstein.

"Huge numbers of religiously observant Americans voted for Democrats, reversing a 14-year trend," according to the liberal People for the American Way (PFAW). "There are hugely hopeful signs that the pendulum in American public life is swinging back from the far-right extremes."

 Well, sorta.  According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

Most white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants voted Republican, although by slightly smaller numbers. White Catholics, who in the past have strongly supported Republicans, voted for Democrats in 2006 by a bare majority.
"Nonwhite" voters of any faith, who tend to vote Democratic, backed their party in higher numbers. The biggest Democratic surge came from three small religious groups that skew Democratic — white "unaffiliated," white "other faiths" and white Jews.

But there is definitely a big Democratic tilt developing in the youth vote.

Some observers criticize the traditional values movement for identifying too much with the Republican Party

Says Mark J. Rozell, a public-policy professor at George Mason University who studies religion in politics: "There are many, and I will include myself, that think that the religious conservative movement may have made a mistake some years ago by adopting a one-party strategy, that they should have done more to play the parties off each other.

That’s easy to say, of course.  But the reality is that the Republican Party is friendly to religious believers and the Democratic Party is friendly to secularists.  And that orientation is not likely to change much in the future.  What’s a believer to do?

Last November the voters threw the Republicans out for a number of reasons, and rightly so.  Throwing the rascals out is always the right thing to do.  In fact, the voters don’t do it enough.

Now it’s time for Democrats to demonstrate that they deserve the support the voters gave them.

Global Guerrillas for Breakfast

Alerted by the trend-spotting Instapundit to the new book by John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization I naturally proceeded to the blog by BNW author John Robb.  Right now he’s taking a look at the Fort Dix six.

We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act.

And frankly, young men like to create mayhem.  It’s what evolution designed them for.

Open source warfare is what we are seeing in Iraq, in Srk Lanka, in the Niger Delta, in Somalia, and in southern Thailand.  Loosely organized terror gangs form and reform to execute spectacular violence on our vulnerable interconnected world and “hollow out” nation states by negating their monopoly on violence.

For instance in this item Robb reports on the Tamil Tigers air force.  It is just a couple of light planes and it only has hand-held bombs.  But it’s cut tourism by 35 percent in Sri Lanka.

The current surge in Baghdad is doomed to fail because it will not be able to drive out the terror gangs.

It ain’t pretty reading.

Married Mothers Day

Why is it that liberals have made a world with their welfare state in which single mothers are subsidized and married mothers are penalized?  It’s something to think about this Mothers Day. The fact is that married mothers are essential, writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.

[M]arried mothers serve our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even themselves better than any of the dizzying array of alternatives to married motherhood.

But why? What’s the point of married mothers?  Look at the consequences

• Crime.  The children of married mothers are much less likely to get involved in crime.
• Psychological wellbeing. Children of married mothers are much less likely to experience “serious emotional trouble.”
• Relationships. “[M]others are much more likely to have poor relationships with their children when dad is not in the picture”

It’s all in a “recent report, Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences.”

And of course, there is the modest fact that children are flat out safer with a married mom.

So what’s the problem?  Why do we persist in subsidizing single parenthood?  Is it because of the anti-marriage prejudice of feminists?  Is it because of the money and jobs in all those government programs, not to mention the votes of all the grateful recipients?

Seriously, I’d like to know the answer to this.

A Decade of Blair

First the good news.  The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful for a left-of-center party in Britain ever.  Well, at least since W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the nineteenth century.  As Prime Minister Blair told his constituents today, according to George Jones:

He said expectations had probably been "too high" in 1997, but he insisted living standards had improved under Labour. "There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following: more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime and economic growth in every quarter. Only one government, this one."

So it might seem odd that the British people have recently voted heavily against the Labour Party.  And it’s not just about Iraq.

There are those who contest the idea that health, education and crime have improved on Blair’s watch.  In contrast to Blair’s sunny report:

• Education is a mess.  The government keeps dumbing down the high-stakes tests, the A-levels and GSCE tests, and violence is endemic in inner-city schools.  The vast underclass gets almost no education.
• The National Health Service is a mess.  The government has vastly ramped up spending in the last ten years but productivity has gone down, and the staff are demoralized.
• Vast numbers of workers on disability.  About 15 percent of the work force.
• Property crime may have gone down now that everyone has a home security system.  But gang violence and street intimidation is up.  Crime is up 2,300 percent in the last century.  And the murder rate is up.

And then there are the burgeoning problems of single-parent families, a growing feral underclass, and uncontrolled immigration, all of which are probably worse than in the United States.

The worsening social conditions are probably hitting the Labour Party’s natural supporters worse than anyone.  But the Conservative Party hasn’t been trying to attract their votes, instead trying to win back the social liberals who deserted to the LibDem Party in the mid 1990s.  The only party that is really going for the votes of the disaffected is the racist BNP.

Stay tuned.  The problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.

Iran and the Chimera of "Self-Sufficiency"

Ever since the dawn of the modern age movements have erupted again and again calling for a return to “self-sufficiency.”

That’s what mercantilism was all about.  That’s what socialism is all about.  And that is what the current regime in Iran is all about.  We don’t need no stink’n trading.  We can make it all here ourselves.

So in Iran, Amir Taheri writes:

Mr. Ahmadinejad insists that the only way Iran can preserve its "Islamic purity" is to reduce dependence on foreign commerce.
"Whatever we can produce we should do ourselves," the president likes to say. "Even if what we produce is not as good, and more costly."

Er no, old chum.  The central insight of the modern commercial era is the law of comparative advantage.  Everyone should do what they do best, and hire out everything else to other people.

It is the exact opposite of the idea of President Ahmadinejad and the rest of the self-sufficiency enthusiasts. 

Generally speaking, the record shows that countries that follow the path of self-sufficiency, or “autarky,” are countries following the path of self-impoverishment.

Of course, for the rest of us, it is no bad thing when thug dictators follow ruinous policies of national impoverishment.  Go ahead Chavez; go ahead Ahmadinejad.  Make my day.

But you have to feel sorry for the people in Venezuela and Iran and the rest of the thug-dictatordoms.  Because they get to pay the price for the follies and the delusions of their leaders.

For Dionne It's All About Compulsion

Things don’t look too good out there for people like us, writes E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the aftermath of the French election.  What with France, Labour’s problems in Britain, Sweden, Canada (land of single-payer health care), and Germany, social democrats are in retreat.  In the light of all this

the social democratic and liberal left faces a big problem because globalization makes the movement’s core pledge — to produce economic growth that lifts up the poor and the middle class as well as the rich — far more problematic.

Er, just a minute E.J. Do you really understand what you are saying? Tell me more.

For much of the period after World War II, national governments found it relatively easy to redistribute wealth and income through taxes and decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions. Globalization and heightened competition are taking a toll on unionized industrial jobs, while national governments have less freedom of action when capital is so mobile.

Is that what you really believe?  That you can really help the poor and the middle class with the big clunking fist of redistribution and monopoly union wages?

How do you account for Britland, where the economy (for all workers) has bounded ahead since it abandoned progressive economic policy?  Or Ireland, that has become a Celtic tiger, changed in twenty years from the poor man of Europe to a per-capita GDP now higher than Britland, France, Germany, Italy, you name it?  Would that have anything to do with the moment in the 1980s when the Irish government lowered tax rates and government spending, do you think, E.J.?

E.J., somewhere along the line you have got it backwards.  The progressive promise has always been to redistribute income the the poor (middle class? come on) irregardless of the effect on the economy.  It was a matter of social justice, remember?

And “decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions” is what killed the steel industry, and is on the point of killing the automobile industry in this country.  Was it really worth it to give a few workers a decade or two of aristocratic privilege for that?  The whole rust belt, home of the unionized industrial worker, is rusted out.  Do you think that is maybe because labor is priced out of the market and the state governments in the rust belt are just too anti-business, E.J.?

The lesson of globalization is something that you progressives can’t bear to learn.  It is that a vibrant economy with low tax rates and low privileges lifts all boats in a sudden, overwhelming, flood tide of prosperity.  They tried it in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  They tried it in Britland and the US in the 1980s.  They tried in in China, in Ireland, now in India, and maybe tomorrow in France.  Yah think, E.J.?

All that progressive politics does is slow it down with compulsion and class warfare pitting people against each other.

Of course, nobody ever denied that the progressive welfare state was a bonanza for progressive activists, politicians, and experts.

That is something we can all agree on.

Democrats Still Opposed to Missile Defense

For forty years after World War II the defenses of the United States were aligned to “contain” the Soviet Union.  Most of the time Democrats had to be dragged along kicking and screaming to contribute to the effort.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union did not appreciate this.  To them, the United States was engaged in a strategy of encirclement.  Of course, they were right.

But since 9/11 the United States has switched its front.  The front is no longer aligned along the borders of the Soviet Empire.  It is aligned around the Islamic empire.

As James Hackett writes:

President Bush is showing that his ABM treaty withdrawal, missile defense deployment in Alaska and on Aegis ships, overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq were all part of a worldview in which national security is the highest priority.

Part of the proposed disposition of the US armed force is to put missile defense radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, a proposal that the Poles and Czechs think is rather a good idea.

Only two voices seem opposed.  President Putin of Russia and Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.  Seems like old times.

It reminds me of the defense policy of Scientific American.  To that magazine’s editors, there there have always seemed to be two types of weapon systems.  There are weapon systems that work but that should not be deployed because they are destabilizing.  Then there are weapons that do not work that should be canceled.

The folks in Congress seem to have a similar idea.  Writes Hackett:

Just as support [for missile defense] is developing in Europe, some members of the Democratic-controlled Congress want to reduce funding for the sites there. The Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee has cut the administration’s $310 million request by more than half, to $150 million, which is the wrong message to send to our European allies. Subcommittee Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher, California Democrat, explained earlier that some members think more operational testing is needed.

What is it about these people? 

Netroots: On Chait in TNR

Here is how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 election in Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga and Jerome Armstrong’s book, Crashing the Gate:

Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

That is a version of reality that conservatives and Republicans would certainly contest.  But never mind.  That’s the netroots’ story and they are sticking with it.

It is certainly true, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic, that the netroots experience themselves as another great political movement like the conservative movement that hit the radar with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency 16 years later.

And he certainly captures in his article the flavor of the netroots, at least from the perspective of one who is not a member.

What is interesting, for a conservative, is how much he gets wrong about the conservative movement.  That is always a frustrating, but also an exhilirating experience.  After all, if mainstream liberals don’t really “get” the conservative movement, after all these years, so much the better.

The bigger question is: Just what is the netroots movement for?  For it is the difference between the netroots and the conservative movement that is most telling. 

The conservative movement went critical in the 1960s in a coming together of political activists, books, interests, and scholarship.  It was a coming together of people who believed that the welfare state was the wrong road for the modern world and who wanted to think and organize around the project of reforming it and/or replacing it.  On the way the original fusion of libertarians and traditional conservatives developed into a big tent that included evangelical Christians, Jewish liberals mugged by reality, and Reagan Democrats that felt uncomfortable in the post-patriotic McGovernite Democratic Party.

The question is: who do the netroots represent, beyond a cadre of angry college-educated children of the welfare state?  Where do they want to take the United States?  What do they want to change?  Where are their books?

In Chait’s view the netroots don’t really have a philosophy and they don’t really have an agenda.  Pushed to say what they believe in they regurgitate a fairly conventional liberal agenda.  Only more so.

Let’s look at it another way.  Conservatives formed a movement because they wanted to change the welfare state.  That’s what movements are for, to mount an insurgency against the establishment by political organizing and winning elections.  Conservatives wanted to move the nation away from top-down management by experts and activists.

The netroots appear to be forming a movement to oppose the establishment for not opposing the insurgent conservatives with enough energy.  Maybe that’s a brilliant idea: putting some backbone into wimpy liberal establishment types and make them fight for the programs that help poor people.

Or maybe it’s a catastrophic error.  It could just as well split the Democrats, as the right-wing patriotic side of the party splits off from the left-wing netroots.  Or it could move the whole party to the left, away from the center where the independent voters are.

I come back, again and again to the analysis of Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies.  To him we are talking about the war between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Why it is that the netroots seem, rather obviously, a gang of ruthless men?

Center-right Sarkozy Wins In France

Because the left has liked to represent Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France as “fascist” and “right-wing”it is important to state that Sarkozy is a conventional center-right politician. 

Sarkozy believes that the science is in on the economy, that capitalism and limited-liability companies work for the average person, and especially for the marginalized.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

Sarkozy thinks that there ought to be sensible control on immigration and that immigrants have a responsibility to integrate with the land in which they wish to live and work.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

But Sarkozy has a problem. When the center-right Reagan/Thatcher revolution began a quarter of a century ago in the Anglosphere it was founded upon a widespread understanding among the voters that something was wrong and something had to change.  As the folks at  Mark Steyn agrees, but in more colorful language.

[The French are] sick of crime and unemployment and on the whole could do with rather fewer Muslims on the streets, but they’re not yet willing to give up on the economic protectionism and lavish social programs that lead, inexorably, to the crime and unemployment and a general economic and demographic decline leaving the nation dependent on mass immigration and accelerating Islamization.

After all, why should they?  The preachers of the left have taught the French people for a century that they deserve a life of security and sinecure and tenure by right.

We wish the best for our French friends, but fear that things will have to get worse before they get better.

Don't Frighten the Horses

Analyzing the British local elections of last week Charles Moore conducts a seminar in the politics of the twenty-first century.  He is talking about the consequence of the ascendancy of New Labour under Tony Blair, but everything he says applies to our own Democratic Party.

The brilliance of Tony Blair is that—even though schools don’t educate and government health care doesn’t work and the nation is overrun with immigration and surly youths have turned the streets into a battlezone—people don’t think that anything can be done about it.

While New Labour has been throwing money at schools and health care they have been enormously increasing the size of the public sector.  And in that public sector there are “privileges in employment and pensions which are quite beyond the reach of the rest of us.”

But it is not just the public sector that has been increased.

These changes enormously increase the political class. Again as in other parts of the EU, thousands of people can now have entire, well-paid careers working for political parties in commodious offices. They start as staffers to the elected; then they get elected on list systems over which the voter has no control; then, if they are lucky, they become MPs.

Of course, in politics as in the Church, many are called but few are chosen.  No problem. If they can’t become elected officials,

they can get jobs as regulators and governance experts and special advisers or even-better-paid versions of the same thing in Brussels. The power of party political patronage is now 18th-century in its abuse, but thoroughly 21st-century in its enormous size. 

Sound familiar?

But here is the corker.  Despite all this huge government failure: services that don’t work, government workers that don’t work, huge taxes, endless meddling and regulation, if you propose to change it the voters get scared and go running back to their incompetent welfare state party bosses and ward heelers.

So just like America’s Republicans, David Cameron cannot propose sweeping changes that will end forever the dull failing mediocrity of the lefty welfare state.  Oh no.

[O]ne longs to advise Mr Cameron to proclaim an arresting analysis which breaks decisively with all the dreary Continentalism described above, but I am sure that at this point it would not work. He is right that the Tories are still "in recovery" rather than fully accepted. If they try to be clever, dangerous, bold, they will just frighten people.

This is what is so maddening.  We know what to do about the welfare state.  The science is in.  It has been for at least a generation.  Abolish the government pension programs; they never work because the politicians always over-promise.  Abolish government health care.  It doesn’t do much for life expectancy.  Abolish government education.  It doesn’t really do much educating.

But anyone who advances the modest agenda of ending government programs that don’t work is ruthlessly stigmatized as a madman.  It just isn’t fair.

Actually the voters are right.  As much as the political class loves bold, persistent experimentation, the voters instinctively understand rapid change is not for them.  They know, the ordinary people, that they are the folks that get left with the mess when the suits move on.

So the way to reform the welfare state out of existence is by baby steps, with a little reform here and a minor privatization there.

As Senator Everett Dirksen used to say forty years ago, a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

It’s just like the antarctic Shackleton expedition a century ago.  When they took the sled dogs out to kill them, they took them out individually and applied the coup de grace out of site behind a hill.

That way the other dogs wouldn’t get nervous.

Tories Advance in Brit Local Elections

Britain’s Conservative Party oustripped forecasts of 600-700 by gaining over 875 seats in the British local council elections.  As the BBC put it: 

It may not have been the surge many had been hoping for, but Mr Cameron has always stressed the party has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win the next general election and, with around 800 seats gained, it outstripped its forecasts.

But the goal of the Tories was to make real improvement in the North (wiped out in the 1997 general election) and to chip away at the Liberal Democrats (many disaffected Conservative voters have been sojourning with the LibDems).

And that is exactly what the Tories achieved.  They had some notable successes in the north of England, and in their 875+ gain they took almost 500 seats from Labour and almost 150 seats from the LibDems.

The centerpiece of the Cameron strategy is to appeal to centrists with themes like work/life balance and global warming.  Those centrists are the LibDem voters that the Conservatives must attract if they are to win the next general election.

After the Debate: Romney

You could say that the reason I’m a Romney guy is because of the unrelenting Romney-boosting on the Hugh Hewitt radio show.  Hugh has his book A Mormon in the White House to promote shamelessly and so it’s been Romney, Romney, Romney now for weeks.

Still I couldn’t help but notice the centerpiece of Mitt’s campaign.  In China they would call it the Three Strongs. 

• Strengthen America’s Military
• Strengthen America’s Economy
• Strengthen America’s Families

He got in his licks on the Three Strongs on the Tonight Show on Wednesday here.

Then he got it in on the debate in Simi Valley on Thursday evening here.

We’ll probably get sick of it before we’re done.  But of course it exactly fits the center-right agenda.

Notice how it also dovetails with the women’s agenda as expressed by 18 Doughty Street Brit Iain Dale:

They want to feel secure in their family, in their home and in their community.

There is also this important plug on Romney from Hugh Hewitt.  It has to do with Romney’s media presence.  Romney, he writes, is a candidate

who has had a graduate school education in hadling the MSM, broadcast and print variety... Watching the second President Bush debate was perhaps the greatest trial GOP activists had to endure in the campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

I’ll say.  Expecially if you happened to be watching him with a Democrat.

But Romney excels in debate and on TV.  Imagine him easily trading one liners with Jay Leno. Imagine being relaxed every time your candidate comes up to bat, and expecting him to deliver a solid base hit every time he’s at bat.

And imagine a candidate who, every so often, lofts the ball over the fences.

The Heart of the Education Problem

In Britland they have recently discovered that social mobility is going down not up.  As Anne McElvoy writes in The Spectator:

[Children] born in 1970 are more likely to have ended up poor themselves than the children born in 1958. There is no sign that the trend has changed.

So guess what: more central government education programs are needed.

You see, back in 2002 the London School of Economics published a study:

comparing able children from a disadvantaged background [Group A] with less able children from middle-class homes [Group B]. The two lines on the graph cross over shockingly early. Group A’s progress falls off sharply at the age of four or five. At the same point Group B begins to race ahead. The poor-but-bright child all too easily falls by the wayside in this race[.]

The solution is obvious, apparently.

I would certainly argue for pupils to be taught in ability groups when they reach secondary level... We still need to do much more to encourage autonomous new providers of schools within the state sector who come in to do things better, and force existing schools to emulate their achievements.

Notice that McElvoy takes for granted the essential assumption of welfare state politics.  The disadvantaged are helpless.  Everything is to be done for them by the experts.  Ability groups are to be instituted, new providers encouraged, existing schools are to be forced to emulate.

Here’s a concept.  What do the disadvantaged actually want for their children?  Do they want them to get an education?  If so, what are they prepared to do to bring that about?

I recently listened to Ruth Messinger, CEO of American Jewish World Service, tell a fundraiser that in their microloan program in the Third World, the women recipients immediately apply their earnings to the education and the health care of their children.

You mean to say that in the Third World the poor actually spend their own money on their children to improve their life chances?

Then why are the poor in the First World considered to be helpless to seek the welfare of their children, requiring 24/7 supervision by the academic middle class?

"Make No Mistake"

After President Bush vetoed the Democrats’ emergency war funding bill everyone got together at the White House to discuss what to next, reports the Chicago Tribune:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the meeting “positive.” held in “good faith.” Her Republican counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, called it “very productive,” reporting no tense moments.

But they hardly decided what the outlines of a new bill would look like.

“Make no mistake,” Pelosi said, “Democrats are committed to ending this war.”

If Democratic leaders had their druthers it would probably be for President Bush to withdraw from Iraq before the 2008 election.  Then any subsequent problems would be Bush’s fault.

But President Bush has probably no intention of allowing such an outcome.  Let the Democrats withdraw from Iraq in 2009.  Then any subsequent problems would be the Democrats’ fault.

Don’t like it?  You think that politicians should just do the right thing, irrespective of partisan advantage? 

GM to Advertise on Limbaugh Show

This year on August 1 talk radio will be 19 years old.  It started with Rush Limbaugh and the end of the old FCC Fairness Doctrine that mandated “balance” in political opinion on the airwaves.

Tomorrow, Rush Limbaugh announced on his show today, he will not be performing his assigned host duties flawlessly.  He will not be performing them at all.  Instead he will be in Detroit talking to his new sponsor General Motors.

Conservatives will understand that this is an epic event.  Let us spell it out.

Beginning in the spring of 2007 General Motors Corporation will be advertising on the Rush Limbaugh Program.

Up till now the national consumer brands have been reluctant to advertise on controversial conservative talk radio.  That is odd, when you consider that talk radio enjoys huge national audiences.  But we know why.

The big consumer corporations are afraid.  They are afraid of being mau-maued by liberal interest groups.  There is even the possibility of a boycott.

If you doubt that read the comments about General Motors’ decision to hire conservative host Sean Hannity as “lead spokesman for a car giveaway campaign called ‘You’re a Great American.’”  Lots of people would like to punish General Motors for using Hannity as a spokesman.

I wonder if General Motors knows what it is getting into.  I’d say that if a Democrat gets into the White House in 2008 then congressional Democrats will want to punish GM for advertising on conservative talk radio.

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if such an effort begins by the summer.

Romney: You Make the Call

The AP recently reported that Mitt Romney didn’t think it was that important to go after Osama bin Laden.  Here’s the quote from the AP article by Liz Sidoti:

[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.

John McCain and conservative opinion journalists jumped on him.

Good job as usual, MSM, in burying the lede says blogger Dean Barnett.  Romney’s remarks were part of an interview in which, beyond the tactical question of bin Laden, he said the following about the war on terror: 

Global Jihad is not an effort that is being populated by a handful or even a football stadium full of people. It is — it involves millions of people and is going to require a far more comprehensive strategy than a targeted approach for bin laden or a few of his associates.

 So Romney is taking the strategic view, which is that the US and the west are in a long term conflct with the forces of Islamic Jihad.  He judges that this movement does not depend on a single leader, so that decapitation is not worth spending vast amounts of money.

As I watch the Republican presidential contest unfold I confess that I am getting more and more impressed by Romney.  You get the feeling that he has sat down for months with staff and advisers and really thought about the strategic issues to be faced, domestically and in foreign policy.

Either he has thought about the issues or he is doing a superb job of making it look like he has.

How will we tell?  A guy who has done his strategy right will usually have his forces in the right place at the right time.

The classic case of strategy beating tactics was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.  Many of the battles were inconclusive and many over-eager Prussian commanders made tactical mistakes.  But the Prussian armies were almost always in the right place, and the French armies were almost always in the wrong place.

There’s a reason why we call the activities of politicians prior to an election a “campaign.” 

"Eurostar Generation" Threatens Euro Social Model

They call them the “Eurostar Generation.”  They are the young French professionals who have bought one-way tickets on the Eurostar train from Paris to London. 

And when they get to London they are often amazed at how quickly they can find jobs.

Politicians are noticing, as Anne Applebaum reports.  The highlight of the current French presidential election has to have been the election rally of candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in London to a crowd of 2,500 French expats.

He called London “one of the great French cities,” and with 300,000 French living and working in London, he may be right.

The French ex-pats, along with the notorious “Polish plumbers,” are wrecking the social welfare state that the left has tried to mandate in Europe.

For the past decade, French, German and other European leaders have tried to unify European tax laws and regulations, the better to "even out the playing field" — or (depending on your point of view) to make life equally difficult everywhere.

 But humans are a wandering species, and they naturally migrate abroad to find greener pastures, whatever the dictates of the rich and the powerful.

Up to now, the new Europe has lacked a European “idea,” according to Applebaum.

Almost by accident, the European Union may have created a new kind of European citizen instead: mobile, English-speaking, Internet-using, perhaps with the same nostalgia for Krakow or Dijon that first-generation New Yorkers feel for Missouri or Mississippi but nevertheless willing to live pretty much anywhere.

And that could be the way that Europe shakes off its lassitude and finds a new cultural and economic vigor.