Our Favorite French Babe

Any time you want, link to
Liberté Chérie, the web site of enlightened French youth, symbolized by activist
Sabine Herold. Here’s an article by
Veronique de Rugy
that mentions her visit to the American Enterprise Institute. A couple of years ago Herold created a sensation
by staging a demonstration against public employee strikes. About 80,000 people turned up.

The educated youth of Europe have an interesting challenge. Do they accommodate to the schlerotic
economic and political culture of Europe or do they try to break the mold? Herold and her group
are break out of the death grip of the superstate and are trying to learn the lessons that the US learned a generation ago from Ronald Reagan.

Benefit Fraud in Old Europe

For over a century conservatives have struggled against the welfare state’s claim to be “helping people.”
But the problem about helping people is: what if they are lying? Here’s an article about benefit
fraud in Sweden written by an Iranian immigrant,
Nima Sanandaji.

Nima relates how the Swedish welfare state shovels money at beneficiaries, and how it really doesn’t
pay to be responsible and work. There is a presumption of helplessness:

Social security secretaries assumed that the people that they supported had no sense
of responsibility. Also, they were responsible to see that each person had enough money to live a
decent life at all times. If you told them that you had spent all your money at the beginning of the
month and didn’t have any left, they gave you some more. If you told them that your children cried
every day in want of new toys, they helped you.
If you told them that a neighbor had stolen all you clothes, they helped you.

The system might have worked half a century ago when people still possessed a strong work
ethic. But now people are responding to the economic incentives in the system. If you can only earn
five percent more after earning a college degree, why bother?

In Britain, according to
James Bartholomew in The Welfare State We’re In, the government estimates
that the incidence of fraud among people claiming “benefit” ranges from 10 percent for the
disabled to 23 percent for the unemployed and 27 percent for single parents.

There’s got to be a way to make this into the great political issue of the age.

HSAs Equal First Party Payment

Experts agree that the “third party” payment system in health care is one of the big
factors driving up health costs. People just don’t pay much attention to costs when a third party
is paying for their health care. But it looks as if the tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
are beginning to change all that.

HSAs are accounts that consumers use to pay routine health costs. They
are usually combined with a high-deductible health insurance policy.
Michael Barone reports that there are already over a million Americans with HSAs and
employers are planning to move more of their employees into them. And health cost inflation is beginning
to slow down. Could it be a coincidence, or is there cause and effect in operation here?

Democrats Still Don't Get The Eighties

What are the lessons to be learned from the Eighties? In an interview
with John Ehrman, author of the eponymous book,
Orrin C. Judd
reviews the tumultuous decade in which Ronald Reagan changed American
politics and the old smokestack economy morphed into the entrepreneurial
startup nation that we live in today. “Many Democrats understood
these changes and knew that their party needed to change its ideas
and programs if it was going to rebuild its majority,” says Ehrman.
“But none of them was strong enough to challenge Reagan’s success
or the Democratic party’s entrenched interests.”

What’s amazing is that this still is the case.
It has been sixteen years since Reagan left office, and the
Democrats still have not been able to modernize their ideas or
break the holds of their various traditional factions.
Even as talented a politician as Bill Clinton was unable to do this,
although he tried during his first term. The Democrats’ situation has
only gotten worse since 2000, as their anger at George W. Bush has
made it hard for them to think clearly about how to formulate
politically strong alternatives to Republican policies.

That is the real danger of the Dean Offensive and all the
Democratic talk about “attack machines.” It puts off the day when
Democrats really start to think about what a progressive majority
party would look like and formulate the strategery to get there.

Jesus Fights AIDS

There is one thing that cannot be true, must not be true for our liberal friends. And that is that religion really is a necessary part of the human experience. But the conservative David Brooks witnesses to this truth. He goes to Africa and concludes that when it comes to AIDS, it is not the technique of condoms and treatment that matters. “The problem is that while treatment is a technical problem, prevention is not. Prevention is about changing behavior. It is getting into the hearts of people,” like the women in a little church with a tin roof in southern Mozambique.

But after a while [the women] slip out of the language of safety and into a different language. They say, “It is easier for those who have been touched by God to accept when a woman says no.”" They talk about praying for the man who beats his H.I.V.-positive wife, and trying to bring him into the congregation. They have polygamists in their church but say God loves monogamy best.

What is going on in such simple wisdom that is missing in the technical talk of condoms and drug therapies? It is something that liberals do not want to talk about, the power of religion and faith to save peoples’ lives.

The Tipping Point: $24,000

The new Democratic group Third Way
has done a poll of the electorate, and they have found that white
voters just don’t like the Democrats. Middle income whites start voting
Republican when income exceeds $23,900 per year, and middle income
whites think and vote similarly to upper-income whites. Hispanic voters
are trending rapidly Republican as their income increases.

The Democratic savior is the black vote. Blacks are the only group
that do not trend Republican with increased income, voting Democratic by
90-10. Even upper-income blacks vote 80-20 Democratic.

Fear and Loathing in Manhattan

Let us not get mad at Howard Dean for tagging the Republican Party as monolithically
“white Christian.” He is just reflecting the mainstream belief in his Democratic
Party, writes
Don Feder.
The same sentiments are routinely advanced in the elite media and with rather less moderation
by wacko lefties in the academy.

It is easy to be outraged by Dean’s hate speech, or alternatively chuckle at the gift that keeps on giving. But there is a bigger problem.
What is to become of America when one of its political parties is so radically anti-religion?