French-bashing on Sartre's Centenary

Conservative philosopher
Roger Scruton
does a retrospective on Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frenchman who tried to
find a meaning for life after God is Dead. It’s a problem.

For the religious world-view, self-consciousness is a
source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special
relation to God and of our ultimate redemption, as we leap from the
world into the arms of our creator. For Sartre, self-consciousness
is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety:
proof of our apartness, certainly, but also of our loneliness,
which is a loneliness without redemption, since all the doors
on our inner walls have been painted
there by ourselves and none of them will open.

Since Sartre, of course, the entire French elite and latterly their epigones in the American
academy have lived by banging into the doors on their inner walls. That
is fine. Let them wreck their lives if they want to.
The trouble
is that Sartre ended up wrecking France.

The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps
never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual
establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that
hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France.
The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered
the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing
is certain save the repudiation of the national idea.

Read the whole thing.

What's The Point?

News reports indicate that House Republicans are drafting a Social Security bill
that
strips out personal accounts. If that is true, then
what’s the point of it? There is no point in doing anything with Social Security unless
we start the process of sucking money out of the government’s coffers and into individual
Americans’ pockets. The current Social Security surplus just allows the
federal government to spend money on Democrats and buy their votes. Then, in ten years, the
idea is to raise taxes
on Republicans to pay Social Security to aging liberals who have done nothing except
show up for work for the last 30 years.

Anything short
of personal accounts just keeps shoveling money at Democratic voters with no end in
sight.

Tell me that I’m missing something here.

Cheer Up Chaps!

Ever since the election, conservatives have been down in the dumps.
Cheer up, conservatives, write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, British authors
of The Right Nation, you chaps are still winning. After the orgasm of November, of course
you are going to feel sad.

The bottom line is that conservatives are the optimists in America.
They write:

the Republicans are more optimistic, convinced that the future
will be better than the past and that they can determine their own futures. Democrats,
on the other hand, have a European belief that “fate,” or, in
modern parlance, social circumstances, determines people’s lot in life.

On top of that, Bush won in the places where people are having children. Kerry won in the
cities where people are not. The fact is that liberals just aren’t having children.
Studies show, after all, that the people most satisfied with their sex
life is... well who do you think?

Right first time: married conservative women. Who would have thought that back in the Sixties?

Victim of the Welfare State

For over a century progressives have dined out on the misery of the poor. It was
all the fault of capitalism, they said. It was the inevitable consequence of
an uncaring society blinded by a mean-spirited ideology to the sufferings of the poor and
the unfortunate, the helpless
victims of ruthless capitalism. But after a century of the welfare state,
we are seeing another kind of victim, people victimized by the culture and the ethos
of the rule of the experts.
Minette Marrin
tells the story of one such victim, memorialized in Stuart: a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters.
It’s a story of abuse and incest, and step-parenting. Of course.

Laffer Rides Again

Remember the Laffer Curve, the curve that economist
Arthur Laffer drew on a napkin
in a restaurant meal in 1994 with Ford Administration biggies Rumsfeld and Cheney and the late, great
Bob Bartley?
Stephen Moore reminds us what
happens when a government implements the Laffer Curve by lowering tax rates. Tax revenues take a jump.

Individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded like a cap let off a geyser, up 30% in the two years since the tax cut.

Tax collections from non-withheld income (i.e., dividends and capital gains) are up over 30 percent
in the last year.

The Science of Free Trade

Democrats had a grand time in 2004 congratulating themselves as being the party of science (i.e.,
pro embryonic stem cell research) while the Republicans were the party of superstition that would
shut of hope for Alzheimers sufferers.

Of course when it comes to economics, the shoe is on the other foot, as
Thomas Sowell
reminds us. Ever since the early economists came up with the law of comparative advantage, the
advocates of economic privilege and clientage (which today means Democrats) have struggled against it.
The law of comparative advantage says that it is always mutually beneficial for two or more
people to engage in economic interchange untrammeled by monopoly and trade barriers, in short, that
free trade works. But those that have extracted monopoly privileges out of the government stand to lose from
a removal of trade barriers and government economic regulation. They agitate against the removal of their
privileges.

When Democrats rail against “outsourcing” they are railing against the law of comparative advantage.
They are also railing against economic growth, lifting the poor out of poverty, and they are shilling
for special interests like the sugar lobby.
So whose science are you on, Democrats?

Productivity Rules the World

Why is the US the most advanced industrial nation in the world? Because of productivity.
OK. But aren’t the Japanese more productive than US corporations? That is
true, in the manufacturing sector. But Japanese retailers are 50 percent less productive
than the US. And productivity

in food processing [is] about a third of the US. And
food processing, although it’s a manufacturing industry and it’s not
heavily traded, it has more employment than steel, automotive,
computers, and machine
tools added together. So it’s much more important.

So, in the end it is the overall productivity that counts, not the headline
manufacturing corporations.

What about education, you ask? Good question. Despite everything you have heard, education is not very
important. Corporations the world over can train their employees to roughly the same productivity whatever their educational level. In

Houston, the US industry was using Mexican agriculture
workers who were illiterate and didn’t speak English. So they were not
any different than the agricultural workers who were building similar
high rises say in Sao Paolo. And yet
they were working at four times the productivity.

So what is holding back the Third World? It is two things. The informal sector
can undercut efficient formal sector enterprises by not paying taxes and by counterfeiting
brand merchandise. And domestic producers have the power to erect
trade barriers that prevent efficient producers from making money.

It’s a breathtaking story. Read the whole thing as
Nick Schultz
interviews William Lewis, author of The Power of Productivity.