Welfare in Paris

We don’t often get to read about the details of the welfare state in Old Europe due
to the language barrier. We Americans do not know French and German, and we should.
But here’s a story from
Sylvain Charat about
the poverty trap in France.

Yes, in France as elsewhere, it doesn’t pay for a woman to get off welfare because
she loses as much in benefits as she gains in income from work. So there are about half
a million people (although nobody knows exactly how many) who stay home from work and get
the RMI (revenu minimum d’insertion).

The French social model creates poverty. It transformed a system
that was supposed to be temporary into a permanent one. Willing to work, most people are thus forced
into behavioral poverty, since they are better off staying home.

And as we know, lengthy periods of unemployment are very harmful because people rapidly lose job skills
when they are out of the workforce.

Sooner or later, the French are going to have to suck it in and copy the cowboy Americans. They will
have to put a limit on welfare, just like we did in the United States. But we’ll be nice
about it. We’ll just pretend we
didn’t notice.

Trying to Smoke Out the Lawyers

Remember the great lawsuit against Big Tobacco? It was a noble crusade to make the tobacco companies pay for the damage they have
done to smokers. Well, not exactly. They are going to pay state governments
to compensate them for the extra health costs of smokers. Well, not exactly,
because smokers die early and cost government less than ordinary folk.

So what is going on with the great Tobacco Deal?

Smokers are going to pay tobacco companies who are going to pay state governments
and lawyers about $250 billion over 25 years.

But wait a minute. Can they do this? Doesn’t the U.S. Constitution forbid
the states from acting in concert without the consent of Congress as in
“Article I, Section 10 — the compacts clause — that “No state shall,
without the consent of
Congress ... , enter into any agreement or compact with another state.’”

That is what the Competitive Enterprise Institute is wondering, and it
is suing to have the whole Tobacco Deal declared unconstitutional.

You think they got a chance? Maybe, writes
Jonathan Rauch.

Turtles All The Way Down

The summer of ’05 seems to be turning into a good old-fashioned sophomore bull session, arguing
across the political divide about intelligent design vs. evolution.
Paul Campos, for my money, has the best entry yet. He argues that it’s
turtles all the way down, as in

The student asks the great sage, "O Master, upon what does the Earth rest?" The
sage replies, "O seeker of knowledge, the Earth rests on the back of an enormous turtle." The
student then asks, "Tell me, Wise One, upon what does this turtle rest?" The
sage answers with annoyance, "Well obviously it’s turtles all the way down!"

As usual, the two sides are arguing past each other.

First, the secular liberal is mistaken in his belief that there are special
people called "scientists" (or more broadly, "rational thinkers," "members of the reality-based
community" etc.) whose beliefs are based solely on something called "the facts" or "evidence" or
what have you, and who therefore don’t rely on faith-based reasoning.

Because it all comes down to faith. But the conservatives are arguing the opposite, and just as
foolishly:

Second, the cultural conservative is mistaken in his belief - a belief
held by many proponents of intelligent design theory - that a more tolerant attitude on the part
of natural scientists toward supernatural explanations would confirm that the divine origins
of life are empirically verifiable. Science can tell us nothing about God for the same reason
that a comprehensive physical description of the Mona Lisa, down to the level of subatomic particles,
would tell us nothing worth knowing about the Mona Lisa.

The British radio astronomer Bernard Lovell recently told
Mary Wakefield
that he wasn’t too sure
about the Big Bang. This is the guy who helped invent the radio telescope that was used to detect
the background radiation from the Big Bang.

"The Big Bang? Well it is of course conventional wisdom that there was one, but I’m not so sure," said Sir Bernard. "There is a tendency to talk about it as if it happened, but we really do not know."

He looked, as I remember, a little impatient. What about black holes, surely they exist?

"Everyone now believes in black holes, but they forget that the evidence is just circumstantial," he said. "One infers a black hole from plotting in detail the structure of a distant galaxy but no one really knows."

I felt confused. Why does everybody talk about these things as if they’ve been proved? I asked. "Young people get enthusiastic. And I suppose they just think it makes a better story."

Of course, Sir Bernard Lovell is 90. He could just be confused. Or maybe he is a postmodernist, and he believes in “narratives.”

It's Because We are Taking Over the World

What could we do, the war critics ask, to deal with Al Qaeda’s demands so that they will go away and leave us alone? What have we done to stir them up to such rage?

The thesis of the “Why do they hate us” crowd gets a good airing from the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner.

Gardner walks through the usual routine. The terror masters do not exactly tell us what they want.

But they have, through smuggled video cassettes and internet broadcasts, and in their own pedantic and lecturing way, made their demands clear. These are: the withdrawal of all Western forces from Muslim lands, especially Iraq, the withdrawal of support for Israel, and of support for "apostate" governments, specifically in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Of course, he admits, Al Qaeda’s grand plan is a single caliphate from the Philippines to Gibraltar, but by meeting their demands on Iraq we could damp down the enthusiasm in the Muslim street. And then the terrorists would probably go away.

But this approach, treating the West as just there and the terrorists as angry victims enraged by oppression misses the point.

The West is a world-historical movement that wants to take over the whole world and convert it to democracy and capitalism. You can personalize this if you like in the person of George W. Bush, but that would miss the point. The leader of the United States plays the role of the leader of the world-historical western movement whatever his party or his name. The radical Muslims rightly understand that if things keep going the way they are then their culture and way of life will be destroyed. The US invasion of Iraq and military presence in the Arab lands is merely a local manifestation of the world-historical force of western capitalism and democracy at work. The US deploys its armed forces in Iraq and the Arab lands because they are resisting our world-historical force.

This conflict is not going to be resolved by dialog and diplomacy. It is a clash between two world-historical forces. One of them will win, and the other will be destroyed.

Inside the Movement

We should have been reading this stuff years ago, but better late than never. The London Times
sends an
undercover reporter
into a group in the Islamicist terror network in Britain and finds—well,
an ordinary mass movement driven by rage and hate.

So now we know what we are dealing with, now
we can get cracking to solve it. It seems that the number one thing we can do is stop the welfare.
These noble terrorists and their leaders make a virtue out of living off welfare, able-bodied, adult
men as they are. The undercover Times reporter

discovered that the core of the group consisted of about 40 young men guided by
a handful of spiritual mentors. Many are of Bangladeshi origin, jobless and living in council flats
[i.e., public housing] in east London. They use aliases, taking the names of the prophet Muhammad’s
companions.

At their meetings — which often included school-age teenagers — they were fed a constant
diet of propaganda warning that the kuffar [non-Muslims] are out to destroy them.

Integration with British society is scorned, as is any form of democratic process.
Followers are encouraged to exploit the benefits system. They avoid jobs which could
bring them into contact with western women or might lead them to contribute to the economy
of a nation they are taught to despise.

This shouldn’t be too hard. If these chaps had to go to work they would have a lot less time
to plan bloody revolution. They would have to get with the program, and they would have to learn
how to make it in the economy, earning a living and serving the consumer.

Your move, Prime Minister Blair.

Jobs Disconnect Continues

The increase in non-farm payroll jobs this last month was impressive, at 207,000 new jobs
since the June establishment survey. But the household survey was even more impressive. (The
household survey is the one used to come up with the unemployment rate.)
It showed an increase of 438,000 jobs.

Why is there such a huge difference between the establishment survey and
the household survey? Great minds wonder too. But here are the numbers in the
government’s Employment Situation Summary.

Economy Great, Americans Are Miserable

What’s wrong with the Yanks, asks British commentator
Gerard Baker?
The economy is great, and basically has been for twenty years ever since the Reagan years,
with a couple of shallow recessions just to keep things ship-shape. Yet

only 4 per cent of the public rate the economy to be in excellent
condition; a further 37 per cent describe it as good. But 59 per cent say it’s
either not good or poor. This incongruous misery is reflected in a broader national
funk. Only 32 per cent of Americans think the country is on the right track;
54 per cent say it’s headed in the wrong direction.

Now why would the American people think that everything stinks? It could be
that their appreciation of the economy always lags its actual performance. They tend
to think the economy is in a recession for years after robust economic growth resumes. They only get
really optimistic just before a fall.

It couldn’t be, could
it, that a sector of the political class are engaged, as they were in the 1980s, in
systematically talking down the economy and the nation? Whereas in the 1990s they
were regularly fainting in the aisles with wonder at the genius of the Clinton economy?
No. That could not happen in a country blessed with an objective, professional corps of
news journalists and with a patriotic and loyal Democratic opposition.

At any rate, the objective facts are that the economy of the United States is the
envy of the world. We supply-side fanatics think we have an explanation for this.
Tax rate cuts. During the administration of the “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan and the
mentally challenged George W. Bush Congress enacted, upon the strong recommendation of
the executive branch, significant tax rate cuts. (Note to you liberals: tax rate
cuts. There’s a secret in there if you have the intelligence to figure it out.)

Yes. Just like Calvin Coolidge and Jack Kennedy, Reagan and Bush implemented significant tax rate cuts. In the “narrative”
of capitalist economics, tax rate cuts are said to lead to significant increases in
sustained economic output.

Not that that means anything. Oh no. It’s just a narrative, after all,
and there is no reason why any one narrative should be privileged above other narratives.