The Blame Game Begins

As the Democrats crank up the blame game, citing a planned “cut” in the budget of the
New Orleans District Corps of Engineers budget
here and
here as a reason to blame President Bush for
the devastation, conservative
Michael Ledeen waxes lyrical about the insouciance of cities that live
under constant threat of annihilation.

For decades, Democrats have excoriated the Corps of Engineers as a wasteful organization that harms
the environment with its dam-building and river channelization projects. Now they are going to use
“budget cuts” as a cudgel to beat President Bush.

But Ledeen writes about how cities like New Orleans, Venice, and Naples, that face constant
threat from inundation from water or blanketing with volcanic ash, must affect a bold face against
the furies of Nature. New Orleans, he writes,

has long been admired for its literary creativity, its exceptional food,
and its wonderful music, and deplored — albeit also frequented — because of its legendary
corruption and degradation. The possibility of its destruction no doubt played a role in the
character of its people, and it is no accident that an annual bacchanal took place there, in
the riotous celebrations of Mardi Gras. Death has always been omnipresent in the consciousness
of the city; dancing in defiance of death was the city’s trademark, and the spirited music that
defined New Orleans for much of the world was played at
the happiest occasions, and at the most famous funerals.

In the coming months the people of the United States will dip generously into their pockets and their hearts to help
the people of New Orleans as they rebuild their city and their lives. We all hope that our
Democratic friends will pitch in and help.

After the Deluge

As we get to know more about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the scale of the devastation
becomes clearer, as
The New York Times reports.
In New Orleans the failure of two levees has unundated the city

causing incalculable destruction and rendering it uninhabitable for weeks to come.

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines
inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city. Officials began
planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly
grim conditions as water and food were running out and rising water threatened the generators.

The situation was so dire that late in the day the Pentagon ordered five Navy ships and eight
Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations. It also planned to fly
in Swift boat rescue teams from California.

We all extend our best wishes and our help to the folks digging out of the destruction and hope for
a speedy repair of the damage.

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about the vulnerable position of New Orleans, how it is
below river level, how it is in the path of hurricanes, an environmental disaster waiting to
happen. Now that the worst has happened,
we will get to see how bad the worst really is. Chances are it is not the end of the city, not
an environmental disaster, but just
a huge challenge to be overcome, the sort of thing that humans are really good at.

Here are some fearless predictions. The loss
of life will exceed 1,000 souls.
The total damage will
be north of $100 billion, and New Orleans will be back in business, sorta, in a couple of months.

Death of a Supply-side Salesman

There have been many important figures in the rise of the American conservative
movement, but in anyone’s front rank must be Jude Wanniski who died Monday August 29, 2005
aged 69. Obituaries can be found
here and
here.
Bob Novak recalls him here.
George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, celebrates Jude as an
inspiration:
“Economies are driven not by the dollars in people’s pockets but by the ideas in their heads.”
Even The New York Times rolls out a decent obit.

It was Wanniski, as one of Bob Bartley’s bright young men, who first advanced
on the edit page of The Wall Street Journal
the supply-side cocktail of sound money and low tax rates that
brought Ronald Reagan to the Presidency and that remains the
bedrock of Republican Party economic policy. Wanniski’s economic ideas are
expounded in his immodestly titled book The Way the World Works.

Supply-side economics is the basis for the solid economic growth that the
United States has enjoyed since the first Reagan income tax rate cuts started
to bite in late 1983. The new economic policy seems to have shifted the United
States to a decadal business cycle with only two short recessions, in 1991 and 2001,
since the start of Reaganomics.

It is natural for the governing class to look with skepticism on supply-side
economics. Elites like ideas that boost elites; that is why they loved Keynesian
economics. But supply-side economics relies upon a Hayekian understanding of
the economy. It is the millions of decisions by millions of economic actors that
drives the economy, not the big ideas of powerful people. Bureaucrats and
experts simply cannot know enough to outperform the economic decisions of millions
of businessmen, entrepreneurs, and consumers.

Understandably, Democrats hate supply-side economics. Their politics is based
on dependency and clientage, handing out economic goodies to their supporters in
programs and “targeted” tax cuts. In the supply-side world where ordinary
people do extraordinary things, there is no need for all-knowing experts and
patronage-dispensing political bosses.

Still, the Democrats will probably be hesitant to crank up tax rates again. They
tried it in 1993 and were promptly spanked by the voters in 1994 in the Republican
takeover of Congress.

It Couldn't Happen Here

Let us talk about something important. No, not the burning question whether the
recent Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, but something even more important:
The power of the government to take your children away from you.

Maybe there is nothing to worry about on this score. But then again you can’t be too careful
where government power is concerned. In Britain, things seem to be getting beyond the “nothing to
worry about” stage, according to
Cassandra Jardine.

Again and again, I have heard parents say that social workers seem to make
an instant judgment about their fitness as parents and then assemble the evidence to support
that decision. One woman sobbed down the phone from South Wales that she had been accused of
neglecting her children because one of them was underweight; even those of her children without
dietary problems have been taken from her. A cluster of women from Sheffield contacted me about
the high-handed behaviour of social services: one had had her two children taken because she had
left them with a 12-year-old while shopping; another had had her younger children taken because
her eldest had mental health problems; a third because she and her partner had been arguing. From
the Isle of Wight, I heard from a woman whose three-year-old cowered whenever the doorbell rang
because twice she had been taken into
care by social services on the basis of inaccurate information.

Maybe that is just the British welfare state. But here is a curious story from the excellent
Minette Marrin about the rights of parents over their adult disabled children. How
many rights do they have? Not very many.

In both these areas, the removal of children from their homes by the state and the control of adult
mentally disabled children, the presumption is clearly in favor of the government, its experts, and
its functionaries. If the local social worker starts a file on you and your family, then you could
very easily find yourself fighting to prove that you deserve to raise your children. If you have
an adult disabled child, well, the government is the one with the money, after all.

We have got into this situation gradually, without ever really getting a chance to decide what
is right. We set up government child protective services to help abused children, and then the experts
and the social workers went to work. Their interest, of course, is to increase their power and increase
their discretion and reduce the power of parents to “make a nuisance.”

But the question is: do government child service operations result in positive outcomes, compared
to other approaches? Where should the level of proof be set when the government removes a child from
its parents? And what kind of say should parents have in the treatment of their adult disabled children
even if the state has custody of them?

Let’s have a dialog. Sooner rather than later.

People Want to Work at Wal-Mart

Who would want to work at Wal-Mart? That’s the question at the bottom of the
left-wing campaign to unionize the world’s biggest retailer. Critics make a big
deal out of the fact that Wal-Mart doesn’t offer good benefits to its employees, and therefore
they need a union to get the benefits they deserve.

Here are some facts about Wal-Mart for you, courtesy of the London
Economist.

Wal-Mart retorts that it offers “good, affordable coverage” of benefits
to staff willing to pay $70.50 per fortnight per family. Anyway, with Wal-Mart’ tax
bill of about $5 billion a year, American taxpayers come out well ahead. Whatever
shortcomings Wal-Mart may have as an employer, it can hardly be accused of paying
less than the market rate, at least in America. Last week it said that over 11,000 people
had applied for 400 jobs at a new store in Oakland, California.

Oh really. So 11,000 people signed up for 400 jobs at Wal-Mart in Oakland. So just what is it
about Wal-Mart that makes it such a pariah in the eyes of the union movement and so
desirable in the eyes of eager job-seekers in Oakland?

Of course in New York City they’ve changed the law to make the city unwelcome as
a business location for Wal-Mart. So the chances
are that we will never know how many people in Gotham would like to work for Wal-Mart. But
we do know how many would like to work for Wal-Mart in Oakland, California. 11,000. That’s
quite a lot.

Good God, Carruthers. A Flat Tax in Germany?

Don’t get too excited, old chap. Angela Merkel, head of the German Christian Democratic Party, says
that a flat tax in Germany is only a “vision” for the future. But the appointment of Germany’s principal
flat tax proponent, Paul Kirchhof, to her campaign staff has got all us flat tax wackos in a twitter.

The folks at the London Daily Telegraph are getting quite giddy. Writes
George Trefgarne:

Prof Kirchhof believes he can slim down or scrap more than 90,000 German
tax rules and 418 tax exemptions. "Each person only has to pay 25 cents out of each euro
earned," he
explains. "With the rest, he is set free in the garden of liberty."

Trefgarne smells blood. In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown likes the present system and likes

to review his Red Army of tax inspectors and officials,
parading past his window. In fact, he has just merged them into a sinister new department called
HM Revenue and Customs and moved 1,500 of them into his own building on Whitehall, where he can
summon them to his office to hear news of fresh victories.

And in case you think that describing Mr Brown’s tax collectors as an army is overdoing it,
a report by the Treasury select committee last year said there were 99,400 of them, only a
couple of thousand less than the strength
of the Army and much more than both the RAF and the Royal Navy.

We know that the British Chancellor doesn’t like the flat tax because documents obtained from the UK
Treasury say so. Oops! It turns out that the unredacted copy of the documents reveals that the officials
were quite impressed with the flat tax.

One of the Browned-out pieces even said there
could be an "economic mini-boom" if a flat tax were introduced.

By the way, in this
Reuters report
the German for “flat tax” is “einheitlicher Steuersatz.” It doesn’t exactly come trippingly
off the tongue, does it? Oh wait. There’s a short version: “Einheitssteuer.” So that’s all right.

More Points on the Board in Iraq

Now that the Iraqi constitution is looking like more than Bush administration wishful thinking,
Mark Steyn
is allowing himself a little thimbleful of celebration. The liberals
said it couldn’t be done, but the Bushies just executed on their strategy and made it happen.

By the way, here’s another reason why Iraq isn’t another Vietnam. Back in the Sixties, the Democrats
never really had a strategy. Nixon did, but he got bounced out of office by Watergate.

Ever since 9/11 the Bush administration has been executing on a strategy, a plan (
yes, the Bushies really do have a plan) to introduce
some sort of democracy in the Middle East and to put pressure on the terror masters, first in Afghanistan,
then in Iraq, and now in Syria and Iran.

Of course, things have gone wrong. They always do. Mistakes have been made. As alway. The whole project
may blow up and end in disaster. The Israelis could be driven into the sea.

But the Bush administration keeps putting points on the board. The reduction of Kabul. The invasion
of Iraq. The interim Iraqi government. The reduction of Fallujah. The January 2005 election.
The buildup of the new Iraqi security forces. The draft constitution. These are not just propaganda and public relations. They
are real, hard-won victories. They mean something.