"Harmless" Drugs

As parents and teachers coke our children up on Ritalin, retired
physician
Theodore Dalrymple recalls that it was ever thus. There
is always a convenient and harmless drug floating around to take care of our mood or
keep children quiet.

Back in the 19th century parents dosed their children up with laudanum (that’s
a solution of opium) to keep them quiet. Then in the 1960s there was
“Phenergan, an antihistamine with tranquillising effects.”

I think I must have prescribed the stuff myself in the
mid-1970s to the children of mothers who said they were going to kill
their offspring if they did not soon get a good night’s sleep.
Better a drugged baby, I thought, than a murderous mother.

There is always a fashionable drug with magical properties for setting
the world to rights.

In fact, there is a pattern in such fashions, a pattern
from which we never seem to learn. A drug that acts on the brain is
first heralded not only as a miraculous cure of some psychological ill
or other, but harmless to boot; it is later learned that not only have
its miraculous therapeutic properties been much exaggerated, but
that it is not at all harmless either.

Now, of course, the drug is Ritalin, a powerful amphetamine that we
use on our children to make them more tractable and to curb their
attention deficit disorder.

Media Loses Heart

Back in the good old days, when Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce,” was president, and when Republicans first took over Congress after the mid-term elections of 1994, conservatives used to fulminate over the gross misrepresentation of conservative policies in the media, writes Tony Blankley, former aide to Newt Gingrich.

But now, they just don’t seem to have the same old fire.

Today, big media has lost interest in policy substance almost altogether. Analysis of major policy announcements is viewed almost exclusively through the prism of polling numbers.

If the president were to call for two plus two to equal four, the media would report that such a proposal had the support of only 42 percent of likely voters, and a slippage of even conservative support from 87 percent to 63 percent. Perhaps on the jump page, in the 38th inch of the story in the New York Times, they might get around to quoting a professor of mathematics from MIT to the effect that in fact the president was right that two plus two still equals four.

And in reporting the president’s speech on the Global War on Terror recently, the mainstream media reported that it contained nothing new and would not likely raise the president’s poll numbers In fact, the speech did contain something new.

For the first time the president of the United States named the enemy: "Islamofascist" and "radical, militant Islam." He compared it to the Nazi and Communist ideological threat of the previous century.

Blankley complains that the MSM are not just b*st*rds, but dumb b*st*rds. But he should see it as good news. Behind the rage and the frenzy of the young angry left there is in fact nothing. No new ideas, no vision of the future, just an attempt to hang on.

It’s time for a big conservative offensive, to get conservative ideas out before the American people, now that the opposition, so spirited for so many years, is losing heart.

Iraqis Vote For Constitution

Early returns show that the Iraqi people
approved
a new constitution on October 15, 2005, with only
two provinces appearing to vote against approval. So the Bush strategy seems to have cleared another
hurdle.

For now at least, the program of bringing consensual government to the Middle East goes on. And
the Bush plan to inject a blocking regime against the militant and expansionist Islamist regime in
Iran remains a success.

That’s the plan, in case you are wondering. In case you are one of the folks buying into the notion
that the Bush administration had “no plan” after they got to Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
It’s not that different from the containment strategy
that ended up succeeding against the Soviet Union. In 1947 the need was to block the expansion of the
murderous Stalin regime into western Europe. For 40 years the United States through Republican and
Democratic administrations held the line in Europe until the Soviet Union and its old-fashioned
empire collapsed from its internal contradictions.

Now a new force has arisen to oppose the irresistible force of democratic capitalism, this time
in the Muslim
Middle East. And so the United States once again has mobilized to oppose it.

Thatcher's 80th Birthday

They celebrated the 80th birthday last night of
Margaret Thatcher, the other half
of the tag team of Reagan and Thatcher. She was a scholarship girl, daughter of the corner
grocer who went to Cambridge University and then into national politics.

Her great life achievement was to turn Britain away from the disastrous expert-led death
spiral of the 1970s when the economy was utterly devastated by political power and rent-seeking,
all in the name of social progress and compassion.

Now she is 80 and we all live in the afterglow of her hard-won achievements. The success of the
New Labour Blair government is based on the continuing good economic growth that was founded
in the hard years of 1979-1984.

But the hard truth is that, while the British Conservative Party solved the economic problem of
productivity in the private sector the British Labour Party under Tony Blair has failed to solve
the economic problem of productivity in the public sector. And that is too bad for the British people.

It is said that you only get strong leaders when you need them. At least, the Anglosphere seems to
throw up strong leaders in a time of need. The British certainly got their strong leader
when they needed one in Margaret Thatcher, and just in the nick
of time.

Bush's Plan on Track in Iraq

For about a couple of years now Democrats have pushed the line that the Bush administration
had no plan for Iraq. It sent the US armed forces into Baghdad and then and then stood around
wondering, Now what do we do?

The Bush plan was, and is, to replace the terror regime of Saddam Hussein with some sort of
consensual regime. The plan was to replace one-man rule with Iraqi rule. It was to replace the politics
of the gun with the politics of the negotiation.

So with two major Sunni parties signing onto the proposed Iraq constitution things are looking up
for the election Saturday October 15 in which the Iraqi people get to approve the constitution that
was drafted for them. You could say that Bush’s plan is working.

And as James S. Robbins observes, the Al Qaeda chaps are facing a bit of a problem
with their executioner public face. They are wondering whether they need to tone it down a bit.

With the Iraqi army growing in strengh and the constitution approved, what will the pessimists
hang their hats on next?

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reforms

What does the recent German election mean, in which the two main parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU basically
ended in a dead heat?
Anatole Kaletsky reckons it means that the three great nations of Europe, Germany, France,
and Italy, are checking out. First in France with the rejection of the EU constitution and now
with the German rejection of reform, the Europeans are saying that they don’t want any stinking
reforms. They just want to go on as they are. According to

Wolfgang Münchau, a German commentator in the Financial Times: “The
German electorate has launched a new era in European economic policy — the post-reform era.
After ten years of
economic reforms, the Germans decided they had had enough.”

I know, I know. What planet are these Germans on? What reforms? From this side of the Atlantic
there is no sense that the German government has been enacting bold reforms. What they have been
doing is avoiding reform, talking about the noble European “Social Model” and making rude
remarks about the Anglo-Saxon economic model. (By the way, where do the Irish with their world-beating
Celtic Model fit in all this?)

Well, it’s a shame. For all their rascally behavior over the centuries, we owe a lot to the French
and the Germans. Montesquieu taught us how to write our constitution, and the Germans invented the
research university. And Hitler thoughtfully ripped the brain out of Germany and sent it over here.

But still, it’s a shame.

Low US Savings: Is It a Problem?

One of the concerns of enlightened elite opinion recently has been a worry over the lagging US savings
rate. Compared against any nation you like, the US savings rate comes in at the bottom. But like
the balance of payments problem, another worry of concerned elitists, the question is: Is “the problem” a problem?

The balance of payments is always in balance, wrote Ludwig von Mises half a century ago. He meant
that if the US runs a balance of payments deficit in, say, merchandise, it merely reflected the
choice of millions of consumers and thousands of producers. It means that Americans want to buy goods, and foreigners want
to hold American paper: dollars, debt, and equity.

In NRO, John Tamny weighs into The Wall Street Journal’s
David Wessel for worrying about
the savings deficit, that we need to wean ourselves from “from growing dependence on the savings of Asians and Europeans,”
and that the US “consumes more than it makes.”

The problem with this received elite opinion is that is flies in the face of some awkward facts. If
we are dangerously dependent on foreign capital, why are interest rates so low? And if low savings
is such a problem, why does US national wealth keep going up?

The answer is that the US does not have to save because our economy generates wealth.

[Data] last month from the Federal Reserve show that U.S. household net worth hit a
record of $49.8 trillion, up roughly $5 trillion in the last year alone. Notably, those gains
were split
almost equally between residential real estate and financial assets.

High savings rate is an indication that the economy is not throwing off the increase in wealth that
people need to provide for the future.

the best way to boost the savings rate would be for both the housing and stock
markets to collapse. Americans experienced just such a thing in the early 1980s when stocks
were still mired in a multi-year slump and home prices were crashing. Amidst those capital
losses, the savings rate unsurprisingly reached double digits.

To put it bluntly, Americans save when the economy is in the tank.

The bigger question is: Why do foreigners want to put their money into American debt with its
low returns? Why aren’t there better risk-reward propositions out there?