The Fight for Economic Competence

It’s been well said that, if the parties of the right stand for anything, they stand for
economic competence in national affairs. Not for them the easy road of compassion and spending
other people’s money on vaguely defined “needs.” When you stand for compassion and sensitivity
you always have the excuse when things go south that you meant well. When you stand for
common sense and balanced budgets and good management, then you have to deliver. If you can’t
deliver, who needs you?

In this season of discontent the Bush administration had better make sure that its economic
policy delivers, as Larry Kudlow warns.
That means spending restraint and keeping tax rates low. American conservatives know all about the
importance of low marginal tax rates. But government spending restraint delivers big dividends too.

Four nations have undertaken a policy of spending
restraint in recent years, Chile, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. In three
of the four cases, the spending
restraint focused mainly not on spending cuts but just keeping year-on-year increases under control.
But any way it was done, the result was a vibrant, growing economy that suprised everyone.

If you really want a big payoff, then real spending cuts are the way to go. That’s what Ireland
did in the late 1980s, reducing government spending from 53.2 percent of GDP in 1987 to 40.6 percent
in 1990, according to William W. Lewis in The Power of Productivity.
The Irish economy, once a basket case, is now the toast of Europe (er, make that the envy of Europe). Irish GDP per head
in 2004 was $26,890, well ahead of the United Kingdom at $23,920. The surge has all taken place
in the last 15 years since the Irish cut government spending and lowered tax rates.

Battle of Trafalgar

Today, October 21, is a day that will live... in glory. It was this day two hundred years ago
that the British Royal Navy squadron under the command of Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the combined
fleets of France and Spain off Cape Trafalgar.

The victory was a great military triumph in operational terms, for it was a bold attempt to
suprise and confuse the French with unexpected and unorthodox tactics. As
Brett M. Decker writes:

Nelson aimed his ships strait at the middle of the enemy line to break the force
in two. It was a very risky strategy because the massive cannons were positioned on the sides
of their great ships. Heading straight ahead into the enemy line meant Nelson’s side-mounted
guns were useless and exposed Nelson’s fleet to pounding from the broadsides of his targets,
which were
stretched in a long line with their gun ports facing Nelson’s advance.

This tactic of suprise is today the basic modus operandi of all armies: to suprise and disorient
the enemy and keep moving faster than he is able to react.

But the battle had another consequence. It meant that Napoleon could not deploy the invasion
force he had assembled across the English Channel from Britain. Instead of becoming “French-occupied
Britain” the British entered upon a century of global dominance in which they exported their politics,
their culture, and their industry to the world.

One of the things that Napoleon would have done would have been to sweep away Britain’s common
law and replace it with the Code Napoleacute;on, writes
Tom Utley.

The trouble with Britain’s common law is that it is an organic growth, based not on
first principles, but on human nature and accumulated experience.

Tidy-minded continental rationalists have never liked that sort of thing.

But now, two hundred years after its victory against mindless
continental rationalism, Britain is succumbing to the embrace of the universal European superstate,
the centralized, one-size-fits-all European Union.

Was all that brilliance and all that glory two
hundred years ago for nothing?

Out of the Mouths of Babes

What really happened to those WMDs? And what really was the relationship between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?
Oh, and how is Syria involved in the Iraqi insurgency?

Using publicly available intelligence and his home computer, 19-year-old Ryan Mauro, analyst for
“Tactical Defense Concepts and Northeast Intelligence Network,” has
dug out all the answers to these vexing questions. And he’s got a book out:
Death to America: The Unreported Battle of Iraq.

In an interview with Frontpagemag.com
he tells all the stuff that the MSM and the Democrats don’t want you to know. That there was long-standing
relationships between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That there was a long-standing arrangement between Iraq and Syria to
allow Saddam to shuttle his WMD into Syria when needed to escape inspection. That Syria is behind
most of the Baathist-led insurgency.

One of the problems with the CIA, he says, is that the intelligence community is addicted to classified
intelligence. When he gave a CIA contact some intelligence, the contact refused it.
“The CIA contact refused to pass the information along, saying that he’d
then be expected from then on to provide such high-quality information.”

Course, this kid’s only 19. What does he know?

Democrats Still Don't Get It

Democrats are working hard on making a comeback in 2006 and 2008. But it is not clear that
they really have something new to excite the voters.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, there may be a lot for Republicans to be gloomy about
right now, what with scandals as far as the eye can see, high gas prices, and a bulge in inflation.
But Democrats really haven’t come up with anything new. With the encouragement of the progressive
George Lakoff, they have gotten the idea that their problem is that they have been stuck
with the wrong metaphors. “Trial lawyers” should really be called “public protection attorneys.”
Good try, George. Your Philosophy in the Flesh was a great introduction to your day job, as a
professor of cognitive science at Berkeley. But the metaphor game in politics needs to start after
you have come up with some good ideas, not before.

It is Third Way analysts Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck that have a better take on the Democratic problem. They argue in
The Politics of Polarization
(pdf here)
that the Democrat problem is too much metaphoric polarization and not enough
thoughtful analysis of the needs of the American people. They identify four myths that have stymied
the Democrats.

• The myth of mobilization is the belief that the key to Democratic victory is to energize the base and bring them to the polls in record numbers.
  
  
• The myth of demography is the view that long-term, ongoing changes in the U.S. population - such as an increase in the number of Hispanic voters and female professionals - will secure a Democratic majority for decades to come.
  
  
• The myth of language holds that the problem with the Democratic Party is not what it advocates, but rather how it speaks.
  
  
• The myth of prescription drugs is shorthand for the theory that the Party can win national elections by avoiding cultural issues, downplaying national security, and changing the subject to domestic issues such as health care, education, and job security in the post-9/11 world.
  

In other words, they are in a whole heap of trouble.

"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.