UN Discovers Property Rights for the Poor

Here’s a man bites dog story. The United Nations is setting up a commission on the
property rights of the poor and the hurdles and obstacles the poor face as they try to
make a living.

It’s surprising because, for more than a century, the global bien-pensant elites have
brushed aside the question of property rights. They have experienced that the way
for the poor to advance was by clientage to the political power of the educated elite.
Vote for us, the educated elite told the poor, and we will have our experts look after you.

But now, according to
Alejandro Chafuen,
the UN is taking a look at the narrative developed by Peruvian businessman Hernando De Soto.
And guess what. The new “High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor” will be
led by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and Hernando De Soto himself.

Founder and director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, and author of the landmark 1986 book on property rights, "The Other Path," Mr. De Soto has demonstrated to policy makers worldwide that an organized "legal property system" is the single
most important factor -- the "hidden architecture" or "missing link," he calls it --
that will determine whether individual entrepreneurs and national economies have even
a chance of achieving success.

In capitalist economies, Mr. De Soto notes, business transactions are made
possible by widely accepted rules governing legally defined property. Such concepts
often don’t exist in the developing world, where existing legal systems (or the lack
thereof) may not recognize the assets and transactions of some 70 percent of the
population.

And if that doesn’t persuade you there is the testimony of William L. Lewis in
The Power of Productivity in which he shows that the biggest problem faced by anyone,
rich or poor, is the lack of a flat and fair playing field for economic competition. Usually,
Third World countries are hobbled by vast structures that favor producers over consumers and
distort the economy with a miasma of subsidies.

Of course, all the UN is proposing to do for now is to talk. But still, progress is progress.

A Great Opportunity

It was the fall of 1987 when Senator Edward Kennedy opened a new era in American politics.
In fact, it is perhaps his signature contribution to American politics. An hour after President Reagan
nominated Appeals Court Judge Robert Bork to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Kennedy spoke
these words on the floor of the United States Senate:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into
back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police
could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,
children could not be taught about evolution

It was the beginning of the Bork era, in which Democrats arrogated to themselves
the right to attack with ruthless character assassination any candidate for the federal bench who did not hew
to the liberal line on abortion and the other various “rights” that had been
legislated from the federal bench in the era of judicial activism that began in the 1950s
with the Warren court.

Ever since, Republicans have walked in fear of being Borked, and Republicans have suffered
again and again from vicious campaigns of character assassination from Democratic activists.
For Republicans never seemed to be able to avoid getting spattered with mud when Democrats
jumped into the gutter.

Central to the Democrats’ power to administer these public floggings was their
willing accomplices in the media. Most journalists were liberal and they wanted
to preserve the great liberal rights decisions that the Supreme Court had made in the
previous generation.

Now they are trying it again. Senator Schumer of New York has stepped into the shoes
of Senator Kennedy with a speech made this time moments before President Bush announced
the nomination of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, implying that Alito was
a racist:

A preliminary review of his record raises real questions about
Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy and his commitment to civil rights, workers’
rights, women’s rights, the rights of average Americans which the courts have always
looked out for.

Now, it’s sad that the president felt he had to pick a nominee likely to
divide America instead of choosing a nominee in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor
who would unify us.

America needs unity now. America needs reaching out to one another more than ever.
But the president seems to want to hunker down in his bunker and is more concerned
about smoothing the ruffled feathers of the extreme wing of his party than about
governing all of America and changing history for the better.

For conservatives and Republicans, the issue cannot be clearer. After twenty years cowering from
the monstrous calumnies of liberal senators and liberal activist groups, the Bork era
must be brought to a close. Conservatives and Republicans should not live in
fear of Borking and character assassination.

This time, once for all, the Democratic
tactic of character assassination and obstruction must not stand. It must fail, and
be seen to fail in a national convulsion of disgust with the politics of
“the eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Fortunately Republicans now have the tools to do the job: our own publicity machine
that can meet or beat the organs of the Democratic Party and their willing accomplices
in the mainstream media.

Bring. It. On.

The Folly of Feminism

Judging by her article in The New York Times Magazine about
the rough time women are having in the Noughties columnist
Maureen Dowd
is fixin’ to publish one of those tiresomely
superficial books that pretends to capture the zeitgeist while actually
telling us nothing except that media people in New York persist in thinking that
they are central to the culture.

Under subheads like “Courtship” “Money” “Power Dynamics” “Movies” and “Beauty” Dowd
tries to figure out what went wrong with the feminist program of the 1970s to
which she and her peers subscribed. How come girls are returning to courtship,
frills and furbelows, and men are picking up the tab at dinner? How come that women
give up so much more on the career track and successful women are so
often childless?

Of course, Dowd cannot really give an answer to all this, for it would mean
shining the light of truth on the whole modern project, and that she cannot
even begin to permit.

The answer is suggested in the complaints of a boss I worked for years ago. He
would complain that the software engineers working for him were forever going off on tangents.
We had all the time in the world for building
cute tools and elegant software embellishments. When, he would wonder, would we focus on getting the job done,
on time and on budget?

Work is hard, and humans will do anything to escape the pain of work.
That is why we have an inexhaustible appetite for diversions, hobbies, addictions, and pleasures.
All this activity is an excuse to avoid getting down to work. The central
work of adult humans is the same as adults throughout the animal kingdom, to bring forth
a new generation and rear it to adulthood.

Leaving aside the social superstructure of culture and custom, this task means
that women must spend a great part of their life energy in nurturing and raising
children. Men must spend a great deal of their life energy in providing
resources for that task, particularly during the critical period when women
are weighed down by pregnancy and by young children.

In today’s society we enjoy a remarkable privilege. We are able to separate
sex from childbearing. Thus modern women have the opportunity to control their
fertility; they can choose when to have children. In the excitement of this new freedom women have rushed out and jumped
over the fence to romp in the greener grass that seemed to grow in the man’s world
of career, power, and status that women seemed to be excluded from because of the
yoke of childbearing and the baleful culture of the patriarchy.

Women are discovering that the grass is not greener in the man’s world. And they
are discovering that their lust to escape domesticity was not a noble yearning
for freedom but just an excuse to go off on tangents and neglect the real work
that needed to be done.

The real work of humans is children. Everything else is a tangent.

Alito, Scalito

Conservatives got what we asked for. In Appeals Court Judge Samuel A. Alito we
have a judge with years on the bench, a clear paper trail, and impeccable conservative
credentials. In return for the compliment from President Bush in nominating
such a candidate for the Supreme Court we have an obligation to
fight for victory over the abortion today, abortion tomorrow, and abortion forever brigade.
And the battle begins today.

On his blog Hugh Hewitt
has the strategy all laid out. He has thoughtfully provided the telephone numbers of the key United States Senators.

The strategy is to head off the Democratic filibuster at the pass, by
getting to the Gang of 14, the seven Republicans and seven Democrats that committed to
voting for cloture back in the spring over President Bush’s filibustered Appeals Court
judges. If they come out for cloture on Alito, then the filibustering tactic is dead.

But let there be no doubt about this. Conservatives need to rally and to show their
senators that a rejection of Judge Alito’s nomination will cost them at the ballot box.
That is the coin of the realm for them.

The Lessons of Volcker and Greenspan

As the quarter century of inflation-free prosperity under the monetary policies of Federal Reserve
Board Chairmen Paul Volker and Alan Greenspan comes to a close with the retirement of Greenspan,
Steve Chapman
reviews the lessons learned.

Back in 1980 people believed that there was a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. It
was the precipitate of a generation of Keynesian economics.

Back then, the conventional wisdom was that we had to choose our poison.
If we wanted a prosperous economy and low unemployment, we had to accept inflation. If we wanted
low inflation, we would have to put up with a sluggish economy and sentence millions of people to
a life on the dole.

But evil conservative economists protested. “‘Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,’”
wrote Milton Friedman. So Paul Volcker, appointed to the Fed chairmanship in 1979 put this concept into
practice. It produced bone-chilling interest rates and then 11 percent unemployment until the other
leg of post-1980 economics kicked in: the Reagan tax rate cuts. Ever since, the US and the rest
of the the world has enjoyed bold, persistent economic growth.

The great discovery of the last quarter-century is not that the government
should do nothing, but that it should focus on doing certain essential tasks -- one of
which is to avoid debasing the currency on which all economic activity depends. Long after
Messrs. Greenspan and Volcker are forgotten,
Americans will still be in debt to them for that lesson.

Actually, there are four legs to the economic stool:

• Sound money, i.e., Volcker-Greenspan policy


• Low tax rates, i.e., Reagan-Bush tax rate cuts


• Affordable government, i.e., keep government share of economy low


• Even playing field for intense business competition, i.e., hack away at subsidies and privileges

Pretty simple, isn’t it?

The Conservative Base Rejoins the Bush Team

There’s a problem about belonging to a political base. Sometimes your party ignores you. It takes
you for granted and spends all its energy wooing moderates and independents.

So occasionally the base needs to rebel. Just to remind the politicians where they live.

President Bush obviously wants to get Supreme Court nominations through the US Senate with the
minimum of fighting. That’s why he chose John Roberts: brilliant, but slippery. Democrats
could never get a grip on him, so half of them ended up voting for his confirmation. But last summer
conservatives started out unsure about Roberts. It took a while before they climbed on board his
nomination bandwagon.

With the Miers nomination, Bush crossed a line. Many conservatives just couldn’t swallow it, and they
said so. Now President Bush has to submit a new name, and he understands, no doubt, that the new
nominee must be someone that will excite the conservative base even at the cost of a battle in the US
Senate with the Roe v. Wade Democrats.

But with the Miers nomination history, it appears that conservatives are willing to come together
and fight for the president’s agenda.

According to
Donald Lambro and Ralph Z. Hallow conservatives have put the Miers imbroglio behind them
and are ready to fight for the president.

"The White House has begun shoring up its support among conservatives who have been upset
with them. The president has been more forceful
on spending issues, and that bodes well for his administration down the road," said Ron Bonjean,
chief spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican.

"They’ve been playing defense for so long on Harriet Miers that it’s great to see them pivoting
and going on offense again on our issues," he said.

President Bush will need a united Republican Party going into the 2006 mid-term elections. Democratic
victories in Congress could make the final two years of his term a misery.

Miers Withdraws

Today, October 27, Harriet Miers
withdrew
her nomination to be an associate justice on the
United States Supreme Court. So that’s over. The question is: What comes next? Or, to put it another
way, what does the captain of a mutinous company do to stop the growling and scowls from his
licentious soldiery?

The answer is obvious. Lead them into battle. And he should not just lead them into a fight but
make it perfectly clear that he expects them to win.

So maybe, after the Miers debacle, President Bush will nominate a good solid, qualified conservative
for the court, someone like Judge J. Michael Luttig or like Judge Michael W. McConnell.

Then he can say
to the Miers opponents, or imply: ok, you guys,
you wanted a conservative on the court. I’ve got one right here. Now, after all your whining and
grumbling show me what you can do. And let me make something clear. There is a difference between
trying and doing. We are not talking about fighting for the new nominee. We are talking about
fighting and winning.

Will that approach work? It could. The Miers nomination has raised a huge dust cloud that has
obscured the old Supreme Court battlefield. Ever since the election of Bush in 2000,
liberals and conservatives have been lining up for a set-piece battle, with conservative hordes preparing
to attack liberals in their Roe v. Wade citadel.

But now the story has changed. After the successful Roberts nomination and the Miers debacle
the old set-piece battle is not longer on the cards. The next nomination battle will be different.
How different? Well, we shall see.