President to Take Credit for Good Economy

Now you’re talking. The White House is sending out the word that the president is going to focus now on the war and taxes, after being distracted for months by hurricanes and Supreme Court flaps. According to Donald Lambro the president is finally getting out and

promoting one of his highest domestic achievements and the fiscal policies that have produced four years of uninterrupted economic growth.

Here we are, after all, the industrial country with the fastest economic growth and 43 percent of Americans think we are in a recession. Why would they think that?

They think that because our media publicize all the bad news, and the president hasn’t been publicizing the good news.

Now that is going to end. The president is going to get out and toot his own horn, and we’ll see what the American people think about that.

What Would Hayek Do?

In Britland they are worrying about the consequence of cranking up the government share of the economy from 38 percent in 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister to an expected 44 percent this year or next. Well, we all know the answer to that. Nothing good.

In the annual Hayek Lecture given at the Institute of Economic Affairs,
Andrew Neil thinks about the bigger picture. With China and India poised to become economic giants in the next 50 years should Britain stay a part of a Europe in inevitable decline or should it become the 51st state of the USA?

What would Hayek say?

Based on the ideas he formulated over a lifetime of scholarship and advocacy he would argue against a Britain founded on The Fatal Conceit of building society using “constructivist rationalism,” the idea that
“all social institutions are, or ought to be, the
product of deliberate design”. Instead he would argue that Britain should be built using “evolutionary rationalism,” that is
orderly
“structures which are the product of the actions
of many men [and women] but are not the
result of human design.” He would say (and his words would apply just as much to us here in the good old U.S. of A.) that

Government policy should not respond to
China as such, he would say, but strive to
become a low-tax, high-skill, well-educated,
high-productivity vibrant nation-state just
offshore the highest-taxed, increasingly low-skilled, sclerotic set of rich nations in the
world. The ability to compete with China would
follow naturally.

It really isn’t that hard, is it. Just do it.

But we can see where the hard part is. It’s dealing with all those who have squirreled into the vast welfare state (that princely 44 percent of GDP) and built themselves a nice little hoard over the years. Maybe their hoard is a tenured professorship. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out union job. Maybe it’s a 30-and-out government job. Maybe it’s a job in some tax-favored industry.
All those folks are going to squeal like banshees over any move to a low-tax, high-skill vibrant nation-state. Because, after years getting paid pretty nicely for not doing too much, they are going to object to all that vibrancy. To them, it will feel like Hurricane Katrina.

It’s just human nature.

Teen Sex Leads to Depression in Girls

We all know, because liberals have taught us, that sexual restraint is harmful, leading to dangerous mental health disorders such as “repression” and “neurosis.” That is what Freud taught us a century ago. If you repress your natural, non-violent instincts in conformity with oppressive social or religious tradition, your healthy instincts will erupt into mental illness.

What the world needs is open, creative people with a healthy sex life. That’s what the experts have been teaching us and our children for the past half century.

When it comes to teenagers, of course, liberals teach us that they are all going to do it anyway, so we need to teach the kids how to have “safe sex.” And, according to the experts, children already suffering from depression and anxiety might turn to sexual experimentation and drugs in an effort to medicate their mental illness.

Now comes a study that asserts that the experts had it all wrong. According to Warren Throckmorton,

a new study, which followed over 13,000 middle and high school students for two years in a row, found that depression did not predict risky sexual or drug using behavior.

Instead it works the other way around.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Denise Hallfors told [Throckmorton] in an interview that her research team found evidence that heavy drug and alcohol use significantly increased the likelihood of depression among boys. For girls, the findings are stunning: Even low levels of alcohol, drug or sexual experimentation increased the probability of depression for girls.

OK. Let’s look at the numbers shall we? Compared with teens who were absolute abstainers from sex and drugs

Girls even experimenting with drugs were slightly more than two times as likely to be depressed (8-10 percent). Those experimenting with sex were three times more likely to be depressed than abstainers (12 percent versus 4 percent). For sexually promiscuous teen girls, the results are staggering: 44 percent of girls with multiple sexual partners during the study period experienced depression.

Now here’s a thought. What is the rate of depression among promiscious teen girls who have had an abortion? Is it 10 percent higher than ordinary promiscuous girls? Or 20 percent higher? Or even 40 percent higher? Obviously more research is needed.

For years liberals have been insisting that the basis of social mores should not be encrusted patriarchal tradition but rational, factual social science research. We should not believe old wives tales or the wisdom of the fathers. We should trust instead the objective, scientific research of the educated elite of experts.

How about it, then, liberals?

Talk Up The Economy

In the last fiscal year federal revenues came in $100 billion above the estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. That means that the federal deficit came in $100 billion lower than estimates. Think what that means.

It means, according to Newt Gingrich and David Merritt, that the econometric models the CBO uses to “score” the federal government’s activities are broken, and a new CBO director is needed to provide the American people with better tools to measure the performance of the government.

It means, according to Donald Lambro, that President Bush should get out more to talk about the strength of the economy, and also work early and often to extend the tax rate cuts that were enacted in 2003 and sent the economy into overdrive. “Here’s an economy that’s growing by more than 4 percent a year, producing 200,000 plus new jobs a month,” and the American people think the economy is in the tank. There’s a reason for that, of course. The president hasn’t been talking it up.

Of course, maybe the White House folks have been crazy like a fox. Maybe they have been quiet on progress on the economy and in Iraq because, not needing to fight any elections this year, they figured they could wait till now before determining how to present their story. And in the meanwhile the Democrats have overreached themselves with their gloom-and-doom rhetoric.

Anyway, it now looks as though the president will be talking all the time about the administration’s successes. He had better. The media ain’t gonna do it for him.

New Party Leader Addresses Brit "Broken Society"

Ten years ago British Prime Minister Tony Blair turned the Labour Party away from its economic socialism. But the real problem in its left-wing recipe was left to fester, the destruction of civil society by the all-powerful social-services state. Conservatives in Britain and the United States know what that looks like, and we know what to do about it. Writer Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed to it in numerous articles and in Life at the Bottom: the utter degradation of underclass life under the tutelage of the welfare state. Numerous writers and politicians have shown what to do about it, from Charles Murray and his Losing Ground to Rudolph Giuliani and his “broken window” policing. Now the spotlight shifts to Britain.

It is significant that the first speech of new Tory leader David Cameron, elected by Conservative Party members to be leader of the Conservatives in the British Parliament, should address the “broken society” of the welfare state.

I want to set free the voluntary sector and social enterprises to deal with the linked problems that blight so many of our communities, of drug abuse, family breakdown, poor public space, chaotic home environments, high crime.

We can deal with these issues, we can mend our broken society.

In opening this flank attack on the welfare state he is opening a new era in British politics. As always, the thinkers and the scribblers have got there first: There is Civitas, the British think tank that has opened a low-cost independent school to serve parents of modest means that want to escape from the “bog standard” government schools. And there is James Bartholomew and his book The Welfare State We’re In, a devastating history of the welfare state in Britain over the last century.

It’s a radical notion, that the social space for helping the helpless should be filled by a voluntary sector, rather than by government experts and functionaries. For most people in Britain and in the United States the idea is over the top, so used are we to the educated class’s insistence that only they, furnished with our money, have the standing to help the poor and the unfortunate.

We will see whether David Cameron can move the British people away from the government model of social welfare towards another model: ordinary people helping ordinary people, face to face, heart to heart.

The Mind of the Left

What is it like to belong to the left? How does the left think? Conservatives ponder this from time to time, as we think about our political adversaries, and as we formulate our ideas.

One of the best ways to look into the mind of the left is to ask a former member. You could ask, for example, Tammy Bruce, the lesbian writer and talk-show host who used to be the head of a National Organization for Women affiliate.

In an interview with John Hawkins to promote her new book The New American Revolution, she tells what it is like to be a left-wing activist. Asked by Hawkins

You said victimhood is the cornerstone of the identity of many liberals and for that reason, it’s very difficult for many of them to give it up. Why do you say that?

Bruce replies:

With an identity that’s based in victimhood, if you find either that you’re not a victim or you find personal independence and power, it literally becomes a threat. (If) your identity (is) based in victimhood (and) that is removed, it literally strikes at the core of the identity of that person.

What about hate mail and death threats? As a person who has had a public life on the left and on the right, is there a difference in the level of hate that you experience from the other side? Says Bruce:

When I was on the left my activism began on abortion rights and even in facing pro-life individuals, I would get the occasional death threat but really nothing to speak of. Upon my being honest and coming out and writing my book and dissenting from the left as a liberal, the threats and attacks are extraordinary. It is a remarkable window into the kind of venom, the kind of hate that drives the left.

And Bruce found that Christian conservatives were happy people.

[I was] quite surprised by how happy they were. I mean, I remember being on the left; no one is happy, trust me. They (are the) biggest group of miserable people you would ever want to meet. Everything is wrong, everything is going bad, everyone is after you, everyone wants to get you, people are building camps.

Modern developmental psychology has quite a lot to say about all this. You can check out one model, Spiral Dynamics, here. In the Spiral Dynamics model it is perfectly natural for many people to live as “red” victims. But they grow out of it, For many people, the way they do this is by accepting the Christian framework of God’s love for sinners and victims.

Does Iraq Have an Army?

In the Atlantic James Fallows reports that Iraq has no army. He writes:

An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren’t even close. The Bush administration doesn’t take the problem seriously — and it never has[.]

In National Review Online W. Thomas Smith Jr. reports that the Iraq armed forces are developing into the best army in the Middle East. They are turning out “the right sort of men”

"In all the discussion about troop or unit numbers, or fully trained versus trained, we’re missing the real story," says [Gen. Daniel P.] Bolger. "The truth is these guys fight. They want to fight and win, and they do. Some pundits may not know that, but the Iraqis know it."

Who are you gonna believe?

The big question after the fall of Saddam’s regime was whether to rebuild the Iraq armed forces from the ground up, or whether to start with the existing Baathist cadres. The Bush administration chose to build from the ground up. Obviously that takes longer. But it results in an army free of the taint of the Saddam era and more likely to be loyal to the new regime.

Was that the right decision? That will be for the historians to decide.