The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States

There is a difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.

In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.

But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the ground. In Saudi Arabia (and in other natural resource states) the people are an annoying cost that reduces the revenue of the political leaders.

This model can be applied globally. States like the United States, Japan, South Korea, India, and China are nations that depend upon their people for their wealth. States like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, and now even little Bolivia are natural resource states. They do not produce much of anything that the world wants except their oil or their natural gas.

So when Russia turns off the gas to Ukraine, writes Irwin M. Stelzer, maybe we ought to pay attention. Maybe Russian President Vladimir Putin is sending

a warning to major energy-consuming countries that their long-term prosperity is in the hands of very dangerous people.

The joke is that the natural resource states need us much more than we need them. In the long term, if they push prices above the market then the energy-consuming countries will find other ways of getting energy. In the short term, certainly, they can swing their weight around and cause inconvenience.

Of course, there is no reason why the natural resource countries and their tin-pot dictators should have the influence they do. There are plenty of ways we can reduce their influence. We can build out nuclear power. We can aggressively prospect for oil and natural gas in the mainland US and offshore. But we don’t. We don’t do it because significant portions of our educated elite in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world belong to a post-Christian religious cult that experiences the earth as an expression of the divine. They experience the land outside the cities as a sacred place that should be kept apart. Characteristically, they want to force their religious beliefs onto other Americans.

But that will change. Eventually the people states will deal with the natural resource states. The only question is, shall we do it now, when the cost is manageable? Or shall we let the natural resource states wax in strength and pride and in their ability to cause mischief before we deal with them?

Lefty Professors Don't Get It

While the pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?

And of course to back him up Frontpagemag.com has a horror story about a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia who runs a cartoonish left-wing course on “Urban Society: ‘Race,’ Class, and Gender in the City.” Needless to say, all the readings are left-wing, and anyone that disagrees with the teacher, associate professor Melissa Gilbert, gets an earful, as this student reported on ratemyprofessors.com

“Racism and Sexism are only one side. She is one of the biggest feminists I know — Oh and if you’re a white male, you can’t ask her a question, she yelled at me after class for asking test structure. She’s hypocritical and a HUGE Feminist. Very bad teacher.”

You feel sorry for the kids being subjected to this abuse, but maybe it is good for them. Maybe they need a bit of abuse from the lefties. Who knows? Maybe left-wing teaching is the biggest factor creating conservatives here in the good old USA.

Sam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist?

It is Monday morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to Charles Hurt. Says Senator Charles Schumer about Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito:

"If he continuously, given his previous record, refused to answer questions and hid behind ’I can’t answer this because it might come before me,’ it would increase the chances of a filibuster."

Notice the use of the passive voice here.

On the other hand, Alito supporter Senator John Cornyn voices support for President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee.

A 2004 study by two law professors found him to be the fourth most independent federal appeals-court judge in the United States.

But you can understand the passion of the liberal interest groups. They know that their mountain of progressive legislation and their pile of liberal court decisions are under attack. Their great liberal monuments are under attack because America has moved on from the polity and the economy of liberal clientage, except in the benighted liberal cities where schools rot and liberal activist groups entice troubled Americans into lifelong dependency.

All over the nation young families are moving from blue states to red states to get away from the expense and the tyranny of liberal government, to find the jobs they need and to find housing they can afford and schools they can trust. They know that they need to get away from liberals if they are going to be able to realize their dreams.

And liberals want to stop them.

No wonder liberals have sworn to stop the nomination of Samuel A. Alito to become associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. They feel their power slipping away, and they will do anything to keep it.

Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong

God bless Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.

And now she has written a book about it, The Treehouse : Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See.

It’s delicious, isn’t it. Democrats are holding their heads in horror insisting that Samuel Alito completely blotted his copybook twenty years ago with a rather enthusiastically conservative job application. But it’s perfectly OK for liberal Naomi Wolf to confess the error of her ways. Yes, all those years wearing the “same straight-leg black jeans and black boots that every other young Marxist” was wearing and all those books railing against the patriarchy: that was then. Hey, anyone can make a mistake!

So Naomi determined that she wanted her poet father to teach her

formally, what he had taught his students for the decades during which he gave a famous class in poetry and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

I realised that when I had gone astray it was because I had deliberately ignored, or insisted on forgetting, as daughters do who are trying to forge their own identity in the world, one of those 12 lessons about literature — lessons that are really, or equally, about life.

Instead, Naomi now wondered:

What had I lost? Was it peace? Was it the need to get closer to a sense of God? Was it the longing to quit work in the public dog pit — where one must strive, compete, and produce the way men have traditionally produced — and to do more of the traditionally “female” work of planting seeds and watching children? ... I wanted to listen to a child, not a meeting. I wanted peace, not war. God, not Mammon. Family, not itineraries. Poetry, not polemic.

Well, good. I mean, what’s not to like? And a gentler, kinder Naomi Wolf can still indulge in the occasional rant against evil Republican neo-cons and corrupt Republican lawmakers and lying Republican presidents without it harming in the least her new role as a wise old crone.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to buy the book.

What is Our Mideast Strategy?

Democrats have been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.

Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq we can be pretty sure that they are pretty sure that we already have victory in Iraq, bar shouting. The document talks about three tracks to victory—the Political Track, the Security Track, and the Economic Track—which must be glaringly obvious to anyone that hasn’t been asleep for the last three years.

The remarks of General Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Defense University the day after the release of the stragegy document point all this up. He talks willingly about strategy in Iraq, referring his audience to the Iraq strategy document, but when asked why “four years after 9/11 we still don’t appear to have a comprehensive strategy to fight that global war” says of future strategy that

there’s a lot of this puzzle that we would need a classified forum to be able to talk about. You are correct that we are publicly and in most of our fora talking about the immediate center of gravity, but I can assure you that we also have an enormous amount of energy being put into the other, longer-term requirements of having a global capacity with our friends to be able to respond. And that’s about as good as I can do for you in an open forum.

It’s pretty obvious what that strategy is, but we just can’t talk about it because it probably involves long-term presence in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and covert activities in Iran. The point, after all, of invading Afghanistan and Iraq was to contain Iran to the east of Mesopotamia.

But what is our strategy with regards to Mark Steyn’s Eurabia? Good question, Senator. My guess would be that the plan is to remove our troops from Europe, so that the Euros wake up from their 60 year social-democratic dream and get with the program.

NYT Brides Stay Home with Babies

What do women want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.

Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick rundown in NRO so you don’t have to read the whole thing.

What is happening is that elite women, the kind of women who advertise their weddings in The New York Times “Sunday Styles” section, are choosing to staying home to raise their children. What do women want? “Not what they should.” You see,

The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”

We conservatives, who know that fashion moves from the top down, understand, with Linda Hirschman, that if the fashionable women in the New York Times Sunday Style section are staying home to have babies then the rest of American women can’t be far behind.

But let us return to Linda Hirschman. If the family is a “necessary part of life” shouldn’t it occupy some sort of central place in society, honored and fêted by everyone? One of the hardest things for society to do is to encourage people to stick to the necessary things and to stop going off at tangents and diverting themselves with the fun things, the pleasurable things, at the expense of the necessary things.

But of course, for feminist Linda Hirshman the important things are not the necessary things. What is important is for women to take their place in the political and business elite. If women opt out of the career track, then fewer of them will get to the top of the political and business elites. That means that the rulers will make decisions that benefit men. And women’s lives will be tarnished.

A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world.

So, what does that have to do with a career in the business and political elite?

The problem with Hirschman’s religious agenda—and it is a religious agenda as pointed as the religious agenda of The Purpose-driven Life, is that it flies in the face of what women want, or more cogently, what women clearly do not want. The fact is that women aren’t as interested in the rat-race of “career” (which comes from the French word for racetrack). One of the Times Sunday Style brides,

a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at her workplace, which fired her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only money,” she mused.

That is the problem that the feminists will never solve. For many men, the race is everything. For many women, what’s the point?

Evangelicals are Different: They Give More Money

One of the reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a lot of Americans go to church and the ones that do give to their churches. The same thing applies in Britain. American evangelicals give away about 10 percent of their income, but British evangelicals are even more generous. They give away 12 percent of their income, according to Ruth Gledhill and Joanna Sugden. They give “nine times as much to charity as the average householder” in Britain. And of course, they have much less debt and three times the average level of household savings.

The survey, conducted for Kingdom Bank by Christian Research found that evangelical Christians in Britain

give 7.5 per cent of their income to the church, 3 per cent to Christian charities and 1.5 per cent to secular charities, averaging £3,000 [$5,000] a year per household. The Rev Vaughan Roberts, Rector of St Ebbe’s Church, Oxford, where hundreds of students attend Sunday services and give a total of £00,000 [$1 million] a year, said: “It is not surprising that those who have understood God’s gift of grace to them should be generous in return.”

But what happens to all that money? Not all of it goes for megachurch buildings and services. According to Richard Bewes, at his church ”we were giving 30 per cent of our income to outside mission work.”