Celebrating Earth Day

Al Gore celebrated Earth Day, April 22nd, with an fearmongering screed in Vanity Fair. Watch out for the 10,000 ft chunk of ice perched on the top of Greenland, he advised. If it fell off and plunged into the ocean it could raise sea levels by 20 feet!

On the other hand, we could talk, as OpinionJournal.com does, about the amazing improvements in environmental quality since the first Earth Day in 1970.

Since 1970, carbon monoxide emissions in the U.S. are down 55%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Particulate emissions are down nearly 80%, and sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced by half. Lead emissions have declined more than 98%.

Meanwhile the number of cars of the road has doubled and the number of miles driven has tripled in the United States.

Fifteen years ago at an environmental conference in Davos, Switzerland, a German told me a story about the problem of the improving environment. Every time a chemical plant has a spill in the River Rhine, he observed, there’s a fish kill and the attendant media attention. The dirty little secret is that thirty years earlier there were no fish kills. There were no fish kills because there were no fish living in the rivers. German rivers were too toxic for the fish.

Last year in the British press they wrote about the herons that you could now see along the River Thames. Herons? But that must mean there are fish in the river for herons to eat, and food in the river for the fish to eat.

Still, as Al Gore points out, there is always the chance that Greenland will slide into the sea.

Who is al-Maliki?

Last week the squabbling politicians of Iraq settled upon a prime minister to replace the unsatisfactory al-Jaafari. And hopes are high that he can get a cabinet together in the next couple of weeks. But who is Jawad al-Maliki?

Iranian journalist Amir Taheri gives us a first look. Is he an “apparatchik” of the al-Dawa Party? Or is he a long-time freedom fighter against Saddam Hussein’s regime? More to the point, can he serve as an effective prime minister? On the one hand, writes Taheri,

Where al-Jaafari is a charismatic figure and a powerful orator, al-Maliki is a more cerebral leader - and no crowd-pleaser. In Iraqi politics today, that may be a disadvantage.

On the other hand:

But al-Maliki has several advantages - starting with his discipline and capacity for hard work, something al-Jaafari singularly lacked. Plus, he has developed close ties with secular Shiite leaders and groups, again something that al-Jaafari never achieved. Last but not least: The Kurds and Arab Sunnis, who together account for more than 40 percent of the population, see al-Maliki as someone they can work with - another contrast with al-Jaafari.

So the answer is: we don’t know. Meanwhile, Taheri writes, the government has two urgent tasks, to push through an emergency economic plan and to negotiate a future relationship with the Coalition occupying forces after the current UN mandate expires in December.

The Russians are Coming -- To Royal Ascot

Many of us, when we take time out from worrying about Iraq, have worried for years about the London social season.

With the British descending into an informal miasma of athletic gear and hoodies, who is going to keep the good old traditions going, like tea at Wimbledon and big hats at Royal Ascot?

Have no fear. The newly rich Russians that have flooded into London in recent years just love dressing up and flaunting their wealth.

And who can blame them? After 80 years of dreadful Stalinism and socialist realism who wouldn’t enjoy dressing up and showing off?
As Christine Toomey explains in the Sunday Times, the Russians like the London season because so many of their “traditions were destroyed in the Russian revolution.” Even the Russians back home are getting into the act, if only vicariously. “Two Russian documentaries were filmed at Royal Ascot last year.”

Can the Russians really be accepted in snooty old London? Elena Ragozhina, editor of a glossy magazine for rich Russians, thinks so. They can get doors to open through their charitable donations.

“Charity is a new concept for many Russians. In Soviet society the state was expected to provide for everybody,” she says. “But before that, there was a noble tradition of charitable giving in Russia, and we are trying to revive that. The generosity of many Russians is greatly appreciated, I think.”

Oh sure. Just listen to this. Some of the old school are not too impressed.

Since the appearance of so many arrivistes, the season is said to have lost its appeal for some of its traditional patrons, says Clive Aslet, a former editor of Country Life. “Most of the real old families rather look down on that world now. They see it as rather pretentious.”

Lowering the tone of the neighborhood, eh?

The Social Security Guarantee

Democrats like to characterize individual Social Security accounts as a “risky scheme.” Social Security, they assert, is guaranteed, while you could lose all your money in an account at Fidelity.

Hold on a minute, writes Jagadeesh Gokhale. What do you mean “guaranteed?”

Life holds no certainties. But to provide a relatively strong benefit "guarantee," Congress would have to pass a law requiring a super majority vote to alter the current benefit formula.

...

In reality, there is no strong Social Security guarantee and future electorates are unlikely to acquiesce to exclusively revenue-side adjustments. Potential future benefit adjustments should not be ignored, but talk of "guaranteed" benefits misleads people into believing their retirements are more secure than is really the case -- a misperception that negatively affects how much they personally save for the future.

The Social Security “guarantee” is really nothing more than the power of Social Security recipients to use the political system to extract resources from other Americans. But in an economic crisis the political system is quite likely to tell the elderly to go fly a kite. It’s happened before.

In fact it is Social Security that is the “risky scheme.” First of all, it discourages savings, which reduces the resources available to pay for pensions. And on a larger scale it also reduces fertility.

[E]conomists and social scientists have begun to suggest that the long-term fertility decline in developed economies may also be the effect of generous pension and health insurance programs. A recent study shows that a significant portion of fertility declines among developed economies during the 20th century can "be explained" by the generosity of retiree pension and health benefits.

The best system is for ordinary people to save for their own retirements and stop working when they can afford it. Once the government steps in and sets an arbitrary level retirement benefits it introduces a systemic risk that endangers everyone’s well-being.

How Hypocritical Can You Get, Liberals?

How low will liberals go? Who knows? Here are the news items on liberal hypocrisy, for just one day.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a high-school student could not wear a T-shirt with anti-gay slogans. But I thought that liberals believed in the First Amendment and the right of dissent.

OK, well maybe innocent high-school students must be protected from the cruel winds of the public square. But the faculty of Ohio State University (Mansfield) voted to allow gay professors to file charges for sexual harrassment against a librarian, Scott Savage, who recommended the following books for a reading list: “'The Marketing of Evil' by David Kupelian, 'The Professors' by David Horowitz, 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis' by Bat Ye'or and 'It Takes a Family' by Senator Rick Santorum” because it made them feel unsafe.
But I thought liberals believed in free speech and were absolutely against censorship in any form.

Then we have Howard Dean. He has just called for making border security a top priority. “'The first thing we want is tough border control,' he said.” But don’t Democrats in every big city in the nation order their police officers not to arrest illegal immigrants? And don’t liberals call the border fence “inhuman?”

As gas prices reach $3.00 a gallon the New York Times reports that “Democrats running for Congress are moving quickly to use the most recent surge in oil and gasoline prices to bash Republicans over energy policy.” But haven’t Democrats for years opposed development of new oil resources offshore and in Alaska, and isn’t it Democrats that insist on fancy gasoline formulations that drive up the price and cause local shortages? And don’t Democrats believe that energy prices ought to be high to encourage conservation?

There’s a question that every day gets bigger and bigger. Do Democrats believe in anything?

Two Nations Under 401(k)

Many social changes do not occur in the blaze of national publicity but work their way under the radar, slowly changing society one person at a time. Such a change may be the 401(k) revolution, the rise of defined contribution pensions, or more exactly, the rise of pre-tax individual savings plans. Donald Lambro at the Washington Times celebrates their huge expansion.

The numbers are astounding and explosive: Since 1990, total worker assets in 401(k) plans have grown an average of 13 percent a year, from $385 billion to an estimated $2.1 trillion in 2004... says the Investment Company Institute.

At $2.1 trillion, we are talking about real money. But what political junkies want to know is: Does this change the political balance in the United States towards an ownership society?

"Investors, regardless of income, gender or race, vote more Republican than non-investors," tax cut crusaders Grover Norquist and Cesar Conda wrote in a Wall Street Journal analysis about the effect of President Bush's tax cuts.

But there is another thing to think about. While the ranks of investors grow what about the people left behind? What about the dependent classes, the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party who live by remittances from the government: from government programs, from government jobs, and from government pensions? These people have a completely different outlook on life, and live lives that depend, until their dying day, upon the continuance of that check from the government. For the last half century the Democrats have been happily growing the ranks of the dependent, instinctively understanding that their political support comes from the dependent classes.

When will the clash come between these Two Nations, between the defined contribution nation and the defined benefit nation?

e-Stonian PM Gets Friedman Prize

He’s no relation of Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, and he’s certainly not lacking in courage.

He is Mart Laar, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, who set in motion the economic reforms that has doubled the GDP of Estonia in ten years. And now he is the third recipient of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty awarded by the Cato Institute.

Accordint to Marian Tupy

Mart Laar replaced the "dead hand" of the government with Adam Smith's "invisible hand." His government eliminated import tariffs (a decision that was partly reversed by Estonia's membership of the European Union) and established a flat income tax. Corporate taxes on reinvested profits fell to zero and a currency board was established to combat inflation. The government also undertook extensive privatization of state companies.

But here is what Laar himself says about his reforms, as told on the Cato Institute’s website.

"I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman's Free to Choose," he said. "I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."

Oy! It’s lucky that Milton Friedman has solid ideas that actually work. Suppose Laar had read some lefty tome instead! Then e-Stonia would be in a mess, like Old Europe.

And bravo to Mart Laar for turning his nation into a Baltic tiger.