Blair in a Pickle

You think that President Bush is in a mess. Prime Minister Blair is in meltdown. This week three separate scandals hit the fan. And next week are the British local elections.

The first problem is that the National Health Service is running over budget and so hospitals are laying off doctors and nurses. It’s got so bad that Health Secretary Patricia Hewett was booed by nurses at a convention.

But that was just the light relief. The big deal is that the British prisons have been releasing foreign prison inmates and that over a thousand of these “former inmates were “lost” between an incoherent Prison Service and an inept Immigration and Nationality Directorate,” according to the London Times. Some of them went ahead and committed rapes and murders.

You might wonder how the Brits expect two branches of the Home Office to communicate with each other, and you would be right. It is unconscionable to expect government employees to do much more than just show up. But still. Don’t these bureaucrats have any shame?

Scandal Number Three is really not worth worrying about, except that it is a question of ethics and all that. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been having an affair with his civil-servant secretary. “[T]his relationship between a prominent politician and a civil servant in his office was unprofessional as well as unethical in other respects,” says the Times. Lucky he isn’t a corporate CEO, but merely a politician. Then he would have had to resign.

The conservative press are, of course, enjoying the meltdown of New Labour immensely. It merely demonstrates the essential unseriousness of the Blair regime: all spin and no substance.

But the British people thought that Blair would be different.

Iran a Threat But Iraq Wasn't

It’s easy to write that now. In the left-wing Guardian Jonathan Freedland writes that:

That the Iraqi peril was a phantom, all but the pro-war diehards now concede. On the current menace posed by Iran, there is no such consensus.

Iran is a country that experts agree could have nuclear weapons in a short while.

But it is surely relevant that Iran is led by a man who cannot let a week go by without issuing an annihilationist threat to one of his regional neighbours.

Well, you expect this sort of thing from left-wing commentators. But looked at from a strategic viewpoint, the attraction of an Iraq invasion was that it was next to Iran. Iran was always the problem, even back in 2000/2001. But when you are doing military operations you have limited options. Iraq was a threat to neighboring states, including of course Israel and it was doable. Hence the decision to invade Iraq.

I suspect that if you could have got into the meetings in the months after 9/11 you would have heard, again and again, that Iraq was only the start. What was needed was to contain Iran.

Of course, when and if we do something about Iran then the lefty media will say that Bush Lied about that too. Iran was never a threat, they’ll say. And Bush knew it.

Raise the Storm Signals

A big worry, if you worry about big things, is this. Does the current explosion in commodity prices mean another economic blowdown like 1979-82, when the world, led by the United States and Europe, experienced “stagflation?” Are we going to see a replay of the Carter years when we had inflation and recession at the same time?

William P. Kucewicz takes a look at the numbers, and asks: is the runup in commodity prices a monetary phenomenon or a response to economic growth?

Don’t worry, he says. The numbers show that it’s an economic response, not a monetary phenomenon.

Well, it’s nice to be so sanguine about it, but I took a look at the graphs in his article and I don’t get it. It looks to me as if the world is heading for a big economic slowdown resulting from the huge increase in commodity prices of the last few years. And just what was the global economic boom driven by other than the huge increase in credit when the Fed started fighting recession in 2001/2002?

Here are the interesting numbers. Economic growth towards the end of 2005, worldwide, has almost stalled out. Global capital spending is still increasing even though global economic growth has been slowing since late 2003.

What the numbers say to me is: Expect a sharp decline in economic growth, a stall in capital spending, and a sharp drop in commodity prices. And then start wondering where the bottom is going to be.

Sounds a bit like 1980 all over again.

Why Are Bush and Cameron Going Green?

President Bush opened the year by confessing that America was “addicted to oil.” It was obviously no throwaway line. He has repeated it, most recently in his speech Monday on renewable fuel sources in which he said that

[T]he prices that people are paying at the gas pumps reflect our addiction to oil.

Meanwhile British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has made a point of moving the Tory Party greenwards, installing a windmill on his London house and buying a Lexus Hybrid. Last week he went to the Arctic to hug a husky. He’s setting up a new

approach to climate change, part of the new green revolution that the Conservative Party is intending to lead.

For starters, he’s going to propose a Carbon Levy on polluters.

If conservative politicians are talking like this then they must be looking at polls and focus group results that tell them to go green or go out of business.

President Bush’s speech “was a sad example of political capitulation by a former Texas oilman who certainly knows better,” writes James K. Glassman He should know that

America is no more addicted to oil than it is addicted to bread, to milk, to paper, to water, to computers or, in the immortal words of the late Robert Palmer, to love.


We use oil -- and other unmentioned but implied addictions like coal and natural gas -- to generate energy that powers our cars, heats our homes, lights our cities, runs our factories. By the standard of what they do for us, fossil fuels are pretty cheap. They provide enormous industrial leverage.

And if fossil fuels one day run out, or if global warming really does melt the glaciers and flood the lowlands—a very big if—then humans will adapt.

So what is going on? Why are conservative politicians capitulating to the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside, socialists in drag?

The problem is the “mmmmhh” factor. What’s that? It’s the sound that the fifty-something liberal Seattle women were making all around me on December 6, 2005. They were listening to photographer Subhanker Banerjee tell them about the beauties of the Alaskan North Slope at a Seattle Arts and Lectures special event held at Benaroya Hall. And whenever Banerjee would tell them what a shame it would be to spoil the North Slope by drilling for oil in ANWR, several of them would moan “mmmmhh.”

They weren’t speaking in tongues but they were certainly having a religious experience.

The educated elite in the Anglosphere may not believe in God any more, but they do have a religion, and that religion provides them with the universal human need for meaning, for apocalyptic fear, for sacrifice, and for redemption from sin.

And best of all it is a religion with costs, an essential ingredient in a thriving religion according to sociologist Rodney Stark.

You don’t mess with peoples’ religion. Every politician knows that.

Left Brimming with New Ideas?

If a center-left columnist wrote a column about the new Big Ideas that people on the left were coming up with, what would you think? That’s what E.J. Dionne just did. So what is the basis of his claim?

First of all there’s an article in The American Prospect by Michael Tomasky titled Party in Search of a Notion.

Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political “paradigm” based on “radical individualism” and replace it with a politics of the “common good.” Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to “do a lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises.”

OK. That means a lot or a little, depending on what actual policies back it up. And a quick scan of the article indicates that his proposal for Democrats to “argue on behalf of civic reconstruction and genuine public morality” doesn’t yet have any specific ideas attached to it.

What about the Center for American Progress? Dionne says that it is pushing 15 New Ideas on its website. He’s right. Here they are.

Offering Opportunity for All: Build an opportunity nation where every hard-working person — regardless of background — can realize his or her dreams through education, decent work and fair pay.

• Create a Fair and Simple Tax Code
• Extend Learning Time
• Improve Teacher Quality
• Increase College Opportunity and Completion
• Reduce Debt Burdens by Fighting Abusive Lending
• Strengthen Pensions: Universal 401(k)

Promoting a Just and Secure World: Use America’s awesome strength to bring the world together, not pull it apart.

• Use Integrated Power
• Strengthen the All-Volunteer Army
• Grow the World’s Energy Future
• Invest in Global Equity

Building Strong Communities: Reawaken America’s conscience — our sense of shared and personal responsibility &mdash to build healthy, vibrant communities.

• Provide Universal Health Coverage
• Use Health Care to Strengthen the U.S. Auto Industry
• Provide Comprehensive Worker Adjustment Assistance

Creating Open and Fair Government: Reform government so that it is of, by, and for the people: open, effective, and committed to the common good.

• Bring Government Decisionmaking into the Information Age
• Impose New Rules to Curb Abuses of Congressional Power

Most of these ideas are great. They are ideas that Republicans have proposed in Congress and that Democrats have blocked. And there are other ideas, for instance in education, where Republicans have the same goals but different ways of reaching them. There are other areas, like the family, where the 15 New Ideas are silent. And that’s a shame, because the common good begins with the family.

The big problem for Democrats when they start talking about a new devotion to the “common good” is that Democrats, by and large, are the people on the government’s teat sucking greedily from the common good. How many Democrats are going to agree to be plucked off the teat to support civic republicanism and the common good?

That’s why Democrats find themselves opposing all the Republican proposals to enhance the common good. Just about everything you could think of doing for the common good will take money away from Democrats.

And that is going to make it difficult for Democrats to deliver on E.J. Dionne’s hoped-for Big Ideas.

Robert Carleson: Another Conservative That Nobody Knew

Everyone knows that Horace Mann was the father of public education. But nobody knows that Bob Carleson, who died April 21, was the father of welfare reform.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Welfare reform is probably the most successful government reform of the last half century, and yet the man who did the most to bring it about is unknown.

Government education, on the other hand...

It was in 1970 that Governor Ronald Reagan decided that he wanted to do something about soaring welfare caseloads in California. He appointed Robert B. Carleson as director of the welfare department. “After a year of studying the crisis,” according to the Washington Times,

Mr. Carleson handed the governor a plan that would restrict eligibility, clamp down on corruption and increase work incentives.

...

The results were irrefutable. A year after enactment, total welfare spending dropped for the first time, despite an increase in spending on the neediest families. Where once the welfare rolls had been increasing by nearly 40,000 people per month, by the end of the decade there were 300,000 fewer people than in 1971.

It is worth noting that this program was enacted in the early 1970s when program evaluations of the federal War on Poverty were already showing that the huge expansion in material aid to the poor wasn’t winning the war.

It took twenty years to take Carleson’s program national. Now the welfare case load has been cut in half and more, and welfare reform is the most successful social experiment of our lifetimes.

And the most telling anecdote in the years immediately after the 1996 reform was the news that women were deliberately getting back to work before their eligibility was exhausted so that they could “bank” it. What’s this? Weren’t welfare recipients supposed to be helpless victims? Then how could they be planning and thinking about the future, and treating welfare not as a pension but as an insurance against a rainy day?

Nobody remembers Bob Carleson except the few. But he did not live in vain.

US Economy in High Gear, Says Brit

With the GDP number this quarter expected to hit 5 percent the US remains the engine of the world economy. But don’t tell the MSM.

Just think, writes Gerard Baker of the London Times, if you extend that 5 percent for a year, that adds up to $600 billion added to the economy,

roughly the equivalent of adding one whole new Brazil or Australia to global economic activity every year, just from the incremental extra sweat and heave and click of 300 million Americans.

Or, if you like, think of it this way. Right now the US economy is about 30 percent bigger than Europe’s. In 15 years it will be twice as big.

Baker’s only worry is that rising inequality might cause the US to turn away from the global economy. Actually, he is probably wrong about that.

Inequality is probably only a problem when the economy turns south. It is then, as liberals like to say, that the voters turn to a man on a white horse. Sometimes that man is like Ronald Reagan and ushers in a quarter century of prosperity, with SUVs, McMansions, and starter castles. Sometimes that man is a Franklin Delano Roosevelt and bumbles along for ten years getting nowhere but creating lots of New Deal federal agencies and jobs for liberals. And sometimes that man is an Adolf Hitler and leads his people off a cliff.