Chavez Wows Economic Fundamentalists in London

They had a grand old-time revival last week in London. Pastor “Red Ken” Livinstone had Venezuelan pastor Hugo Chávez in town for a rousing witness to the faithful. Said host Livingstone to the assembled faithful, according to Richard Beeston in the London Times:

“Those who a decade ago said that socialism was dead, see it now very much alive in Venezuela,” Mr Livingstone said, adding that the march against capitalism was now too strong for America to resist.



“When they predicted the death of socialism they could not have predicted what was to come,” he said. “It is not that socialism failed, it is that socialism has not come.”

Yep. Those economic fundamentalists certainly have a way with words. Here’s George Anthony, a retired engineer:

“I think Chávez is doing a great job for the people of Venezuela,” he said. “He is showing that socialism works in Latin America and the rest of the world.”

But Edward Lucas, in an address during Christian Aid Week, had another take.

Christian Aid Week is rightly a time for warmheartedness. But that is no excuse for softheadedness. It is sloppy thinking, for example, to believe poverty in one place is caused by wealth in another.

...

Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has shown convincingly how abuse of property rights by the powerful and corrupt prevents subsistence farmers and shantytown dwellers from getting on to the first rung of the wealth-creating ladder. No property rights mean no collateral for loans, no mobility and no investment.



That still eludes much of the anti-poverty lobby.

Shall I go on?

Without enforceable contracts, the rich and powerful are free to plunder the poor and weak. Debts are uncollectable; assets unprotectable.

Commentators have been remarking for some years about the decline of property rights under the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez.

[T]ragically, anti-poverty campaigners in the West have allowed themselves to be conned by the protectionist arguments of rich people in poor countries. The protection of corrupt, incompetent and uncompetitive producers and providers of goods and services in poor countries levies yet another tax on the weakest.

And of course the most corrupt, incompetent and uncompetitive producers can be found in thug oil regimes from Saudi Arabia to Iran to Venezuela.

Meanwhile the thug dictator Chávez today

will be the guest of honour at City Hall, visit the House of Commons and deliver a speech in Whitehall before departing for Libya to meet his fellow revolutionary, Colonel Gaddafi.

And when the thug regime of Bolivarian socialism collapses in misery and violence will Pastor Red Ken and his followers still be saying that socialism has not been tried?

"Connect the Dots" but Don't "Collect The Dots"

Do you mean to say, Senator Leahy, that you had no idea that the NSA was doing data mining on phone records? That you, as the ranking minority member on the Judiciary Committee have never been briefed on this program?

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaida? These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything. ... Where does it stop?" _ Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Notice that the Senator did not express suprise. He just expressed shock and outrage. His words are, if you can believe it, rather artfully chosen.

And Senator Leahy, if you are shocked and appalled by the efforts of the NSA to “collect the dots” about terrorists operations are you going to remain respectfully silent the next time that the government fails to “connect the dots?” What would be your position on that?

This business of “collect the dots” vs. “connect the dots” is the idea of columnist and humorist James Lileks, interviewed here (perm) by Hugh Hewitt. It’s nonsense, says Lileks,

because what they're telling you, essentially, is that the Democratic platform is not to do any data mining, any sort of pattern matching. They want us to connect the dots, but they do not want us to collect the dots. The dots should apparently just walk up and volunteer, here I am. I'm a dot. And that's the extent of the War On Terror.

The liberal obsession with government eavesdropping is intriguing. For this conservative, the government eavesdropping on all my financial transactions and complete access to all my salary records is profoundly disturbing. But really, I should care about the government listening in on my phone conversations?

Liberals think differently. They imagine themselves involved at some future time in some political conspiracy, valiantly battling against the fascist US government, and dissenting against its illegal and immoral foreign policy. One thinks of John Kerry negotiating with the North Vietnamese back during the Vietnam War. Imagining such a heroic future for themselves they want the rules set up now so they can conspire against the government of the United States in the future without being monitored. But finances? Well, they work for the government, and the government is going to be paying ttheir pension.

But the rest of us who are not liberals have to wonder. Is this liberal concern for “privacy” real, or is it just liberal conceit?

What's In a Name?

The Social Security Adminstration recently announced the most popular names given to American children.

Emily is the top name for girls. Again. And Jacob is the most popular name for boys. Again.

Things aren’t changing at the top very much. Emily has been the top name for girls every year since 1996, and Jacob has been the top name for boys every year since 1999.

Here is the top twenty for 2005.

Rank Male name Female name 1 Jacob Emily 2 Michael Emma 3 Joshua Madison 4 Matthew Abigail 5 Ethan Olivia 6 Andrew Isabella 7 Daniel Hannah 8 Anthony Samantha 9 Christopher Ava 10 Joseph Ashley 11 William Sophia 12 Alexander Elizabeth 13 Ryan Alexis 14 David Grace 15 Nicholas Sarah 16 Tyler Alyssa 17 James Mia 18 John Natalie 19 Jonathan Chloe 20 Nathan Brianna Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth.

What is really interesting is how the Briannas and Alexises have gone right down. It’s back to the good old names, just like George M. Cohan said it.

For it is Mary, Mary

Plain as any name can be

But with propriety, society will say Marie

But it was Mary, Mary

Long before the fashions came

And there is something there that sounds so square

It's a grand old name

George M. Cohan says you better watch out for that Marie.

Don't ever fear sweet Mary

Beware of sweet Marie

That high-falutin Marie is trouble.

The Man Who Made the New York Times

The Man who made the New York Times into the greatest newspaper in the United States, A.M. Rosenthal, has died aged 84.

And in his passing he has given us a glimpse of his achievement. The son of an indigent fur trader turned a stuffy metropolitan newspaper into a vibrant national institution. As Wes Pruden puts it in the Washington Times:

Abe died at 84 Wednesday in New York, where he made the New York Times in his image (for a time), writing the book on how a newspaper ought to cover the world, giving new life to a newspaper on its uppers, and winning Pulitzer Prizes as if they came from boxes of Cracker Jack.

Reading the obituaries lets you see the genius of the man. He was a great reporter, with the ruthlessness and the courage the job required and when he became an editor he ruthlessly and courageously rebuilt the Times. It is in the echoes of the praise that you can grasp how far the Times has fallen in the years since. William F. Buckley, Jr. tells the critical story.

I once posed a hypothetical question. What would be the discipline, at The New York Times back when he was its boss, against a delinquent reporter? He seemed mystified by the question. He thought he was answering it when he said that no reporter at the Times would be guilty of such an offense as I described: "They are all professionals."

They were all professionals when Rosenthal ran the paper. And the reason that Rosenthal could not imagine a “delinquent” reporter is that, on his watch, nobody would have dared.

You can say what you like about Rosenthal’s anger and his brusque treatment of employees. Under his leadership the New York Times was great.

GOP Extends Tax Cuts; What Have You Done for Me Lately?

It’s a start. Yesterday Congress extended the 2003 tax rate cuts on dividends and capital gains. As the Washington Times reported:

The Senate yesterday approved $70 billion in tax-cut extensions, sending President Bush one of his top tax priorities and securing a key election-year accomplishment for Republicans fighting to keep control of Congress.

And they extended them to 2010. (Suppose we have a President Clinton and a Democratic Congress by then. What do you call an IED? An expiring Republican tax cut.)

That’s good. That’s great. Now, Congress, what have you done for me lately?

Of course, the truth is that our Republican leaders in Washington DC are playing the Republican base like master fishermen. Here we are, all down in the dumps after a solid year of disappointment and humiliation. Iraq is going badly, or seems to. President Bush got the blame for Hurricane Katrina. Now we have $3.00 gasoline. What’s the point of being a Republican?

Well, I’d say that we are going to see non-stop judicial nominees from now till the election. I’d say we are going to give the Democrats plenty of opportunity to vote against ANWR one more time. And I expect we are going to see the House Republicans’ suburban Agenda popping up from time to time.

And of course we are going to see Gen. Hayden explain to outraged Democratic Senators how the NSA “domestic spying” program is entirely constitutional, and moreover that they have known about it all along.

With all that red meat on the floor, you’d think that someone would have thought to bring a barbecue.

"You Must Suggest an Alternative" -- Lady Thatcher

Author and journalist James Bartholomew got to present a copy of his book The Welfare State We’re In to Baroness Thatcher on Wednesday. He explained to her the argument of the book.

I told her that the book argues that we would be better off if the previous welfare systems had been allowed to develop instead of being replaced by the welfare state.



She announced, "You must suggest an alternative. If you say the welfare state is no good, you must suggest an alternative."

But it’s too hard, he whined to the 80-year old grande dame.

She was having none of that, saying words to the effect: "If you can't think of a good way of communicating it, then you must find a way of communicating it."

That is what it must have been like to be a junior minister in Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, he mused.

The paperback edition of The Welfare State We’re In is coming out soon. Writes Bartholomew:

The paperback edition of the book with many updated figures, a special preface and two extra sections (one titled 'The NHS: so did it get better?') will, officially, be published on Monday.

Meanwhile we can all get to thinking about Margaret Thatcher’s challenge. If the welfare state is so bad then what are we going to replace it with?

It was easy for the progressives and the Fabians a century ago to say: Just trust us with our rational, competent, and scientific ideas for reform. We have a much bigger problem. We know that the bureaucratic method is a failure. But we also know that the replacement will be much harder to conceive, to develop, and to sell to the public.

But there is no excuse for not trying! And there is no excuse for not getting started.

A Briton Talks About the Erosion of Liberty

Although the Brits don’t have a real conservative movement, they do have conservative politicians—like Alan Duncan, for instance, who visited the Cato Institute to talk about the erosion of freedom in Britain. As described by James Pinkerton it involves three problems.

First of all, there is Tony Blair. His style of headline government lowers the tone of debate: "the headline matters more than the deed." The danger of this sort of thing becomes obvious when the government gets to be good at spin but fails at the boring stuff of keeping people safe from criminals. It thows money at schools and hospitals without doing the boring stuff of reforming them.

Then there is the brute power of government, made more acute by the special powers we have given to government to prosecute the war on terror. This is a

trend that was visible even before 9-11: the short-circuiting of due process. That is, raison d'etat was displacing the rights of Englishmen.

Thirdly, there is the problem that, with all these powers, government doesn’t do anything very well. In fact it tends to encourage the opposite of what it intends. For instance,

The redistributionist welfare state was created to narrow inequalities, but in fact, in the way that it works, it ends up widening those inequalities. That is, if people are rendered ill-equipped to work, they will likely end up with even less earning power.

Duncan has written a book about it: Saturn’s Children: How the State Devours Liberty, Prosperity, and Virtue. Oh, and by the way, Duncan is gay.

Gay? In the Conservative Party? How did that work? “It just wasn't an issue -- no special privileges, no special penalties. Everybody minds their own business.”