Cal Voters Don't Want More Programs

Never mind about Cal-50, the special election that Republicans won in California last Tuesday. Look at what California Democrats voted down on the rest of the ballot, writes liberal pundit E.J. Dionne.

There were 500,000 more Democratic votes than Republicans in the election because the main event was a contested Democratic primary for Governor, and yet good solid liberal issues went down to defeat.

California voters voted against Rob Reiner’s universal pre-school initiative and even a library building initiative. What gives?

The wealthy rebelled against the big income tax increase -- the top rate would have gone from 9.3 percent to 11 percent -- and bankrolled the opposition. Private preschool providers worried that the public provision of preschool would threaten their businesses.

Yes. Let’s hear it for the private pre-school providers. What does rich Rob Reiner care about them? Small businesspeople making an honest living, yet Rob Reiner is going to pull them up by the roots and substitute a bureaucratic model. Real smart, Rob.

Progressives have a lot to think about. For one thing, there remains a deep skepticism about government spending, even for the best purposes. On the same day that the two propositions went down, voters in five California counties rejected sales tax increases, mostly to fund transportation projects. Attacks on tax and spend sound old and tired, but they still have force.

You know, I should hope so, after a century of surging government spending. The point is, E.J., that is it one thing to say that something is desirable, even necessary, and another thing to say that it should be provided by tax-supported bureaucracies. That is a complicated way of talking about “tax and spend,” but you would have to be an imbecile not to see that most government programs are not about the clients they serve but about the clients who get paid: the teachers in education, the bus drivers in mass transit, and the government workers who provide social services.

Why not think about how progressive ideals can be served without the cruelty and the injustice of government programs? That would be really progressive.

And it could be a big vote-winner.

Strategery After Zarqawi

With Zarqawi dead the pundits are all looking ahead, divining the future from the ruins of the terrorist’s hideout.

Our lefty friends are not impressed. According to Ben Johnson they see his death as

A “transparent psychological operations campaign run out of the Pentagon”; “a double tragedy”; “part of a larger and tragic story of miscalculation”; a possible fraud; a conspiracy; not “moral”; an “obscene spectacle”; no “big deal”; and good cause to beat a hasty retreat.

Hmm. That certainly is a point of view, but I’d advise our Democratic friends not to get too carried away by such talk.

Blogger Austin Bay ties the victory back to President Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom” and the year 1950 when President Truman had set up the strategy of containment for fighting the Cold War. Truman did not win the Cold War, but he set the strategic direction for the United States that subsequent presidents all more or less followed, beginning with President Eisenhower.

In April 1950, the "unpopular" Truman administration produced NSC-68, a strategic study that shaped U.S. foreign policy for five decades. In 1953, the Eisenhower administration "tested" NSC-68 with a secret analysis commissioned by President Eisenhower (the Solarium project). The Eisenhower group ratified NSC-68's basic containment strategy.

And “faster please” Michael Ledeen ties everything back to Iran. After praising the operation that involved the “great performance of our Special Forces and the active cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders in the Anbar Province, plus the Jordanians, plus the various party leaders in Baghdad” he goes on to identify Zarqawi, the man who fanned conflict between Shia and Sunni, as a tool of the Iranian mullahcracy.

Despite his intonations against the Shiites, and his manifest efforts to promote civil war in Iraq, Zarqawi was happy to work with the radical Shiite regime in Tehran, and they were happy to work with him. It is quite wrong to view him as a leader of one faction in a religious war; his promotion of religious conflict was simply a tactic designed to destabilize Iraq and drive out the Coalition.

This ties back to the basic strategic proposition for invading Iraq: to have a platform for operations against Iran, the real strategic problem in the Middle East. However much of a mess Iraq may be it is still a strategic block against Iranian expansionism.

There is another side to the Middle East conflict. It is described by Jay Nordlinger at the World Economic Forum in Sharm El Sheikh. Says Prime Minister Aziz of Pakistan: “Globalization is a tidal wave: You can either ride it, and go far; or resist it, and be swept away.” Or there is Prime Minister Nazif of Egypt, who

is presiding over what everyone sees as Egypt’s economic opening: Tariffs, taxes, regulations, and other barriers are falling. Foreign investment is pouring in, and the economy is growing at 6 percent.

The Middle East is not all terrorism and beheadings. It is a climactic war between the western civilized team, the realm of trust, exchange, and transparency, and the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Cry God for England, Harry, and St. George!

The result of giving the Scots and the Welsh their own assemblies is that the English are feeling left out. So they have responded by flying the red cross flag of St. George to show their English, rather than British, patriotism.

The Labour government and their many minions in the vast British state sector disapprove of this mild rebelliousness. They look down upon nation states and patriotism. Just like our liberals in the US.

And anyway, flying the flag of St. George instead of the Union Jack is considered, well, sort of a “chav” thing.

But with England playing against Paraguay in the World Cup this weekend the flags of St. George, the patron saint of England, are all over London.

And New Labour is caving in to the spirit of Englishness, as Boris Johnson is delighted to celebrate.

Surrender! At last! For you, Blair, the culture war is over. Downing Street yesterday ran up the white flag - the one with the red cross on it. For the period of the World Cup, said a cowed Labour spokesman, the emblem of St George would fly from No 10 [Downing Street].

See what I mean. The Little Englanders are out celebrating. Of course, there are some who have not got the message.

Across England yesterday there were still Leftist forces that were keeping up resistance, oblivious to the Hirohito-like capitulation of the high command. In the country's Labour-controlled urban jungles, the culture warriors fought on with the pointlessness of Japanese privates lost in Burma in 1945.



In Salford City Council there was still a bonkers cell of Marxists, who insisted that the England flag be banned from all vehicles in its control.

So why not go over the top and declare that things will never be the same?

It is the cultural equivalent of the storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace. It is a revolution that was born among the scaffolders and the taxi drivers and the pub owners, and then spread to the bourgeoisie to the point where the Labour elite knew they could no longer contain it; they had to co-opt it.

All that, just by flying the red cross flag of St. George?

Well, why not? England is meeting Paraguay in the World Cup on Saturday and every good Englishman wants them to win.

Senate Fails to Kill Death Tax

On a procedural vote today the United States Senate failed to repeal the federal estate tax. There were 41 voting against repeal, according to Reuters, three votes short of the number needed to head off a filibuster.

The estate tax is intended to be a tax on the rich, but as Wall Street Journal edit page observed today it actually falls more squarely on the owners of farms and private businesses.

The superrich or their kin--such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett--are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that "if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure."

And, of course, the most notable victims are family-owned newspapers that do not generate the revenue to be able to pay Uncle Sam 50 percent of the value of the business every generation.

There is talk of a compromise in the air: to raise the exemption and to lower the rate from 55 percent to 25 percent or even 15 percent.

Here’s my suggestion. Let’s charge 5 percent on all estates over $1 million. It would probably snag a good deal of revenue but it wouldn’t force heirs to liquidate family businesses. And it would be low enough that it wouldn’t be worth doing expensive estate planning.

Zarqawi Dead, Fight Goes On

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed today in a precision F-16 strike. The coup was, as it must be, executed on the tip of an informant.

So the man whose strategy was to foment religious war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is dead. Someone else from Lee Harris’s “eternal gang of ruthless men” must step forward to continue the fight against civilization, that is, to destroy the realm of trust and exchange and performance of promises in the city. For that is the power agenda of the gang of ruthless men who harass the city from their redoubts and their hideaways in the hinterland.

It is, of course, deeply symbolic that today the fight between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men should be taking place in the birthplace of the city, the Land Between the Rivers, where the city first emerged out of the surplus of food and wealth afforded by the abundance of agriculture based on domesticated wild grasses.

It tells us that the fight will never be won, for the fight in Iraq is symbolic of the basic divide in the soul of man, between cooperation and competition. For centuries, the threat to civilized, settled life in the great riverine plains came from the fierce nomads of the Asian steppe who would sweep out of the mountains onto the farmers of the two rivers of China, the Gangetic plain, or the two rivers of Mesopotamia.

A century ago a new threat emerged. It came not from the Asian steppe but from communist, anarchist, western nihilists, the bomb-throwers of Europe, whipped into bloodthirsty frenzy by Romantic scribblers. Now it is the educated, disaffected youth of Islam, whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy by angry old men in the mosques. A century hence it will be another gang of ruthless men.

So the fight goes on.

It's India Week

Both the London Times and the Economist (sub) have done features on India this week as it comes off three years in a row of 8 percent GDP growth. Is it for real, they ask? Yes, but. Writes David Aaronovitch:

Isn’t IT India a little like Bollywood India — lots of glitz but as substantial a representation of reality as the Ice Cool man and his fleck-free hair? This week the subcontinent was admonished with typical grandness by The Economist. “India,” it concluded, “needs to grow much faster. Otherwise, poverty will persist for decades and social tensions will mount.”

Well yes. India does have its problems. The Economist tells the story of the desperate slowness of moving freight across the sub-continent.

The lorry is loaded at 2pm in central Kolkata. But cannot leave until after 10pm, because heavy vehicles can use city streets only at certain times.

After innumerable delays with closed border crossings, night road closures “to avoid the danger of attacks by bandits or Maoist insurgents” (in central India?) the truck arrives on the morning of day eight, “having achieved an average speed of 11km per hour and spent 32 hours waiting at tollbooths and checkpoints.”

India is building a “golden quadrilateral” limited-access highway to connect Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai. Sounds as though it can’t come quick enough.

But what about those Maoist insurgents? What’s that all about?

When Laws Hurt The Ones They Help

What a landmark that Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was. Passed in 1990 when Bush I was president it empowered disabled people and let them come out of the shadows into the mainstream of life for the first time in history. Or something like that.

Only it didn’t. According to John Stossel it made employers shy away from hiring the disabled. Why was that?

One poll found that since the ADA was passed, the percentage of disabled men who were employed dropped. "Once you hire them, you can never fire them. They are lawsuit bombs," one employer said. "So we just tell them the job has been filled."

See how that works? People protected by the ADA will sue under ADA to claim that they were discriminated against. So now we need a law to target employers who lie about positions being filled.

Or take the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. Remember, that was the oil tanker that ran upon a reef because its captain was drunk. Exxon has paid, big time, for the disaster caused by its drunken employee, Joseph Hazelwood.

But guess what?

Exxon gave Joseph Hazelwood a job after he completed alcohol rehab; when Hazelwood then let the Exxon Valdez run aground, a jury found that he'd recklessly gotten drunk before taking command — and that the company had been reckless to give him the job.

Well, serves Exxon right, anyway. They should never have given Hazelwood such a sensitive job. Read on, pal.

So then the company decided people who've had a drug or drinking problem may not hold safety-sensitive jobs. The result? You guessed it — employees with a history of alcohol abuse sued under the ADA, demanding their right to hold safety-sensitive jobs. Employers can't win. They get sued if they do, sued if they don't.

What do you think? How about we repeal the Americans with Disabilities Act and start over.