A Nation of Shoplifters

They used to sneer at the Brits as a Nation of Shopkeepers. That’s what the Germans thought when they marched to war in 1914.

But now Mary Wakefield worries that they have become a nation of shoplifters. And she is not talking about boys with pants down around their ankles.

Rob is a kind man, who listens carefully to his conscience and usually follows its advice. He's well off, no family to support, well respected in his field and well balanced - so there's no real explanation, as far as I can see, for the fact that he shoplifts.

Wakefield took a look at all the Evian bottles in his apartment. Expensive habit, she thought. “Not if you steal them from Sainbury’s,” Rob replied.

Didn’t he feel bad?

"Nope," he said, with a defiant smile. "And anyway, your other friends shoplift too."

And it turned out that they did. There are even internet chatrooms where you can discuss how to do it.

"Look, nice-tasting water should be free," said Rob, as I stared at him, still disapproving, over tea. "If I paid for it, I would resent it, and in fact I resent having to go to the horrible supermarket at all."

In Britain, the educated classes rather frown on supermarkets. They have a cult of local and fresh. So that makes it easier to steal from them.

Fortunately the educated classes in the US don’t just frown on Wal-Mart. They wouldn’t be seen dead shopping there. And, of course, they wouldn’t dream of shoplifting in an independent bookstore.

But who knows what they get up to in Barnes & Noble.

But I have a soft spot for the supermarkets. Their workers work hard, and they bring an unimaginable bounty to us every day. On top of that, US retail and food processing are the most productive in the world. It was hard work and attention to detail that got them there.

So I believe they deserve every penny that I spend with them.

Ken Lay: RIP But Still a Crook

Did you know that in Enron’s home town of Houston they regard the Enron collapse as a tragedy rather than an example of capitalist rascals at work?

A Democratic friend seemed surprised that this was so. After all, if you read the New York Times every day you likely think that the Enron fraud was hatched in the offices of Halliburton and signed off by then-Governor Bush in Austin.

Of course, Democrats don’t realize that Republicans feel just as angry as they do about Enron. And Republicans don’t just feel outraged by Enron’s frauds. We also feel betrayed, because we know that there are many Democrats just waiting to blame Republicans and the whole capitalist system when a corporation like Enron collapses. And also hurts because we know that Democrats will be trying to stampede some new regulatory burden on business.

No doubt Democrats have been wondering all along when the fix would be in on Enron. When were Enron’s corrupt Republican friends going to bail them out? Well, it looks like the Republicans’ God stepped in and did the dirty deed.

Columnist Peggy Noonan reminds us that there is another aspect to all this.

Ken Lay, Enron CEO and convicted felon died this week of a massive heart attack. But he also died of a broken heart.

His life was broken and would never be healed. Or if it was to be healed it would happen while he was imprisoned, for the rest of his life, with four walls to look at. All was wreckage around him.

Deserved as his conviction for fraud might be, he was also a human. And Noonan recalls a friend who remarked how hard we humans are on each other. How we are all little pirates, and how we are more breakable than we know.

Jennifer Roback Morse writes in Love and Economics how

[she] once had a priest tell [her] to kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament... so that [she] could feel the love of God pour over her.

If you wonder what all the sin and redemption stuff is all about in Christianity think of it this way. It is a way for humans to save themselves when the little pirate in them is broken. When they are in danger of dying from a broken heart.

But Ken Lay is still a crook.

Job Growth Moderating; Or Is It?

Today’s announcement by the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the increase in payroll employment at 121,000 last month. It’s the “nonfarm employment” number from the Bureau’s Establishment Survey, and indicates that payroll growth is moderating from the faster pace of last year.

On the other hand, if you look at the increase in employment from the Bureau’s Household Survey, employment increased by 387,000. Here employment growth is, if anything, accelerating. What is going on? The government is measuring triple the employment growth in the household survey than in the establishment survey.

If you step back and look at graphs of the numbers, the difference in the two surveys is quite stark. Here’s a graph of the household survey and here is a graph of the establishment survey.

The household survey shows strong employment growth consistently for the last two years. Going back to the last recession, it shows negative job growth only for twelve months, and shows employment increase comparable to the glory years of the late 1990s.

The establishment survey shows employment growth moderating since the first of the year. Going back to the last recession, it shows a sharp drop in employment for a year, from January 2001 to January 2002, followed by two years of no job growth. Starting in mid 2003, employment growth has been solid and consistent—five million new jobs—but the job growth has never come close to the job growth in the 1990s.

What is going on?

Brits Rail at US While Teen Thugs Run Riot

The Brits have a rather poor opinion of the United States, according to Ben Fenton. Only 12 percent of them think that the United States can be trusted to act responsibly on the world stage.

Britons, writes Anthony King, feel that

America appears to be a class-divided and racially divided society and one that fails to offer its citizens equality of opportunity. Nearly three quarters of Britons, 72 per cent, believe American society is essentially "unequal".

It is understandable that they would take a dim view of the US. It helps them to avoid examining the mess in their own country, where teenaged gangs seem to roam around without limit, according to Theodore Dalrymple. It seems to be considered rare sport for young thugs to loiter around and beat up on adults, sending them to hospital with serious brain injuries. And why not? The criminal justice system just gives them a slap on the wrist.

Peter Wareing, a 42-year-old barrister, was attacked in the street by a gang of youths, and suffered permanent brain injury. The two youthful thugs that beat him were sentenced to 18 months in jail and will likely get out in 9 months.

Wareing was no privileged insider, pampered by a privileged upbringing.

He was evidently a man of some spirit: having been a salesman, he decided to study for the law, supported himself at law school by a variety of manual jobs, and qualified at the bar at the age of 40. The extent of his recovery astounded his neurosurgeon, who attributed it to Wareing’s determination and “bloody-mindedness.”

Here’s another story. “An engineer — Philip Carroll, the father of four — was tinkering with his car outside his home. Four drunken youths sat on a wall on his property, and he asked them to leave.” They beat him and caused brain injury. Carroll may never work again. The culprit, Michael Kuba-Kuba, a talented athlete whose parents owned an African foods grocery store, got 12 months in jail. He said he acted in self-defense.

It’s just as well that the Brits are disgusted with the United States, its racism, its inequality, and its imperial ambitions in the world. They wouldn’t want to look at the unequal fight being waged on their own streets between peaceable householders and drunken teen thugs. That might be too unpleasant.

Liberals Miffed As Canine Cultural Studies Wins Course-of-the-Month

Liberals like to say that university faculties are overwhelmingly liberal because liberals are just more intelligent. Naturally you would find more liberal professors than conservative ones, they tell us.

It is certainly true that no conservative could write a fictional parody of liberal academic antics that could beat the real thing. Truth is stranger than fiction, especially at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The folks at John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy have decided unilaterally that they have a public duty to audit the goings-on at UNC-Chapel Hill. So they billed “Canine Cultural Studies” on their web site as Course of the Month, according to Jane Stancill.

Professor Alice Kuzniar was shocked to be lampooned by the conservative think tank.



"I feel it's such an incredible misrepresentation of what we're doing in the classroom," she said. "We're reading Virginia Woolf. We're reading Franz Kafka."

That is pretty amazing. You’d think that the modern college student would be hardly up to the challenge of Woolf and Kafka. In any case, the UNC-CH community of students and faculty are really riled up about the Pope Center.

Emotions are so strong that some want the university to refuse a potential multimillion-dollar grant by the related John William Pope Foundation.

Well, you see, the Pope Center wants to give money with strings attached. This year it gave money to the university to develop courses “that explore relationships between economics and politics in free societies.” Now they are mulling a grant to fund “a minor in Western culture studies.” No wonder that Professor Judith Bennett fears that if the money goes through she will feel that:

"Art Pope is sitting in the back of the classroom."



"If this program goes through, I would feel vulnerable to a whole new level of hostile surveillance," she said.

There’s no question that these tough hard-nosed feminist profs really know how to turn the clock back and act just like fluttering Victorian debutantes—when it serves their purposes.

Missile Defense Train Has Left the Station

On the Fourth of July as North Korea launched six rockets into the skies of eastern Asia American liberals at their dinner tables were still trotting out their talking points about missile defense being a waste of resources.

But really, the train has left the station. All the guff about “Star Wars” with which liberals have persuaded themselves of their superior understanding about the impossibility of missile defense is now, as the saying goes, “inoperative.” Eventually the word will get down the political food chain to the liberal dinner table.

Japan is moving as quickly as possible to join the US missile defense system and European nations like Poland and the Czech Republic are competing for the privilege of getting a missile defense radar built in their country.

As Martin Sieff writes, after participating a a missile defense war game:

The question is no longer: “Why couldn’t all this money have been spent on more bilingual education programs or deficit reduction?” It becomes: “Why do I only have 10 anti-ballistic missile interceptors deployed to face a threat of seven intercontinental ballistic missiles coming in from the Northeast Asian nation of 'Midland.'”

The answer to that question is: Democrats. It is fair to tell that to the American people? Or would it amount to questioning the Democrats’ patriotism?

Interestingly, Sieff writes, Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is not just a fan of Elvis. He keeps a portrait of Winston Churchill in his study. Koizumi is a firm supporter of “Star Wars,” er, missile defense. Presumably his successor will be no less.

Theocracy and the Religious Right

I listened to Randall Balmer today on the Michael Medved Show talking about his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament. The religious right, he complained, is turning the United States into a theocracy.

What about back in the 1950s, asked Medved? Was the US a theocracy then? Almost, replied Balmer.

Leaving aside the idea that the term “religious right” is a political pejorative, let us think about what this man is saying. Can he really suggest that religious people associated with the Republican Party are any more influential in the public square than religious people on the left are in influencing the Democratic Party?

Georges Lemaitre, the great twentieth century physicist who invented the Big Bang theory, once noted that psychology is the closest science to religion. Given that practitioners of modern psychology are employed by the government in every school in the land, is not the closeness of their science to religion a greater threat to the separation of church and state than the political influence of conservative Christians?