How About Some Liberal Villains on TV

The Business and Media Institute has done a study on the treatment of businesspeople on TV and they don’t like what they see. In Bad Company they report that if you watch TV shows you would see that:

• TV Is Overwhelmingly Negative toward Business
  
• Businessmen Are Villains, Not Heroes
  
• Businessmen Are a Greater Threat to Society than Terrorists or Gangs
  
• Businessmen Are Almost as Likely to Commit a Serious Felony as Career Criminals
  

and so on. On “Law & Order” 50 percent of the crooks are businessmen. On “Desperate Housewives” the office is represented as little more than a dating service.

Tough, writes columnist Clarence Page.

How many people would have watched "Dallas" if J.R. Ewing were an "average businessman"? A nice, ethical, self-sacrificing father who volunteers in his spare time to work with the Boy Scouts is hardly the stuff of gripping crime dramas.

And anyway there are plenty of bad apples in the business world like “Ken Lay, Jack Abramoff or Jeffrey Skilling.” So get used to it.

Look. If TV wants to do lots of stories about corrupt murdering businessmen it’s OK by me. But the point is that the world is swimming with skunks and scoundrels that never get a mention. How about:

• Liberal professors full of hate and rage towards George W. Bush who fake their resumes and plagiarize other peoples’ scholarly work.
  
• Race baiters who shake down big businesses for cash and contributions
  
• Bus drivers who fail to show up for work and don’t get fired for six months.
  
• Government employees who don’t do any work, run businesses on the side, and get paid 50 percent more than folk doing the same work in the private sector.
  
• Liberal environmental activists who lie about the environment.
  
• Journalists who profess their objectivity while spouting Democratic Party talking points.
  

I don’t know about you, but if TV put out some shows about folks like that, I might even tune in now and again.

It happens that all the candidates for TV villainy above are real. Liberal professors really are full of hate. Government employees really do earn 50 percent more than equivalent workers in the private sector. But what of that? What if they weren’t? If it makes a good story, who cares, as long as the profits roll in?

And, best of all, TV could get out of its rating slump with innovative, edgy story lines.

Why is it that liberals are grossly underrepresented in TV villainy?

No Wal-Mart Law for Maryland

Good news. On July 19, a federal district court judge threw out Maryland’s Wal-Mart health care bill. Reports Jan Haberkorn:

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled that the law violates the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), a federal law that sets minimum standards for pensions and health plans.

So that’s all right. Wal-Mart won’t have to pay a tax if its health benefits don’t reach a minimum 8 percent of payroll. You can imagine that Wal-Mart’s PR guys were delighted. “BREAKING NEWS,” they crowed.

But we sober souls need to think long and hard about health insurance and employee benefits and their interaction with government benefits.

The purpose of government benefits is to help people in need. That is a noble idea. The trouble is that when you give people “economic outpatient care” they respond by working less and consuming more.

Over the last century the government has constructed a huge structure of benefits and the result is a lot of people on the lam, doing a minimal amount of work and cunningly using the system to extract the maximum of free services.

It is said that if you finish high school, don’t have child out of wedlock, don’t get divorced then your chance of being poor is pretty small.

But the whole apparatus of government benefits is set to assure that if you do drop out of high school, do have children as a teenager, do get divorced, then things won’t be too hard for you.

When you have a vast apparatus of means-tested government services supplemented by a raft of employer-paid first-dollar employee benefits then you have destroyed the market in basic human needs. You no longer know how much health care people would buy if they had to pay for it, and how they would balance their consumption of health care against other human needs.

For instance, Americans are buying gigantic houses and SUVs these days. Would they be buying smaller houses if they paid a bigger share of their health care costs out-of-pocket?

We know that whenever the government meddles with a market in products or services that sooner or later the supply of products and services gets out of whack.

Wal-Mart is a company that knows that it must mark itself to market every day. It must mark itself to market when it buys products for its customers, and it must mark itself to market when it hires new employees.

Most of all, Wal-Mart has been very careful not to make rash promises to its employees. It has held off giving them first-dollar health insurance or defined benefit pension programs. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. Make an open ended promise like that and you will likely end up destroying the company and the jobs it provides.

Does Wal-Mart take advantage of its employees? I hope so. That’s the idea of the market economy. You buy low and sell high. Still, when Wal-Mart opens a store it generally gets thousands of people applying for the hundreds of jobs. That has to mean something. It has to mean that some people really value a Wal-Mart job.

But the message hasn’t got to the politicians yet.

Making War Against a Tribal Culture

In the season of Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn we appreciate that primitive man was not a noble savage but a savage killer. Now the excellent Mark Steyn has read Wade and written

that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people."

That sort of information is useful when you are thinking about the tribal mores of the Islamist terrorists. Robert D. Kaplan has read Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias by Richard H. Shultz Jr. and Andrea J. Dew and the Islamist way of war seems very like the way described by Wade.

While the U.S. spends billions of dollars on sophisticated defense systems, the dime-a-dozen kidnapper and suicide bomber have emerged as the most strategic weapons of war.

And that gets back to Lee Harris and his western team vs. the “eternal gang of ruthless men.”

The symmetry of “asymmetric war” is that the ruthlessness of the terrorists fits the reluctance of the west to target civilians. And so the terrorists hide behind civilians and assassinate civilians and terrorize civilians.

Eventually, of course, the west will tire of its forebearance. It is the nature of war that what seems unthinkable at the beginning is committed without a qualm by the end. The British were outraged by German bombing in 1940 but leveled Hamburg with firebombing in 1944.

No doubt that is how the War on Terror will end up. The terrorists use terror because it is their only weapon. But it is terrible only so long as it is discrete enough to make the cable TV news. In a general war, terror loses its power to terrorize.

SecEd Launches Vouchers, Bureaucrats Run Interference

What a coicidence! Just before Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announces a new federal pilot school voucher program the folks deep in the bureaucracy at the Institute of Education Sciences release a study that shows that “public school students did as well as or better than those in private school” in many areas.

That meant that the New York Times report by Diana Jean Schemo on Spellings’ announcement of a $100 million school voucher program could feature this paragraph:

The new legislation was introduced after an Education Department report released Friday, which showed that students attending public schools generally did as well as or better than comparable students in private schools.

And of course the reporter made sure to get an inflammatory quote from liberal activist Ralph Neas:

“The goal of this movement isn’t to help students. It’s to achieve vouchers at any cost.”

Still, the Times did have the decency to insert this quote from Secretary Spellings into their report:

Whatever the report’s findings, Ms. Spellings said, parents with children in public schools that repeatedly fail deserve more options.

Actually, you could put it stronger than that, to balance the flamethrower rhetoric of Ralph Neas.

It is wrong and unjust to condemn little children to lousy inner-city schools and stand in the schoolhouse door protecting the monopoly privileges of the system while generation after generation of children go to rot. And when activists like Ralph Neas trample on the right of parents to get their kids a decent education they ought to be ashamed.

How is that for a start?

Government Fails to Educate NJ Kids

Widower Van-Ness Crawford and a number of other parents have sued the State of New Jersey to demand the right to take their children out of failing schools and send them to the school of their choice.

Filed as Crawford v. Davy the suit aims to be a landmark case that establishes the right of parents to educate their children.

Obviously widower Crawford and his triplet 16-year-old sons that attend the failing Malcolm X. Shabazz High School in Newark have been selected by school choice activists as poster boys for school choice. But the point remains: why can New Jersey schools not educate children when they are spending $10,000 to $20,000 per year per student? What gives them the right to spend the money on Crawford’s sons rather than Crawford? If they are going to piss the money away on his kids why not give the money to him and let him piss the money away?

According to Kristen A. Graham, the activist groups backing the suit are “Alliance for School Choice, a Phoenix-based group; the Black Minister's Council of New Jersey; the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey; and Excellent Education for Everyone, a New Jersey group that supports school choice and vouchers.” The co-plaintiffs joining Crawford have been selected from around the state, as you might expect.

Leaving aside the church vs. state aspect of education, there is the basic nature of government. Government responds to problems and throws money at them. But government has no interest in solving problems. If ever a problem would be solved then the funding would go away. What would be the point of that?

Thus when school fail our kids the school lobby demands more money. Why don’t we say that if you fail to educate our kids then we are going to take the money away and give it to someone else?

"We Don't Want to Fight"

It’s not just me. It’s all the conservatives who are deploring the “cycle of violence” brigade. Here is Thomas Sowell writing that “Those who keep calling for an end to the "cycle of violence" are what make such violence more likely.”

Then there is Charles Krauthammer.

Amid the general wringing of hands over the seemingly endless and escalating Israel-Hezbollah fighting, everyone asks: Where will it end?

Or take Robert Tracinski. “What Part of War Don’t We Understand?” Because we are good guys we have to prove our goodness. “a Los Angeles Times op-ed demanded that Israel "has to be the most responsible party" by declaring an immediate ceasefire.”

Like I wrote earlier this week in It’s a War, Stupid. Syria and Iran base their foreign policy on the sponsorship of terrorism. Indeed without terrorism they would be nothing.

It’s time we disabused them of the idea that terrorism is a good idea for them.

NYT Clearing Throat Over Mideast "Conflict" And More

You know that when the cat gets its voice back at the New York Times that President Bush is going to be reprimanded for his intemperance in calling for the United Nations to get its, er, stuff together to stop Hamas and Hizbollah.

As all thoughtful people know, the crisis in the Middle East is much more nuanced than that. Until the Times can finish clearing its throat, at least they have Paul Krugman growling about “the same cast of characters” behind the Times Select wall.

But at OpinionJournal.com James Taranto had some interesting tidbits about the Mideast War. Key Arab governments (well Sunni ones) are blaming Hizbollah for the war, and worrying that it will put the whole region back by years.

But whatever they are saying at the Arab League summit or not saying at the New York Times, the words of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demand respect:

"Citizens of Israel, there are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more," he said.


"And I say to everyone: no more. Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs or by a terrorist authority or by any sovereign state,"

You can’t say fairer than that.