Two Views of Hezbollah

Which is it? Is Hezbollah a homegrown political movement that has organized the downtrodden Shia of Lebanon into a political force, as Bronwen Maddox and others propose? Or is it a overweening satrapy of Iran and Syria, a force of disorder in a weak and suffering land of Lebanon, as Fouad Ajami writes?

What is clear is the Hezbollah has had a ton of money from Iran. You don’t build all that military infrastructure on the benevolence of strangers. And now Hezbollah is in a full-out war with Israel.

Write Maddox et al,

Has Sheikh Nasrallah miscalculated? Many assume that in seizing Israeli soldiers he hoped to win the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israel, as Hezbollah had done before.

...

But Israel may have also have made a misjudgment. It does not want to withdraw without success, but more fighting will kill more civilians, radicalise more Lebanese and test Israelis’ nerves and the patience of its allies.

In the opinion of Ajami,

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin.

Right now the Europeans are singing the song of Israeli “disproportion.” After another week President Bush may find it hard to allow Israel to clean up its northern border and give its people the right to live free of rockets from Lebanon courtesy of Sheikh Nasrullah and Hezbollah.

The 100 mpg Car That Isn't

Our liberal media friends are getting all excited about the birth of the 100 miles per gallon car. There are even people driving around with stickers advertising their triple digit gas sippers. Here’s a characteristic gushy article on the topic from MSNBC.

But wait a minute. These gas sipping miracles aren’t really getting 100 mpg. If their owners were corporate advertisers they would be getting sued for false advertising.

This phoney-baloney way to get to 100 mpg relies on buying an expensive conversion kit, including more of those expensive metal-hydride batteries, and plugging your car into the electric outlet. You don’t really get 100 mpg from the total energy input into the car. You get 100 mpg on the gasoline you buy, augmented by “free” power from your home electric outlet. Only you get to see the cost of the free power on your electric bill.

You could say that you are saving because you are charging the car using off-peak power during the night. But if you are a liberal environmentalist you do not believe in market prices, you just look at the difference in overall energy use.

Let us look at that. The key is to think about losses.

If you are charging your hybrid at home then you start with coal. There are losses at the generating plant, say 30 percent. Then there are losses in electrical transmission, say 15 percent. Then there are losses in charging your battery, say 20 percent. Of course, you are saving because you are not paying road fuel taxes.

If you are running a hybrid then you are saving from the smaller gasoline engine (if you have a Prius; Camry and Highlander hybrid owners forget it) and from the energy saved by recapturing energy in regenerative braking, about 50 percent. But you have the energy losses in charging the battery, which are substantial.

And of course if you have converted your hybrid into a plug-in hybrid it has cost you something north of $10,000. Try amortizing that over the life of the car.

OK. Now let us do the math, with our handy-dandy energy price calculator.

(Calculator omitted)

If you put “3.00” into the gasoline price field you will see that it is equivalent in energy to 8 cents per kilowatt hour. How many of you folks out there are paying more than 8 cents per kilowatt hour to your electric utility?

Just checking. Because you see, if the price of gasoline goes back down to, oh, $2.00 per gallon, then the 100 mpg car isn’t going to look too good, is it?

The Black Divide

This week President Bush finally spoke at the NAACP convention and received, according to reports, a polite reception. The delegates especially liked it when he announced his support for extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Did the president go out of politeness or out of political calculation? According to Harry Jackson there is an emerging split in black America, one that puts African Americans in play politically for the first time in forty years.

The split was made public on June 27 before the national media. As a result, writes Jackson, the pastor of New Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Maryland, the occasion

marked a watershed moment for the black religious community in America. The Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery and about 100 others decided to attack the motives and moral integrity of the nation's most successful black mega-churches.

They made the usual criticism from the left that the mega-churches have abandoned “Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.”

No doubt “poverty reduction, education reform, improved health care, judicial fairness and prison after care” are important, Harry Jackson says, but there are plenty of blacks who are also concerned about “black genocide” in abortion and “family disintegration.” And they need a voice for their concerns.

Harry Jackson is concerned about black unity, but he is backing the wrong horse. It is not disastrous but good that blacks are splitting and beginning to emerge from the safety of racial unity.

It’s happened before in America, and it will happen again. When an immigrant group starts to get its feet on the ground it moves away from ethnic solidarity towards the great American way of purpose and self-help. And the great vehicle of this social transformation has been, for two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christian church.

People cannot live on bread alone. As Harry Jackson quoted Senator Barack Obama: People “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”

Welcome to America.

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?