A Dictator Hands Over Power, For Now

So finally General Pinochet, after 47 years as dictator of Chile, yielded power to his ageing brother in the wake of emergency intestinal surgery. It’s true that he ruled with an iron fist, allowed conservative spokesmen, but at least he made Chile the economic powerhouse of South America, made individual Chileans prosperous with his radical pension reform, and exported its wine to all the world.

Oh dear. Wrong dictator! And of course, Gen. Pinochet didn’t rule for half a century. After the coup in which he ended the chaotic rule of Salvador Allende, he put Chile on the road to prosperity and returned it to democracy.

Unlike Fidel Castro. On Monday night, he handed over power, temporarily, to his brother Raúl, as he underwent intestinal surgery. And he put off his 80th birthday celebration till December.

But today, everyone will be delighted to hear, he is feeling better.

Oh yes, he did wonders with education and health care (but how good is that education and health care really? Has anyone ever checked it out?).
But overall, economic growth in Cuba is estimated at minus 0.5 percent per year since 1959. Not that anyone is allowed to do an independent audit of Cuba’s economy.

But the way to think of Cuba’s half-century under dictatorship is to imagine how it would have been reported by our objective MSM if, instead of the lefty hero Castro, it had been ruled by a right-wing thug.

Forget about the extenuating circumstances, the education, the health care, the charm of Old Havana. Dictatorship would have been dictatorship, fascism, red with the blood of its victims: journalists and political human rights activists.

Reader Mail on Seattle's Cult of Victimhood

Things really are as bad as you think in Seattle. My article on the Seattle cult of victimhood inspired several alert readers to send me their thoughts, including these two horror stories.

One reader reports training employees at Seattle City Light in the use of some new equipment. It sounds like a comedy skit, only you are not allowed to laugh at such things.

Of the five City Light employees training on the new equipment, one was African American, one Native American, one Asian American, one woman, and one white male. The Native American wouldn’t use head sets, and needed special accommodation. The woman militantly said that several things in the equipment would have to be changed to accommodate her. The Asian American asked a few questions and quickly learned how to used the new equipment. The African American was “an old hand” who already knew the basics pretty well. The white male was the supervisor who said that he was fed up, but couldn’t walk away from the money.

Another exasperated reader sent me the definitions of Racism, Cultural Racism, and Institutional Racism that the staff of the Seattle School District’s equity and race relations staff had posted on the district’s website. It was the extreme left-wing victim-enabling stuff you would expect.

Since Cultural Racism on the part of whites includes an assumption of “future time orientation,” we can now understand why the Seattle School District lost about $34 million a year or so ago. Hey, obsessive planning and budgeting is so future-oriented and so racist!

Eventually all this stuff is going to fall down, but before it does a lot more people are going to have their lives ruined by Seattle’s victim-enabling culture.

It is going to get worse before it gets better.

A Pause for Optimism

What with TV screens filled with mayhem and panicked pundits screaming that all is lost, it is easy to throw up your hands and lose all hope.

But Michael Barone suggests that all is not lost yet. He uses the model of Thomas Barnett, “who divides the world into a functioning "Core" (North America, Europe, East Asia, rising China and India) and a nonfunctional "Gap" (the Middle East, most of Africa, part of the Andean chain in South America).”

Barnett’s Big Idea is that we should we working to expand the Core and shrink the Gap, expanding the realm of interconnected wealth creation and shrinking the world of thugs and terror.

From Barnett’s point of view things are not going too badly. Says he:

"Plenty of people look at the world today and see only decline and violence and chaos since September 11 [2001]. I am amazed at how little the Functioning Core of globalization has suffered since that date: no real violence or threats of same amidst our ranks, slow but steady political integration that's still not keeping up with the economic bonds that are booming, spotty but emerging sense of shared security values, and the usual pinpricks of harm inflicted by terror and God, but all in all, nothing really bad despite all this 'tumult' centered in the Middle East and the rising price of oil."

The point is that what Marx would call the “productive forces” all weigh in the advantage of the Functioning Core. And if you look at GDPs you will see that the troublemakers of the Gap are all puny players that for now are hitting way above their weight. And if, say, the price of oil fell by 50 percent they would really be in a world of hurt.

(A way to help that along would be to drill for oil in the Arctic and offshore. Just a thought.)

The difference between the Core nations and the Gap nations is the difference between the rule of law and the swing of power. In the Core nations an ordinary person can get ahead by following the rules. In the Gap nations you need a powerful patron.

As the Mexican immigrant said: In Mexico you need to know a politician if you want to get a job. In the US, in most areas of the economy, all you need is right between your ears.

The United States is the richest country in the world because it has the least amount of privilege weighing on its economy.

Eclipse 500 Gets Preliminary Certification

Even as the Mideast goes up in flames, Eclipse Aviation marked a big milestone as the FAA awarded them a preliminary certification on their Eclipse 500 Very Light Jet in a ceremony at Oshkosh, July 28, according to USAToday. For photos and videos of the Eclipse 500 go to their site. Said CEO Vern Rayburn:

"We have looked forward to this monumental accomplishment since Eclipse was founded nearly eight years ago."

The Eclipse 500 weighs in at 3,536 lbs. empty, and 5,920 lbs. maximum take off weight. Its two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW610F turbofans each deliver 900 lbs of takeoff thrust, and provide power to cruise at 375 knots at 41,000 feet.
Range is 1,125 nautical miles.

CEO Vern Rayburn is an ex-Microsoftie, and maybe it is just as well, since Rayburn needed an infusion of cash from Bill Gates when Eclipse’s initial engine contractor Williams International couldn’t deliver.

But Eclipse Aviation has 2,500 orders booked, and air taxi companies eager to offer the nation’s executives on-demand door-to-door service with fleets of the new VLJs.

Coming soon, of course, a HondaJet.

It could change the face of air transportation.

A Snapshot of Men without Work

For decades we have been taught, nay ordered to believe that the unemployed were helpless victims, denied meaningful work by a cruel and heartless economic system.

Economists disagreed. Ludwig von Mises famously wrote that all unemployment in a free economy is voluntary. When we are out of work we do not take the first job that comes along. We wait, because we expect something better to come up. When we absolutely must get a job, we do.

When Booker T. Washington was traveling across the South after the Civil War on his way to get an education at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute he arrived in Richmond, Virginia late one night hungry and penniless.

[Next morning,] as soon as it was light... I noticed that I was near a large ship, and that this ship seemed to be unloading a cargo of pig iron. I went at once to the vessel and asked the captain to permit me to help unload the vessel in order to get money for food... I worked long enough to earn money for my breakfast, and it seems to me, as I remember it now, to have been about the best breakfast that I have ever eaten.

Unloading pig iron is probably one of the dirtiest, demeaning jobs you can imagine.

Today in America, according to Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, there are about 4 million men in the United States who have withdrawn from the workforce because they don’t want to work at the wages offered by the system—and frankly, they don’t need to.

Many of them are just taking out mortgages on their houses, or living off their wives. Or they are going on disability.

[T]he fastest growing source of help is a patchwork system of government support, the main one being federal disability insurance, which is financed by Social Security payroll taxes. The disability stipends range up to $1,000 a month and, after the first two years, Medicare kicks in, giving access to health insurance that for many missing men no longer comes with the low-wage jobs available to them.



No federal entitlement program is growing as quickly, with more than 6.5 million men and women now receiving monthly disability payments, up from 3 million in 1990.

The rolls of the federal disability program are doubling every decade.

The trouble with the disability program, like all the government programs to assist the unemployed, is that it encourages people to stay out of the workforce. Unfortunately, job skills deteriorate rapidly. The longer you stay out of work, the less employable you are.

According to The New York Times the men that have dropped out of the work force are likely to be:

• Less educated
  
• Living alone
  
• Released from prison
  

The Times invites us to observe the life of the Beggerows. He was laid off from Northwestern Wire and Steel in 2001 and since then has only worked occasionally as a community college instructor. His wife, Cathleen, is getting $12,000 a year from disability after suffering severe injuries in an auto accident. The marriage is the third one for both of them. Beggerow has an adult child from a former marriage; Cathleen has no children. Beggerow has no real plans to look for work.

This is the world that progressives and The New York Times have conjured into being in a century of political thinking and practical politics. And as the workforce participation of men goes down, the participation of women goes up.

Is this really the society that we want, with men dropping out into idleness and dependency? Shouldn’t we do something about it?

Because, as they say, when men go bad, released from work and responsibility, they go bad fast.

Chemerinsky Joins Plame Game

Politics ain’t beanbag, they say. When you go into politics, you had better expect rough treatment.

So when Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to discredit the Bush Administration over the assertion that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake in Chad, he can hardly have been surprised that the Bush Administration would try to discredit him.

But the media was shocked. The very idea! So we got a special prosecutor to determine whether there had been a violation of law in leaking the name of Joseph Wilson’s wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Years later, the special prosecutor has decided not to prosecute any member of the Bush Administration for leaking Plame’s name.

The result: Valerie Plame is suing Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby in a civil-rights and civil conspiracy complaint.

Well, it’s a free country. And it is perfectly OK to hire the leading left-wing law professor in the land, Erwin Chemerinsky, to be your co-counsel and have him write a scathing article in Slate.

The top government officials who revealed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a secret operative for the Central Intelligence Agency egregiously abused their power and inflicted great harms on Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson.

The Man Bites Dog of this episode is the realization that the CIA, the agency that used to symbolize everything that was evil about the USA, is now, apparently, a part of the great liberal conspiracy.

Years ago, politically connected Democrats like Wilson and Plame would have run a mile to avoid having their names connected with the CIA. But now it appears that well-educated, well-connected folk actually work for, or get contract assignments from the Central Intelligence Agency. And when they want a spot of top-tier legal advice they go to Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky.

It’s good to know that when an elite liberal needs a job she isn’t limited to the academy, local government, public law practice, social service administration, but now can also work for the intelligence community without ruining her bona fides.

The Bolton Kerfuffle Resumes

President Bush has nominated of John Bolton to be reappointed as UN Ambassador, and everyone is rehearsing their arguments of a year ago.

Bolton was appointed to the UN ambassadorship last August in the Congressional recess after Democrats filibustered his nomination. If he is not reappointed his recess appointment will expire at the end of the current session of Congress

Should Bolton be reappointed? As Colum Lynch makes clear, it all depends on what you think John Bolton should be doing at the UN. Democrats argue that Bolton is so combative that he is ineffective.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said, "Mr. Bolton's performance at the U.N. only confirms my conviction that he's the wrong person for this job."

And the UN diplomats agree.

"He sometimes makes it very difficult to build bridges because he is a very honest and blunt person," said South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo.

But Republicans like him, and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) has decided to support his nomination this time around.

Republicans feel that since most nations regard the UN as an institution for “constraining U.S. power,” that Bolton’s job is not to make the UN work, but to bring the work of the UN to a halt.

Democrats, who have more faith in the power of diplomacy, want someone to work with the other nations at the UN.

So, do we want to reform an institution that sees its job as constraining US power? Or do we want to keep it discredited and ineffective?

What the US would like out of the UN right now is to enforce Resolution 1559 demanding the disbanding of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Ain’t gonna happen, however nicey nicey the US UN Ambassador is to his fellow diplomats.

The only way that Hezbollah will get disarmed is if it is defeated in battle.

Because international relations are not about diplomacy but about power.