The Decline of the Public Library

Here in Seattle we have just finished spending hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the downtown library and rebuilding a number of branch libraries.

But Helen Rumbelow thinks that public libraries are going the way of the Victorian bath house. Back in the day, there were numerous communal bath houses. But not any more. People have their own baths, thank you.

The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.

So it makes sense that Seattle would just have spent a ton of money on a headline architect designed public library.

All the things we used to need a library for—looking up medical information, queueing up for bestsellers—all that stuff can be done on the Internet.

What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.

Actually, she’s wrong about that. Kids exchange juvenile comments on social networking sites and IM. That is when they are not exchanging juvenile comments texting on their cell phones.

So let us get real.

Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children -- libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs -- all the better for helping with homework.

Children’s libraries. And maybe a bunch of other community-type activities. But forget about adult books. Libraries should be putting their collections online before the books fall apart.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, we have still got to pay off the bonds on our shining new white elephant. Thirty years should do it.

What is Going On in Iraq? Part II

What is going on in Iraq? President Bush isn’t saying.

That has to be the takeaway from the meeting of conservative journalists with the president, recorded by Byron York.

The latest plan to retake the offensive on defining victory is the so-called benchmark. “The idea is to develop with the Iraqi government a series of benchmarks -- oil, federalism, constitutional reform, there’s like 20 different things -- and have that developed in a way that they’re comfortable with and we’re comfortable with,” Bush said. Progress toward those goals would give the administration new ways to point toward overall progress in Iraq.

But this is bureaucratic number-crunching. The question really is: What do we want out of our Iraq venture? Is it democracy in Iraq? Is it Peace in the Middle East? Is it containing Iran?

Or, to put it bluntly, how do we define Winning in Iraq? Right now it looks like it is nothing more than standing up the puppet regime we installed. But do we really care about that? How bad would it be if the warlord Muqtada Al Sadr took over? Ralph Peters thinks that the current Iraqi government is already truckling to Al Sadr.

And that leads to a bigger question? How does each—or any—nation (for want of a better word) advance into the modern culture of capitalism, markets, and democratic rule? One thing is for sure. It ain’t easy.

In the nineteenth century, the European nations engaged in a Race for Africa, tore up its traditional boundaries, imposed western rule, and then withdrew it. The result, as we know, was misery and genocide.

Why should things be any different in the Islamic Middle East?

What is Going On in Iraq?

Just what exactly is going on in Iraq? Is it civil war? If not, just what is it?

Frederick Turner is willing to guess. It is the hour of the vigilante.

He asks what civil society can do when it is opposed by refuseniks, people who refuse to give up when they have been defeated, but still keep up a desultory fusilade of bombings and suicides?

The answer is that you send out the death squads. The official government cannot do it. So it must delegate it to vigilantes.

Basically the killers are posses of self-organized vigilantes, who know their local area, who know who the bombers are, and who the bombers' relatives are.

...

But death squads are rational, in their own horrible way. They may prove, as they did in Latin America, to be a pretty effective method of wiping out implacable enemies of social order and preparing the way for democratic and law-abiding government. In living memory almost every decent and legal regime in Latin America was preceded by a chaotic period in which ordinary men armed themselves with guns, said goodnight to their families, and went out in groups to kill some local dissident.

...
The work of the vigilantes is the hideous and dark crime that Socrates and the Greek tragic dramatists hinted must underlie all civilization.

Is that what is going on in Iraq? The truth is, we do not know. We will only know after it is all over, whatever it is that is going down in Iraq right now.

The Real Culture of Corruption

Conservatives have wonderful ideas—for education, for health care, and for income security. But you do not get elected on great ideas. Americans aren’t that interested in ideas. You get elected when the other guys screw up.

Conservative reform of education and Social Security will not happen through a free and fair discussion of the issues. It will happen because Americans get sick of pervasive liberal corruption in the public sector.

Last week we saw the institutional corruption reported at an ordinary community college in California.

Now here’s a story of corruption in a research university, reported in The New York Times. Reported by Jeneen Interlandi, it’s a story about a professor at the University of Vermont, convicted in federal court of

lying on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging.

What had Eric Poehlman done? Well, according to graduate student Walter DeNino, the whistleblower who had turned him in, Poelman had routinely altered data on clinical studies to make it support his hypotheses. So in a study of the change in fat levels in the blood over time, Poehlman just changed the data in a spreadsheet on which DeNino was working.

In the initial spreadsheet, many patients showed an increase in HDL from the first visit to the second. In the revised sheet, all patients showed a decrease. Astonished, DeNino read through the data again. Sure enough, the only numbers that hadn’t been changed were the ones that supported his hypothesis.

In this high-stakes research business where money, power and the roar of the crowd depend on a continuing flow of government research dollars we can assume that there is a lot of this kind of stuff going on.

Everyone agrees that the private sector is hopelessly compromised by its selfish pursuit of profit. Whereas university professors professors and government civil servants are all good guys.

But the Poehlman case shows how a committed cheater can elude detection for years by playing on the trust — and the self-interest — of his or her junior colleagues.

Before we can change the culture we have to discredit the incumbents. The American people have to grow to understand that “our” teachers, professors, doctors feeding in the public trough are all crooks and liars. You know, just like businessmen.

Then we can start to talk to them about reform.

Meanwhile former professor Eric Poehlman will be spending a year in jail.

The Ebb and Flow of Politics

At two weeks to go before the 2006 mid-term elections everyone is agreed that... well it would be hard to disagree with the idea that Democrats have a good opportunity to seize control of both houses of Congress.

In fact, if Democrats don’t win control of at least one house, they ought to be ashamed.

Republicans are disappointed in their party, and they should be. The Republican Congress has been very short on legislating beneficial reform, and that is bad.

The folks on conservative talk radio have been insisting that Republicans must rally to reelect a Republican Congress... or else.

But the purpose of politics is not to legislate and reform. The purpose of politics is to avoid civil war.

In recent years the Democrats have become so utterly enraged that they have started to develop conspiracy theories, the sort of conspiracy theories that they have utterly deprecated when they came from the right. In fact, any party gets angry and conspiratorial after many years in the wilderness.

We need to put the Democrats back in power. We need to say to them. OK, if George W, Bush is so stupid, and Republicans are so eevil, then show us what can you do.

The last time we did that, in 1992, the American people vomited the Democrats back up in two years.

Because the long-term fact about American politics is that the Republican Party is the party of enterprise, and the Democratic Party is the party of tenure. Republicans are people who live and work in the enterprise sector, Michael Barone’s Hard America. Democrats are people who live and pick up paychecks in the tenured sector, Michael Barone’s Soft America.

And it is all that Democrats can do to protect and preserve the pensions and the tenure and the sinecures that they have awarded themselves and their supporters over the last seventy years.

Let’s fight like hell, but let us remember the old adage of Benjamin Franklin:

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Americans, foolish or not, must alternate power between each party and see what each can do. It’s the democratic thing to do.

Mark Steyn and the 300 Millionth American

Maybe we conservatives are living in a dream world. While we are worrying about the demographic disaster in Europe, with child-shy women refusing to generate a new generation, liberals are wringing their hands as the US population soars north of 300 million.

And it’s all very well for Mark Steyn to chortle about his publicist tipping the
folks at the Census Bureau to announce the 300 millionth American just as his America Alone was hitting the bookstores. Subtitled “The End of the World As We Know It” his book could just as well be titled “It’s The Demography, Stupid.” It’s all very well for him. His wife has already presented him with three children.

Anyway, the patriarchal Mark Steyn really has a lot of fun with the “overpopulation” crowd.

"At 300 million," noted [Dowell Myers] the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, "we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."

Oh please, titters Mark.

If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 392 and 341 inhabitants per square kilometer compared to 31 folks per square kilometer in the United States.

Probably the whole “overpopulation” schtik goes back to the “voluntary motherhood” crowd of the early twentieth century. If you are a woman, like, say, the feminist Simone de Beauvoir, and you want to write books instead of having children, then it makes a lot of sense to fortify your decision with a throwaway comment about “overpopulation.”

But the inescapable demographic fact is that people that don’t have children have not provided for their old age. Who is going to look after you, old chap, if you don’t have any children?

If you want to think clearly about the meaning of the word “unsustainable” don’t think about global warming. Think about global cooling between the sheets.

When there are too many people you can always cull a few million in a convenient war. But when population is declining, then you heading over the cliff.

Rees-Mogg on Ralph Harris

The talent of a great journalist is to bring together all the detritus of the world, like a magpie, but to serve it all up as a delicious meal with the talents of a great chef.

Marking the death of Arthur Harris, director of the think-tank Institute of Economic Affairs, William Rees-Mogg, war horse of British broadsheet journalism, tells just how remarkable Harris’s achievement was: to have changed the elite consensus in Britain from the Fabian “Butskellism” of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in which Britain became the sick man of Europe.

[Harris] converted a whole generation of politicians and journalists to the free-market ideas in which he believed; he converted most economists as well. We are all, or almost all, Harrisites nowadays. I was one of his intellectual converts, became a colleague of his in the House of Lords, and regarded myself as a friend.

Then Rees-Mogg continues with remarkable frankness to write how he himself was a mind-numbed robot of the Keynesian consensus, the conceit that a political elite of experts could operate the levers of the economy through regulation and subsidy.

Most economic theory then taught in universities was Keynesian; industrial policy was based on nationalisation and trade union power. Wartime regulations were still universal; rates of taxation went up to 90 per cent or higher. This was the triumph of the managed socialist economy in a democratic society.

Rees-Mogg remembers discussing ideas back in the late 1950s with Harris and his collaborators at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Even then my own economic ideas, though broadly Keynesian, were not Fabian. Yet, as I listened to Ralph [Harris] and John [Wood], I thought that they were out of touch with contemporary trends, even that they were likeable cranks. How wrong I was. It was I who was trapped in a false consensus from which I had to break free.

You can’t say fairer than that. Then came the crisis of the 1970s.

In the 1960s and early 1970s the IEA moved from the fringe to a position of rising influence, largely as the result of the failure of economic controls. Many free-society pamphlets were published, brilliantly edited by Arthur Seldon. Meetings were held, lunches were given and [F.A.] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman were introduced to a new British audience. The IEA became a focus of criticism when the Heath Government did a U-turn and tried to fight inflation by price and wage controls -- by a policy that I was ignorant enough to support. What folly that now seems.

It is now, as these great men are dying, that we can begin to grasp the enormity of the challenge they faced, and the remarkable achievement of their lives as they succeeded in turning the great ships of state both in Britain and the United States.

Rees-Mogg concludes: “[Harris] deserves a statue: he helped to save the freedom of his country.”

But you could say that the proper memorial for Ralph Harris would the same as that for Sir Christopher Wren, builder of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

"Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" ("Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you").