More Iraq Study Needed

What is it exactly that the Iraq Study Group is proposing? A drawdown in troop strength in 2008? An approach to Syria and Iran?

The Bush administration and the Congress must work together in forging a new course in Iraq despite partisan differences over how to end U.S. involvement in the long-running war, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group said Thursday.

The basic recommendation is probably true.

The panel's 96-page report said flatly that the administration's approach was not working and recommended that the U.S. military accelerate a change in its main mission so that most combat troops can be withdrawn by spring 2008.

The question is how to continue the basic strategic interest of the United States, which is to maintain a divided Middle East. The idea is that no one power obtains control over all the oil. At the same time we want to hinder the use of the Middle East as a training ground for Islamist terror raids into Europe and North America.

For this strategy Iraq needs to be stabilized without becoming a client state of Iran.

We could well listen to the pungent views of Asia Times columnist Spengler, who perceives at the Middle East as an Arab civil war similar to the German civil war we call the Thirty Years War.

In those days France had an interest in a weak and divided Germany, and succeeded in exhausting Germany because Cardinal Richelieu throughout the war “sneakily shifted resources to whichever side seemed likely to fold.”

I have contended for years that the United States ultimately will adopt the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so well served Cardinal Richelieu and made France the master of Europe for a century.

Clearly, Iraq is not ready to be a mult-party democracy. The central error of the Bush policy was to hope that it could be ready, or made ready, for democracy. It was a noble error, but it was an error. Sorry. No can do.

The interest of the United States is now to promote a government in Iraq that reflects the power of the Shia but which is independent of Iran. Then it needs to back the Sunnis to counterbalance the power of Iran.

Here’s a prediction. We will see the United States in the next months muddling through to this policy. One warning. It won’t be pretty.

The Working Poor Are Different From You and Me

It’s pretty sobering, isn’t it, to read that the most charitable people in the United States are the working poor. I mean, they don’t exactly have a lot of spare cash lying around. Not like some people I know.

But then neither do your average middle-class homeowner sup to their ears in mortgage debt. They say: “I don't have enough money to spare,” according to John Stossel. And of course, they (make that we) don’t. We already spent it on our houses, our cars, our shopping, ourselves... You get the point.

Actually it is religious people who give most to charity. First of all they give to their church, and then they give to a lot of other places too. Here are the stats.

1. Religious people give more than non-religious people.
2. The working poor give more than the middle class.
3. The rich give more than the middle class.
4. The working poor give more than the non-working poor.
5. Conservatives give more than liberals.

John Stossel ran a test. He had the Salvation Army put a bucket outside a store in Sious Falls, South Dakota, and another one outside a store in San Francisco. What were the results?

Well, even though people in Sioux Falls make, on average, half as much money as people in San Francisco, and even though the San Francisco location was much busier -- three times as many people were within reach of the bucket -- by the end of the second day, the Sioux Falls bucket held twice as much money.

It’s good to know stuff like that.

Suppose There Was a Government Apple Industry

Imagine this, writes Terence P. Jeffrey. “Suppose there were a law that forced you to pay a government agency for apples you were supposed to feed your children.”

And suppose it turned out that some of the government apples were bad. What should parents do?

When they complained to the public-apple agencies, agency bureaucrats and their union would say: "Excuse me, the bad apples are not our fault. You need to give us more money so we can build better apple storage facilities, and so we can pay better wages to apple handlers."

But the apples still didn’t improve. Eventually we get to a federal Department of Apples. And apple quality still doesn’t improve.

You know what this parable is all about. In the matter of the education of our children we have a system exactly like the government apple system. And the price is going up all the time.

Between the 1970 and 2002 school years, average per-pupil spending in public elementary and secondary schools rose 111 percent, from $4,170 (in constant 2001-2002 dollars) to $8,802.

But the performance of the nation’s students is not going up. Only 29 percent of eighth-graders are rated “proficient” in math and reading.

What do you think we should do, fellow Americans? Increase spending? Increase federal oversight? Start criminalizing underperformance of teachers and principals?

Or shall we use the apple industry as a model, and leave the market to decide how to produce, distribute, and deliver good wholesome apples to parents and children?

Bush Nominates a Theocratic Abstinence Advocate

Oh no, the theocrats in the Bush administration have nominated an abstinence advocate to head up the federal Office of Population Affairs.

Dr. Eric Keroack “advocates abstinence as the most reliable method of pregnancy and STD prevention,” according to Jennifer Roback Morse author of Love and Economics and Smart Sex.

Why are the theocrats still trying to frighten kids when everybody knows that the universal solution to contraception and STD infection is condoms?

But that is not the real problem with Keroack, writes Morse.

Evidently, Keroack has given lectures in which he claims that there are long-term emotional costs to non-marital sexual activity.

According to Amanda Schaffer, writing in Slate, Keroack said this: “People who have misused their sexual faculty and become bonded to multiple persons will diminish the power of oxytocin to maintain a permanent bond with an individual.”

Yes. That is a real problem. He is suggesting that
people who sleep around risk becoming “emotionally wounded.” And studies show that teenage girls who have sex with multiple partners suffer from depression.

But we can’t go too far down that road. Back at the dawn of the feminist age Simone de Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that the “independent woman” needed the physical release of a love affair or two to refresh herself in her intellectual labors.

Suppose that we concede that “science” has established that what is euphemistically called “a sexual life” is bad for the mental health of women? Then what is left of the whole sexual revolution and the war against marriage—or indeed the whole feminist project?

What indeed?

Honor Friedman With Choice in Education and Health Care

As we mourn the passing of Milton Friedman, American hero, we must painfully recognize that much of what he urged upon the United States as beneficial reform remains to be realized, particularly, write Newt Gingrich and David Merrit, in education and health care.

Milton Friedman stood courageously for choice in education and health care against all the special interests of the nation. What better memorial to the great man could we build than a real reform in education and health care.

The status quo is failing our students, and to truly see real change, we need to enact real change. The simplest and surest way to transform education is to give students and parents the freedom to choose where they will go to school. This means eliminating restrictive zoning laws that force kids into schools simply because they live nearby. This means introducing free-market forces into education, encouraging schools to compete for students, much like businesses compete for customers. This means that schools that do not perform will either improve or close their doors -- which is as it should be. There is no middle ground.

And here is the bottom line. If they submitted to the discipline of parental choice, our nation’s educators would feel better about themselves. Instead of acting like dogs-in-the-manger, they would accept the gospel of accountability and would experience an amazing improvement in their positive self-esteem.

Then there is health care. And here choice and transparency could transform 14 percent of the nation’s economy.

We need to put the consumer at the center of the health-care system, just as we do in every other market. And the surest way to do this is by creating a national market to purchase health insurance.
...
[G]overnment must allow competition to flourish. More competition among insurers in a national market will encourage more creative products, better services and lower prices -- just as it always does wherever competition thrives -- and every American will be able to find affordable coverage. The Health Choice Act, which was introduced by Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, will go a long way toward creating a rational, working market in health care.

A vital part of this rational market is the availability of information. Information on performance, cost, and quality allows consumers to make informed decisions, but health care is perhaps the only market in which consumers have virtually no access to this information.

There’s a simple way to understand all of this: shopping. Ruthlessly and consistently, America’s shoppers have promoted corporations that are willing to commit themselves to nothing but the interest of the consumer. And they have demoted corporations that faltered in their dedication to the consumer. That is why Wal-Mart is the king of retail and Starbucks is the king of coffee.

When are we going to free our education shoppers and health-care shoppers to work their magic on education and health care?

Single Parenthood is Dangerous for Children

We educated Americans can afford to screw up. We have skills and we have backup. But there is a class of Americans that don’t. They are the children of single-parent families. In fact, as Kay S. Hymowitz tells us in Marriage and Caste in America, it’s gone beyond a question of class. The single-parent “lifetyle” choice is more of a caste, a separate world from the middle-class mainstream of American life.

As the Wall Street Journal folks put it:

experts who have looked closely at the phenomenon have hardly anything positive to say. Past research indicates that the bulk of unwed births are to young women, typically in their 20s, who are not college-educated and are not prospering. There's also a mountain of evidence to suggest that children raised by such single mothers are at an increased risk for virtually every social problem you can think of--poverty, crime, drug use, etc.--including single parenthood.

It’s curious really. Children who live with mother and boy-friend are something like 10 to 20 times more likely to suffer violence than the child of biological married parents. Imagine if fast food were 20 times more likely to result in negative outcomes for children! Why, the activists would be appearing twice daily to testify to Congress and twice nightly on the network news.

Why then is there silence on the danger, the physical danger to children of single parenthood?

The world wants to know.

Education Choice is Working

It’s a neverending task. To demonstrate again and again that choice works in education.

Because the entrenched interests don’t want you to know. Because the entrenched interests want to continue to enjoy their sinecures and their privileges without accountability.

It’s a dog-in-the-manger attitude that we all are capable of. The desire to sit like a bump on a log, getting that check every month, but not actually being responsible for outcomes. Not being responsible to taxpayers, not being responsible to parents, not being responsible to students.

So here is David Green reporting on school choice achievements in the US and Sweden.

Yes. Imagine that! School choice is alive and well in Sweden! According to Green (emphasis added):

Since 1992, parents in Sweden who are dissatisfied with the local state school have had a right to send their child to an independent school and to receive state funding, now equivalent to the average cost of a place in the state system.

...

Controversial at first in Sweden, vouchers now enjoy cross-party support. They are even supported by the unions. The president of the Swedish Teachers Union has said that its members were "a little suspicious at first" but were now satisfied.

In the US school choice is also proceeding, on a very limited scale. Harvard researcher Caroline Hoxby has analyzed the results. She (emphasis added):

studied attainment by Milwaukee's pupils before and after the introduction of vouchers. She compared three types of school: those most subject to competition (with two-thirds or more of pupils eligible for vouchers); those subject to some competition (with less than two-thirds of their pupils eligible); and a group of other Wisconsin schools not subject to additional competition. Compared with the monopoly era before 1998, competition raised standards for everyone, and the bigger the risk of losing pupils to rival schools, the greater the improvement.

Of course, this is like comfirming that gravity works. We know that people work better when they are challenged by competition, whether it is boys competing in school, businesses competing against businesses in the global marketplace, or schools competing against other schools about town.

And anyone that doesn’t get it “just doesn’t care about kids.”