Gross? As $300 million?

We red-blooded American males have been suffering for years.  Denied our all-American heroes in the movies we have had lefty anti-heroes rammed down our throats for over a generation.  Our anti-hero way of rage against the Man and the machine or the highway, said Hollywood’s creative finest.

Or, to paraphrase a famous American: Anti-heroes yesterday, Anti-heroes today, Anti-heroes forever.

When the United States was savagely attacked by rich Saudi Muslims, we were taught to worry about “why they hate us.”  And Hollywood refused to provoke our moderate Middle-eastern friends.  You know the ones that don’t just want to bury us.  They want to kill us.  After all, we are only infidels.

So now along comes a bunch of schmucks nobody’s ever heard of — graphic novelist Frank Miller, director Zack Snyder, and a couple of other writers — to pull in $70 million over the weekend with a movie about a handful of brave warriors who stand up against the limitless central-Asian hordes, iron men vs. effeminate oriental voluptuaries, and patriots against robotic slaves. How was this picture allowed to be made?  

By now everyone knows that the movie “300” is not really a video-game style recreation of the battle of the Spartans against the Persians, but really...  Nod, nod, wink, wink, know-what-I-mean.

So scriptwriter David Kahane is conflicted.

Help me out here, because I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around a few things: When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King Leonidas’s hot wife, threatens the kingdom, and rages about “blasphemy,” the king kicks him down a bottomless well. And yet nobody in Sparta asks, “Why do they hate us?” and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on their doorstep. Why not?

Does that mean he can now write scripts about true American heroes smiting the mind-numbed robots of the world’s thugocrats?  Or is it back to Nazis and crazed Christian militias?

Romney bets on tax cuts to win

What will it take to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008?  Mitt Romney seems to be placing a bet on tax cuts, reports Donald Lambro.  He recently addressed the Detroit Economic Club. 

"What is the better course for America? A European model of high taxes and regulations, or low taxes and free trade, the Ronald Reagan model? That’s the choice the next president is going to make," he said, adding ominously that the Democrats were "already working hard to implement a massive tax increase."

 As the saying goes, if Republicans don’t stand for tax cuts, who will?

Romney is not just giving speeches about tax cuts, he is loading up his team with tax cutters.

• Vin Weber, “who is chairman of Mr. Romney’s domestic policy board”
• Cesar Conda, “a key player in Republican tax cut battles of the last two decades”
• R. Glenn Hubbard, a “staunch tax cutter”
• N. Gregory Mankiw, “a free market economist at Harvard” 
• John Cogan, “one of the architects of the Bush tax cut plan.” 
• Brian Reardon, “helped put together the president’s 2003 plan to accelerate the tax cuts”

What do you call a team like that?  Lambro calls them “committed Reaganite supply-siders.”

The New "Time": Big and Brawny?

For many of us, it is years since we subscribed to Time magazine.  Maybe decades.  Why?  Is it the reflexive media liberalism?  Is it the dumbed-down punchiness, the emphasis on graphics?  Or is it the fundamental unseriousness?  Who knows?

But this week, Time is redesigning into four basic sections: “Briefing, The Well, Ideas and Arts,”according to Keith J. Kelly at the New York Post. The “Well” will be, well, read for yourself:

The Well will be home for features, what Stengel calls "big, brawny stories" on world, national and business affairs and the main cover story.

Doesn’t exactly make you run out and buy it.  What is it now? A truck?  Do we hear the clang of hammers on anvils?

For Katharine Q. Seelye at The New York Times it’s all a bit of a joke—the end of Time’s signature inverted syntax.

All I know is that my mother asked what to do about Time about five years ago, when she just couldn’t take it any more.  Try The Economist, I said. 

Japanese Day Traders Try "Carry" Trade

Remember 1999-2000?  That was the heyday of the day traders, amateurs trying their hand at making money in the stock market during their coffee breaks at work.  It was an early warning of the NASDAQ meltdown: when the little guy gets in, it’s time to head for the exits.

It’s happened before.  In 1929 Joe Kennedy (yes that Joe Kennedy) reckoned it was time to get out of the market when his shoe-shine boy started giving him stock tips.

It’s deja vu all over again.  In Friday’s Wall Street Journal Yuka Hayashi writes about "Japanese Addiction: Currency Bets" (sub. required).  A lot of Japanese small investors are borrowing yen to buy foreign currency.  In other words, they are engaging in the "carry" trade just like the big boys in the hedge funds.

Only, of course, we are probably in the last days of the "carry" trade.  It worked so long as people could borrow yen at nearly zero percent interest and then use the proceeds to buy other currencies and get five percent on their money.

But notice what happens if the yen goes up.  That means that the other currency goes down.  If it goes down by five percent or more, the investor is under water.

Take the case of Naomi Kashiwazaki.  Hayashi writes:

She trades currencies from her small apartment in Tokyo’s suburbs.  She started about a year and a half ago to supplement the income from her online store... In recent months, she has earned an average profit of $8,600 per month.

But probably not in the last month, for since March 1 the yen has suddenly risen by about four percent against the dollar.

This sounds like something that is going to end in tears. 

The Case of Hillary and the Vanity Mirror

Now we know why our Democratic friends hate Karl Rove with a passion.  Read what he did, back at the beginning of the Bush administration, as reported by Kane Webb.

Of course, this is Rove’s version of events.  You know what that means.

Karl Rove tells the story that he inherited Hillary Clinton’s old office at the White House.  That, according to Rove, “irritated her.”

Now prepare for the dread political cunning of Karl Rove.  He upped and told the media that there was a vanity mirror behind the filing cabinets in this office.

Pretty soon he met Hillary and she told him that she didn’t put that mirror there.

Never said she did.  So Rove put the story out to the media again.

Pretty soon, Rove ran into Hillary.  Again.

“‘I told you I didn’t put that mirror there,’” he said she said, with her Hillary-esque conviction.

Oy!

Now you see the depth to which Karl Rove will descend, the complexity and the sophistication of his political cunning.

For who would want to elect a woman to the presidency who is so vain that she wants everyone to know that she is not so vain that she put a vanity mirror in the White House?

At the Center of the Health Care Mess

Everyone agrees that the health care system is a mess.  But that is where agreement ends.  Democrats believe that the solution to the mess is universal health care, maybe a single-payer system like Canada.

Republicans think that the problem is rather different.  It is that few people actually know what they are paying for health care.  What is needed is a true market in health care so that the price system can do its magic, just like it does in houses, in automobiles, and in movie tickets.

As Scott W. Atlas writes:

Unlike other products and services, consumers use medical care without having any idea of its true costs. Can you imagine buying a house, a car or a dress without knowing what it would cost? Without price information, it is impossible to be an informed customer.

It’s the old, old problem that we spent the entire twentieth century arguing about, although Ludwig von Mises resolved the it with a paper in 1920, subsequently expanded into a book, Socialism. 

The problem with a socialist commonwealth, he wrote, is that you cannot compute prices, and that means that you don’t have a clue what things cost.  For that reason, Mises predicted, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, that socialism would never work.

In the United States we have our own socialized sector and it is just as messed up as the old Soviet economy.  In education, in health care, and in government welfare, nobody knows the cost of anything, and nobody cares.

President Bush has proposed that the cost of health insurance should be exposed by limiting the amount you can deduct in your income tax return.  That’s a start.  But Atlas recommends also that:

• “the prices of medical procedures be fully available and clearly presented to patients before any medical procedure”
• “qualifications of doctors be made available to their potential patients”

That is surely not too much to ask.

Of course, if we make the health care system “transparent” it is going to change everything to do with health care.  Given that health care is 15 percent of the economy, the transition will be staggering.  People will be looking for someone to blame for the pain of it all.

Look for the innocent to be lynched, and the guilty to go free.

School Choice--On the Front Lines

What do you think about this 16 year old kid, Rontrell Matthews, in Johns Island, South Carolina?  He turned up last summer at the doors of Capers Preparatory Christian Academy with $32.86 earned from his job at Subway.  He wanted to buy his way out of his failing public school, as Brendan Miniter reports.

Founded in 2003 by Faye Brown, a 55-year-old retired public school teacher, Capers is one of a handful of "independent schools" that serve the state’s rural poor. It operates out of rented office space, has a total of 42 students in kindergarten through 12th grade, and makes do on an annual budget of about $160,000 a year. Nearly all of its equipment—desks, books and the eight iMacs in its computer lab—were donated to the school.

Now let’s see.  What are we talking about in the cost per student department? With 42 students and $160,000 budget, that makes $3,809 per student.

Yes, but what about the results?  Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman.  Nobody talks about outcomes in the education arena.  Do you imagine that education is like a business, where people insist: “Does it pay?”

Yes, but we are talking about private education, not sacramental public education.  Although nobody would think of raising the question of outcomes and profit in a church of public education, Capers is different.  It is a private academy.  So outcomes do matter.  After all, the people sending students to Capers—and in the case of Rontrell Matthews, sending themselves—are spending their own money.  They expect results.

The school places a heavy emphasis on reading, writing and math. As a result the school’s average SAT score, 1150, is 164 points above the state average, and this year the school expects every one of its graduates to go on to college. St. Johns High School, the public school these students would be attending if not for Capers, has an average SAT score of 788.

So that would make the state’s SAT average a rather dismal 986.

It seems that things never change.  It was about 140 years ago that the young Booker T. Washington traveled half way across the Old South in search of an education.  And you know what happened to him.

In those days it was white conservative racists that were preventing young black men from getting an education.  Today it is white liberal racists that are standing in the school house door.  What’s the difference?