The Incredible Shrinking New York Times

The trouble with being a national institution is that when you start going down the tubes the whole nation is there to gawk at your agony. 

And if you are The New York Times the whole blogosphere is goggling at you in its pajamas.  

The blogosphere is full of experts, as Dan Rather could tell you. Thomas Lifson is not just proprietor of The American Thinker but also a management consultant.  So he has the expertise to translate the NYT earnings numbers into dollars and sense.  He observes that recently NYT CEO

Janet Robinson told investors at a Newspaper Association of America conference in New York that the company would be raising the price of single copy newspapers and home delivery subscriptions. At the same time, the company has suddenly accelerated and apparently made more drastic a previously-announced plan to shrink the physical size of the paper and cut the amount of news provided to readers.

So, Lifson tells his readers, here is what is going down.

[T]he company is composed of a large newspaper business decaying faster and faster, slightly offset by a medium-sized, nicely-but-not-spectacularly-growing internet publishing business, and a half interest in a Manhattan skyscraper under construction.

Of course there’s nothing actually wrong with a nice, medium-sized internet business.  In fact, life can be much more fun on a zippy frigate that on a ponderous ship-of-the-line.

The thing is that when it comes to invitations to important competitive social events, it helps to be the captain of a ship-of-the-line.  It helps with the ladies, too.

What Do These Professors Want?

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz has built a career out of publicizing prosecutorial overreach, most notably in the fantastical abuse cases brought against the operators of day-care facilities back in the 1980s, most notably the Amirault Case.

Now she turns her attention to the two notable abusive prosecutions of the last year: the political lynching of Scooter Libby and the racial lynching of the Duke University lacrosse players.  But the Duke case was more than a racial lynching by a cynical race-baiting prosecutor.

It was in its searing way an educational event, not just about prosecutorial ambition run amok, but about a university world—reflective of many others—where faculty ideologues pursued their agendas unchecked and unabashed. Here was a nearly successful legal lynching, applauded by a significant chunk of the Duke faculty, proud to display their indifference to questions of guilt or innocence.

What is it about the faculties of our universities?  Why are they so utterly consumed with obsession over race, class, gender, and sexual orientation? 

Ordinary Americans plunk along in their lives.  They get jobs, get married, have children, and rub along pretty well.  Yet right next door there’s the frantic world of the academy where everything is viewed in the garish light of frightful oppression, and where the prudent keep their heads down, even prudent people like college presidents.

The great consuming career goal of our college and university presidents—with the exception of oddities like Harvard’s Larry Summers—has for more than two decades been the same: to avoid any word or deed that might incur the wrath of their gender- and race-obsessed faculties and allied campus activists.

And let Larry Summers be a warning to you college presidents!

Here is the irony.  There has never been a time, at least not since the dawn of the agricultural age, where race and class and gender have been less important.  The whole point of democratic capitalism is that it reduces everything to the cash nexus.  It doesn’t matter too much what class or race or gender you are.  So long as you can do the job and render service to your fellow man, you can participate and you can prosper.  Indeed, where race and class and gender oppression still lurk there are profit opportunities for the wily entrepreneur.

Yet we live in a time where the academic middle class is utterly consumed with fashionable theories about race and class and gender.  What is going on?

As Rush Limbaugh insists: Follow the Money. 

And the power.

Hamas Wins Gaza: What Now?

With Israel surrounded by proxies of Iran, what should they give away now?

And what should the United States do to “advance” the peace process?  Do we now divide up the Palestinians into:

Hamas, who are beyond the pale, and Fatah, with whom we can do business.

This is delusion, writes Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan.

The reason for this deluded approach is the fundamentally flawed Western belief that the ‘two state solution’ will end the Middle East impasse. The fact is that the ‘two state solution’ has been on offer since 1922.

But, of course, the Arabs don’t want a two-state solution.  They have always met the peace process with new demands and new violence.

With the victory of Hamas in Gaza the Iranian proxies are threatening Jordan and Egypt.  Maybe it’s time to put the Palestinian problem on their backs.

Long-term, the solution lies in Jordan and Egypt exercising their own self-interest. A Jordan-West Bank confederation is now being floated; the same logic would mean Egypt reoccupying Gaza.

There is only one thing that threatens this sensible arrangement, and that is “the US/UK axis of appeasement.”

Stay tuned.

The Adolescent Cult of "Getting it Right"

Journalist and writer David Halberstam, tragically killed in an auto accident, lived by the modern journalist’s code.  When you take down the politicians and the generals: Get It Right, writes James Bowman, author of Honor, A History.

In championing the culture of “getting it right,” today’s journalists are only following the culture of the academic middle class, which generally lives by observation and the bon mot.

Unfortunately the dirty work of living in the world involves action.  And as the saying goes, if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t learning anything.  Life is a trial-and-error process of getting things wrong and then acting to make it right.

"Getting it right" is of course an admirable ambition for a journalist, but it is an exercise that has little in common with what generals and politicians must do, which is to lead others through situations of mortal peril with appallingly incomplete and inaccurate information to guide them. Getting it wrong is a given...  For the man who must act and not just observe, the only question that matters is how quickly he can recognize and recover from his mistakes and how strong is his will to keep fighting in spite of them and the inevitable setbacks they cause.

The criticism of President Bush in recent years, like the routine criticism of businessmen, betrays this adolescent view of life. 

And of course it is appropriate that liberals and Democrats and academicians all celebrate being right and mercilessly criticize anyone who makes a mistake.  In the bureaucratic and education and media sector hardly anyone is involved in real action.  There is no bottom line for professors and journalists; win or lose they keep drawing their salaries.

But in the real world you struggle from mistake to mistake, and you try to learn as you go along.

People who make with the criticism reveal the adolescent fuzz on their cheeks.  Nobody who ever had responsible charge of a real project, and had made real mistakes in their life, would talk like that.

Follow the Money on Immigration

What are the real issues on the current immigration bill?  Milton Friedman said it best, according to Robert Rector.

It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state,”he warned.

Why not?  Because of the political bargain represented by the modern welfare state.

In the “transfer state,” government taxes the upper middle class and shifts some $1.5 trillion in economic resources to lower-income groups through a vast variety benefits and subsidies.

It’s not just welfare, but a whole raft of complex benefits and subsidies that are administered by the welfare state’s middle men, liberals.

So when we open the borders to low-skill immigrants we open the floodgates to expanding the welfare state.  We change the political balance by increasing the number of people likely to want and likely to vote for benefits and subsidies.

Elections in modern societies are, to a considerable degree, referenda on the magnitude of future income redistribution. An immigration policy which grants citizenship to vast numbers of low-skill, low-income immigrants not only creates new beneficiaries for government transfers, but new voters likely to support even greater transfers in the future.

There is only one practical way for conservatives to view the immigration debate.

“Go ahead. Dismantle the welfare state. As soon as you’ve got that finished, let us know, and then we’ll talk about open borders.”

And that leaves out the real crime of the welfare state, that it delays and hinders the natural adaptation of the immigrant and the low-skilled to the ethos of the modern society, the idea that you prosper by meeting the needs of other people. 

The welfare state teaches people that you prosper by forcing other people to meet your needs because you are a helpless victim.

The welfare state is essentially a reactionary idea, a rejection of the principle of voluntary cooperation to meet other peoples’ needs and return to the agricultural era, its servile relationships and its compulsion.

Talk about SiCKO.

"Women with Needs" Tells It All

What kind of voter would you imagine that Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is attracting to her presidential campaign?  Anne E. Kornblut and Matthew Mosk have the answer.

Clinton is drawing especially strong support from lower-income, lesser-educated women — voters her campaign strategists describe as "women with needs." Obama, by contrast, is faring better among highly educated women, who his campaign says are interested in elevating the political discourse.

Ah yes.  Elevating the political discourse.  We are all in favor of that.

But Republicans should pay attention.  This "women with needs" thing tells it all.  That is what the Democratic Party is for: meeting the needs of "women with needs." 

People Have Needs, they say, as if the answer is obvious: Another government program.

The task for Republicans and conservatives and libertarians and anyone who wants to move from the agricultural era of patronage and clientage is to move the discourse.  To elevate it, if you like.

Civilized society, that is city-based society, has developed a culture in which people meet their needs with astonishing facility.  They work for the benefit of others in the global economy; they marry; they belong to and contribute their time and money to mediating institutions like families, churches, neighborhood associations, mutual-aid associations, affinity groups, and charities.

What they do not do is imagine that government is the place to go to meet their needs beyond the common defense from enemies foreign and domestic and the rule of law.

They know that government is in the compulsion business, and the less of that the more that people will be able to meet their needs in voluntary service to others in the global economy.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton for reminding us of this important truth.

Republican Elite vs. Republican Voters

Now that the Republicans are out of power in Congress and President Bush is a lame duck, the Republican base doesn’t seem to feel the need for party discipline.

So when the Republican Party elite presented the Republican voters with a comprehensive and mandatory omnibus immigration bill we all upchucked, encouraged by our friends the talk-show hosts.

Why not?  There was no point in good manners and obedience.  Our guys aren’t in power any more. 

You can tell that Queen Victoria is not amused about this.  Sen. McCain (R-AZ) has talked about “my friends,” always a dangerous sign, and Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) has opined that talk radio is running America.  “We have to deal with that problem.”

Oh goodie, says talk show host Michael Graham:

Sen. Trent Lott has seen the enemy, and he is us.  Well, actually: me.

But let us have some compassion and sensitivity for our august Republican leaders.

What the reckless Republican base is demanding is quite over the top.  It is demanding accountability from the government.  It is demanding that before we give the government the right to amnesty 12 million illegals they should prove to us that they are controlling the border.

The effrontery!  Why, government has never been subjected to accountability like that before!  It’s unprecedented!  There’s no accountability on Social Security.  There’s no accountability on Medicare, or on VA hospitals.  There’s no accountability on education. 

Why in the world would people suddenly get the idea that we should hold the government accountable on border security?

You can see why the Sen. Lotts and Sen. McCains of the world would be upset.  They didn’t get where they are today so they could take directions from a bunch of talk-radio hosts.  They will, at a pinch, subject themselves to the agony of appealing to the voters once every six years, but enough is enough.

It’s almost enough to get a solon to give up politics in disgust.  Almost.

Something tells me that in all this sound and fury the political plates are shifting under our feet.  Or, if you like:

They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

As the song goes. But who knows who will be on guard after they have changed it. It won’t be all nice and jolly like the song.  Probably the GOP will have to go into the political wilderness for a while and do some hard thinking.

But that’s ok.  As they said about the buboes of bubonic plague during the Black Death:  They need time to ripen.

And the buboes of the welfare state aren’t going to go away.  They will be there when we get back.