Keeper of the Tower Lives in France

Is this what Britain has come to?  The chap who keeps an eye on the crown jewels in the Tower of London lives in north-western France.  Brittany, to be exact.

And why would Major General Keith Cima live in France?  It starts with the basics: “less traffic, less crowding, affordable housing.”  Then there is the matter of the schools.

Our younger children go to school there and learn as we did: facts, focus, lots of tests, plenty of homework. And if they do not do well enough, they repeat a year, which is a great incentive to work hard.

Yes.  It seems almost surreal to imagine a school system like that.  The French are so old-fashioned. And there’s more.

The medical system is superb, and operates off a mixed system of state provision, pay-as-you-use and modest insurance premiums. Appointments are on time, and the IT works. There appear to be no waiting lists; a consultant [specialist] gets his diary out and asks when the operation would be convenient. Even a casualty department on a Saturday night in a city is free-flowing (good, as my thumb had just lost a debate with a circular saw). My dentist apologetically presented me with a bill for £30 [$60] the other week for a capped tooth[.]

You read of more and more Brits moving to France.  They don’t seem to be quite as frank about their reasons as the major general.

But it seems to be that things actually work in France.  It must be the Cartesian rationalism.  And we thought that the French were finished, suffering from terminal euro-sclerosis.

Now The Lawyers are Upset

The Brits are just waking up to the idea that lawyers are miserable.  Apparently 25 percent of them want to leave the profession, according to Sathnam Sanghera.  But of course this is nothing compared to lawyer misery in the United States.  Here, 40 percent of lawyers want to leave the profession.  In fact, lawyer misery has become an industry. 

[T]here are now almost more books, articles and websites dedicated to the subject of legal despair than there are American lawyers. Which is saying something, given that the USA has more lawyers than people.

Ho, ho.  Those Brits must have their little joke.  But why are the lawyers so miserable?  Sanghera lists the reasons.

1. The long hours.
2. The misery of someone so intelligent doing such mind-numbing work.
3. The “yawning gap” between the ideal of law and the reality.
4. The toll of being “competitive, aggressive, judgmental, analytical, adversarial, emotionally detached, paranoid of being sued and, worst of all, pessimistic.”
5. “The vortex of hatred.”  Apparently lawyers hate each other, hate their clients and the clients hate them right back.
6. The self-inflicted misery.  After all, you don’t have to destroy yourself, but in the competitive world of high-stakes lawyering, people do it all the time.

Hold on a minute.  What is so different about lawyers?  Doesn’t everyone suffer in a high-stakes career where you are dealing with ruthless competitors all the time and confronted by the fact that all work, even the most creative, is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration?

Maybe it’s just that lawyers are pushy enough to demand attention.  They demand that we witness their misery.  Other people manage to live their lives of quiet desperation without calling attention to themselves.

But lawyers are different.

The Underclass As Residue of Social Mobility

Most of us like to write about the underclass as a failure of the welfare state.  Underclass unemployment, crime, and social pathology are all the consequence of anesthetizing poor people with subsidies  and rewarding failure.  But Matthew Parris has a different idea about the underclass, at least in Britain.  He sees it as the residue left in the “sink estates” [public housing] after everyone else has left for the suburbs.  Says he:

And I wonder too whether, perverse as this may sound, the plight of the poorest in modern Britain is a result of, rather than a reproach to, social mobility.

You see, back in the old days of class, the classes lived separate and looked after their own.  The rich found nice little billets for the rich idiots and the deserving poor looked after the “undeserving poor” out of class solidarity.

But with the advent of the meritocratic society everyone is sorted not by origin, class, or caste, but by results.  Winners go with winners; winners marry winners.  And losers get stuck with the losers.

People with any drive, capable and motivated people, can find their natural level in our less classbound society. They move on, and up[.]

And the losers get left behind.

Tell that to Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom, and see where it gets you.

The Real David Halberstam

For what seems like forever we have been taught to celebrate David Halberstam as the intrepid journalist who blew the lid off the Vietnam War.  He wrote about how The Best and the Brightest betrayed the United States in their fumbling little war in Vietnam.

Actually, it wasn’t like that at all, according to Mark Moyar, author of an expose about Halberstam, Triumph Forsaken.  It was Halberstam and his buddies in Saigon who committed the central blunder of the war.  It was they who agitated to get Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem removed. 

[T]hey had a low opinion of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and decided that he would need to be removed if the war was to be won.

So they briefed their pals in the US government and told them that Diem was no good.

Most of the information they passed on was false or misleading, owing in part to their heavy reliance on a Reuters stringer named Pham Xuan An who was actually a secret Communist agent. The journalists convinced Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge to accept their reports in place of much more accurate reports from the CIA and the U.S. military, which led Lodge to urge South Vietnamese generals to stage a coup.

Unfortunately, the removal of Diem screwed things up.  His assassination created a power vacuum and a purging of Diem loyalists.

After Diem’s assassination, the South Vietnamese fared very poorly in their war against the Communists, which was why the U.S. eventually had to send half a million troops to South Vietnam.

So Halberstam and his pals had to do a bit of coverup.  They developed the story that things were going to hell in Vietnam before the Diem assassination.

Based on a few faulty pieces of evidence, they contended that the South Vietnamese war effort had crumbled before Diem’s overthrow, not after it. No one of influence succeeded in pointing out that these men’s own articles in 1963 contradicted this claim.

It is a tragedy that David Halberstam should have lost his life in an auto accident.  But if Moyar’s story is true it is outrageous that Halberstam attempted in such a disgraceful way to influence US policy in Vietnam.  And it is tragic that he succeeded.  It is criminal that he then proceeded to cover up his manipulations and succeeded.

What happened to the journalistic passion for the truth?

Is Government Force? Michael Moore Says No

We all know, or at least we’d better know by now, that Michael Moore thinks that government health care, as practiced in Canada, Britain, and Cuba is hunky-dory.  

(I know.  Have you asked a Brit about her wonderful NHS lately?)

Libertarian John Stossel got to ask him about this on ABC’s 20/20 TV show.  How come he could be so relaxed about government health care, Stossel asked?

"But government is force," I said to him. He was incredulous.

Michael Moore: Why do you see it as force?

Me: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.

Moore: No, it doesn’t, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they’ll allow the government to collect taxes from them.

So now you know why liberals wax enthusiastic about the wonderful things that government does for us.

They have talked themselves out of believing that government is the agent of force and compulsion.  Don’t look at the tax collector, they say; look at the good results: a wonderful program to increase minority home ownership. 

But it’s force, says the conservative. 

No it’s not; it’s compassion, says the liberal.

Says Stossel:

Michael Moore may not have thought about it, but there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force.

There’s a lesson here for conservatives.  We don’t spend enough time asking our liberal friends: But why do we have to do this by force?

Oh no we’re not, they’ll say.

OK. So the American people voted Bush into office to fight the war on terror and he spends a hundred billion dollars a year on the war in Iraq.  That’s not force.  It can’t be.  Liberals say so.

No doubt that has nothing to do with reports that people are refusing to pay their taxes because of the war.

Don't The Pols Get It?

Now that the Democrats are back in control of Congress we are hearing calls for increasing taxes on business and the rich.  A couple of senators, one of them a Republican, want to increase taxes on financial partnerships from 15 percent to 35 percent.

And then there are the genius Democrats in the House, according to Richard W.Rahn:

At the same time, House Democrats proposed an increase of 4.3 percentage points in the maximum individual tax rate.

This is at a moment when newly-installed Labour Party Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Britain has assured business and the rich in Britain that he won’t be killing the golden goose of low tax rates on financial businesses and the international “non-domiciled” rich.

What planet do these politicians live?  Don’t they get it?  Don’t they realize that the best way for them to get lots of lovely lolly to spend on buying votes is to make tax rates low across the board so that people expend their effort in making products and services and not on figuring out how to minimize taxes? 

But some people never learn.  One nice little train coming down the tracks is that business tax rates are much lower in places like Ireland and the eastern European countries like Estonia.  Businesses have noticed.

And then there is Sarbanes-Oxley, the financial reform act that loads up US corporations with tons of paperwork.

Some optimists think that the left learned its lesson about the economy in the Reagan-Thatcher years.  At times like this it seems hard to believe that they really “get it,” other than the need to get reelected.

Arnold Kling on Trust in Society

The big problem of the human race is the problem of extending trust beyond blood kin.  In traditional society you just don’t trust people who are not blood kin.  That works pretty well in an agricultural village but it begins to be a problem in the city.  So mankind has developed the radical notion of extending trust beyond the limits of blood kin.

As Arnold Kling puts it: 

A high-trust society is one where trust extends beyond one’s clan or village. Trust within families is something that can be taken for granted, even in a low-trust society. A high-trust society is one that has found a way for trust to extend to strangers.

All this was developing nicely in the nineteenth century with capitalism, which rewards trustworthy behavior with lowered costs and increased profits.  But a parallel movement was the development of “fraternal” associations in which men pretended to be brothers.  It was an ingenious way of dealing with the trust issue.  Why not say that people that you trust are your brothers (or sisters as the case might be)?  Then you can have the comfortable feeling that people you trust are virtual kind.

The nation state is another way of pretending that people who are not your kin, but who speak the same language are in fact kin.  Again, we talk about the mother country, pretending that we are all children of the same mother.

But then along came the progressives and the academic middle class with the welfare state.

The welfare state replaces the contractual and fraternal bonds of trust with the vertical relationships of patronage and clientage.  It lowers the level of trust in society.  This works well for liberals who become responsible for negotiating between the competing interest groups in the welfare state.  They like it because it gives them power.

But it infantilizes ordinary people. Instead of being responsible themselves for building trust with other people, which is an essential skill in the democratic capitalist economy, they become subordinates—at work and in society.

When we conservatives fix the Broken Society one of the big tasks will be to resume the building of voluntary fraternal organizations in which people interact as equals and build trust networks.

We know it can be done because ordinary people did it successfully in the nineteenth century before the academic middle class came to power and wrecked the voluntary fraternal sector.