Texas v. Ohio

As Texas and Ohio voters go to the polls the Wall Street Journal edit page wants you to compare the two states.  Texas is booming and Ohio is hurting.  Here are the numbers according to the WSJ editorial.

The state [Ohio] has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, home foreclosures are soaring, and real family income is lower now than in 2000. Meanwhile, the Texas economy has boomed since 2004, with nearly twice the rate of new job creation as the rest of the nation.

In fact, over the last ten years Texas has added 1.6 million jobs and Ohio has actual had a net reduction of 10,000 jobs.

Who will tell the people, as a lefty once titled his book?  Well, not Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  They are busy telling Ohioans that they would roll back NAFTA.  But Obama seems to be in a spot of bother because his economics chappie told the Canadians not to worry.  His opposition to NAFTA was just for the benefit of Ohio voters.

The problems of the rust belt couldn’t perhaps be due to the high taxes and heavy unionization, could it?  Or Big Government?  The Journal reminds us:

Ohio politicians deplore plant closings even as they impose the third highest corporate income tax in the country (10.5%) and the sixth highest personal income tax (8.87%).

In fact, the jobs in Ohio are not threatened so much by Canadians and Mexicans as by evil corporations in other American states.

Ohio, Indiana and Michigan are losing auto jobs, but many of these "runaway plants" are not fleeing to China, Mexico or India.  They’ve moved to more business-friendly U.S. states, including Texas.

Guess what.  General Motors is going to open a new plant to build hybrid cars.  But not in Ohio.  Oh no.  Their new plant will be near Dallas,Texas.

Dems Trash NAFTA

Democrats like to tell us how they believe in science—unlike those knuckle-dragging holy-rollers in the Republican Party who believe in superstition.

Actually, it really doesn’t much matter what people believe about the Creation.  It doesn’t really affect how we live our daily lives.

But then there’s NAFTA, the free-trade treaty between the US, Canada, and Mexico.  Last week, Senators Obama and Clinton were competing in Ohio to see who could trash NAFTA more.  Writes a San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer:

The politics here aren’t surprising: Ohio Democrats blame the North American Free Trade Agreement for the state’s rust-belt slow-fade of factory closings, job losses and declining income.

There’s only one problem with that.  The science.  We know, as well as we know anything, that the more trade between people and between countries the better.  It all comes from the basic theory at the foundation of economics, the Law of Comparative Advantage.

The law says that even if you  are a highly skilled person that is better at everything than anyone else, it is still better for you to concentrate on the skill that you are best at and buy the other things from other people rather than try to do it all yourself.  In short, trade it don’t make it.

The problems in the rust belt are not due to NAFTA.  They are due to the privileges and subsidies awarded by the government to the big industrial corporations and unions fifty years ago.  The privileges were unsustainable, and the economy has been dying a slow death for the last twenty years as the subsidies and privileges slowly unwind in layoffs and corporate bankruptcies.

It’s a pity that politicians can’t bring themselves to tell the truth, and that the voters don’t want to hear it.

That means that the sufferings of the rust belt will continue.

Race Bureaucrat Worries About Obama

The chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Britain has created a firestorm by writing that the candidacy of Barack Obama postpones the racial healing of America.  Trevor Phillips, a Caribbean black, writes that for whites

A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism.

With Obama, whites can say, OK.  Now we voted for a black.  Let’s call an end to the stain of slavery and the politics of guilt and get on with a post-racial America.   I’ve talked to white friends, and we agree.  Obama represents a chance to escape from the racial politics of the last generation.  We are fed up to the back teeth with having race rammed down our throats by the race-relations industry, what you might call Big Race.  We don’t feel guilty.  We are proud that in two hundred years the west has moved from the universal, immemorial acceptance of slavery to the present situation where all racial inequality is scandalous.

But for Phillips this is far too easy. (Well, of course, he’s made his career out of the politics of liberal white guilt.)  You don’t understand race until you

grasp how profoundly race shapes everyday encounters in the US.

The idea that black problems can be swept under the rug and conveniently assigned to cultural failure “downplays the impact of globalisation on poor communities.”

Of course, Phillips has it all wrong.  It is not “race that shapes everyday encounters in the US.”  It is liberal political power that forces race to the center of national life. 

That is because liberal political power depends upon keeping race as a festering sore.  If we wound up the race laws—the welfare programs, the quota programs, the human rights commissions—but fiercely enforced laws on color-blindness then blacks would get to work and whites would lose their guilt.

There would be a huge sigh of relief.  Right now whites live with the reality that any encounter with a black person could lead to disaster.  You never know when you might say something or do something wrong and be hauled up before some liberal tribunal and stripped of your job, your career, and your reputation.  The safest thing is to avoid black people and say nothing when you are around them.

Imagine an America without the stain of liberal race persecution!

It would mark the true beginning of post-racial America.

But liberals like Trevor Phillips would lose their power. And we can’t have that.

Media Turns on Clintons

The fundamental thing to understand about the media is the blood-in-the-water principle.

The media is always lovey-dovey with people in power. But as soon as there’s blood in the water, and a powerful person appears wounded, then the media sharks appear from near and far to take a bite. It’s called the feeding frenzy.

I remember when I first understood this. It was twenty years ago when the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Jack Patera, was fired. All of a sudden we learned that the sports personalities who had been interviewing Patera on the “Jack Patera Show” before every Seahawks game for years—with Jack this and Jack that—never really liked the guy. And they thought he was a lousy coach. Oh good. Now they tell us.

This week it looks like there’s blood in the water for the Clintons. Jennifer Rubin writes that the media really don’t like the Clintons. She quotes Tucker Carlson:

They’re awful to the media: let’s be totally blunt. They’re awful to the press. They treat the press like enemies. [Clinton Communication Director] Howard Wolfson’s always calling around threatening people. Threatening people! News organizations! They do that! People hate you if you do that. I mean, they’ve earned the enmity of the press, in my view. They have. I mean, it’s been hard but they’ve done it.

Really. You mean all along in the Nineties while the MSM was rolling on the floor at Bill Clinton’s feet they really didn’t like him? And the Clintons are meanie-jellybeanies? Now you tell us.

OK. I’m grownup. I can take it.

This must mean that Hillary Clinton really is down for the count. Forget the polls. The Texas and Ohio primaries are going to be blowouts. It’s blood-in-the-water time. Sharks appearing from near and far. Feeding frenzy. Otherwise nobody would dare.

I reckon that over the years the Clintons have probably used their power to wreck the careers of several journalists they didn’t like. It’s the sort of thing that media insiders all know about. Only we never got to read about it.

Well, you wouldn’t want to cross the powerful Clintons.

Not until now.

Bill Buckley Dead at 82

Even the New York Times agrees that William F. Buckley, Jr., dead at 82, was essential to the modern American conservative movement. Quoting Hugh Kenner, Douglas Martin writes:

“Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

I’m not sure that Bill Buckley had many good ideas, but he put his head above the parapet and became, for 50 years, America’s Mr. Conservative. He made it difficult to assert that all conservatives were beetle-browed Torquemadas.

His high spirits, his kindness, his goodness, and his capacity for work were an inspiration to all.

His passing certainly emphasizes, as if we needed any reminding, that the conservative movement that grew out of Bill Buckley’s youthful enthusiasm in the 1950s, was joined by Jewish New York intellectuals in the late 1960s, was given national political power with Ronald Reagan, and was allied with ordinary religious people with the Christian Right, is now in retreat.

The call goes out now to a new generation to renew the conservative message, and Bill Buckley, always a sponsor of young talent, would be the first to second the call.

When Liberals Write About Religion

Ever since the Enlightenment liberals have liked to talk about religion as something they are separate from. Liberals are the voice of reason, freed from the superstitions of conservatives, reactionaries, and other simple people.

So when liberal religion writer Alan Wolfe writes in The Atlantic about “the coming religious peace,” he doesn’t mention the great secular religions. No, what he’s talking about is the coming peace between Islam and Christianity and their reconciliation into the modern secular world of reason and tolerance. What a good thing, to end this pernicious religious war.

Still, many people, he writes, are expecting an upsurge in religious violence.

A common worry is that intense competition for souls could produce another era in which religious conflict leads to religious war—only this time with nuclear weapons. If we are really in for anything like the kind of zeal that accompanied earlier periods of religious expansion, we might as well say goodbye to the Enlightenment and its principles of tolerance.

But don’t worry. Over most of the world, religious belief is declining.

[M]any areas of the world are experiencing a decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing, they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive forces.

You can see what is going on here in the mind of Alan Wolfe. Religion and faith are things that other people do, and the Platonic Guardians like himself, looking at the world from a higher place—presumably up at the entrance to the Cave, far above the lesser mortals still chained and looking at shadows on the wall—can look forward to the day when the shadow-watchers will have seen the light.

But the great fact of the world since the Enlightenment has been the growth and militant expansion of secular religions like nationalism, socialism, fascism, and the “politics of meaning.” And that’s leaving out other enthusiasms like anarchism, New Age spirituality, and general left-wing terrorism like the Weathermen and the Baader-Meinhof gang.

We conservatives see an inevitable clash, at some point, between the moderate, religious forces of democratic capitalism, and the secular religions which in general are arrayed against the gentle world of trust and reciprocity of the global commonwealth. They want to terminate the differentiation of society into separate political, economic, and moral/cultural sectors. They want to collapse these sectors into a nostalgic compact society secular politics and secular religion.

As a secularist, Alan Wolfe cannot see the persecutions carried out by the militant secularists: the endless secular propaganda on the media and in the schools, and the speech code enforcers, human rights commissions, and informal tribunals that daily show ordinary religious people the instruments of torture.

Yet that is where the flashpoint will occur. Between the militant secular believers and the moderate religious believers. But people like Alan Wolfe define the world to exclude such a possibility.

And in my view the clash will come over the question of human life. Secularist ethics is profoundly self-centered and directed towards amorphous questions like a free-floating compassion, obesity (!) and saving the planet with government programs. Religious ethics is centered around the need for people to purge themselves of selfishness and rage, to practice the difficult process of forgiveness and compassion towards those nearest and dearest and between generations within a family.

The question is how much inconvenience people are willing to tolerate with respect to inconvenient life. That would be inconvenient unborn life and inconvenient older life.

NYT Trashes Working Women

In politics, or at least the politics of personal destruction, anything goes.

So if the New York Times wants to trash John McCain by dredging up a ten year old story about McCain and an attractive female lobbyist, well all’s fair in love and war. Even if there’s no evidence, apart from the fears of staffers, that anything “happened.”

But think of what a story like this does to working women in general, writes Carol Platt Liebau.

Huh?

Remember the Clarence Thomas nomination hearings, she writes.

When Anita Hill launched her still-unproven assault on Clarence Thomas’ character seventeen years ago, men all over America discovered that their reputations could be threatened by a simple accusation from a woman, offered without even a scintilla of evidence[.]

Obviously the appropriate thing for men to do then was to minimize contact with attractive young professional women. Because you never knew when some liberal with an agenda would drag up some perfectly innocent relationship and use it as a bludgeon to ruin your career.

With last week’s McCain Smear, the New York Times has given the ratchet another twist.

Now, it seems that their fidelity to their wives can be publicly questioned for nothing more than spending time in the company of an attractive, young professional woman.

Obviously, feminists all over America should be descending on the New York Times with a hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned kind of rage.

Only they won’t. Because gender equity and the status of women in the workplace takes a back seat to liberal politics.

All across America, there are young women attempting to advance at work by being just as smart, just as prepared, and just as diligent as their male counterparts. But if the senior (most often male) employees they need to impress are hyper-sensitive about the reputational damage that can result from spending time with them, female workers going to be deprived of opportunities they need to showcase their talent.

Oh well. Too bad. That’s not as important as electing a Democrat for president, after all.