The Surge is Working, But...

It’s pretty clear that the “surge” in Iraq is making progress.  And as Dean Barnett observes, the left is taking it badly.

SO HOW HAS THE LEFT reacted to this positive development? Poorly, angrily, and childishly. In other words, characteristically.

Actually, it is not surprising that the surge is working.  The surge is a military operation in which the US Armed Forces are doing military things, like searching out and destroying Al Qaeda forces in places where they are concentrated enough to make it worth while to attack. 

Before the surge the strategy of the United States was to “stand up” the security forces of Iraq and keep US combat forces in the background as much as possible.  It was the failure of this strategy that provoked the appointment of Gen. Petraeus and the adoption of the surge strategy.

But what comes next?  What in fact do the various factions in Iraq want and what will they do to get it?

Right now Iraq exists under the umbrella of US power and the native Iraqi political and military forces are restrained by that power. 

In my view the clearing out of Al Qaeda that seems to be the goal of the surge merely sets up a cleaner civil war between Shia and Sunni than might occur if Al Qaeda were in the full bloom of its power in Iraq.

We have not heard much about the Shia militias since they withdrew from Baghdad at the beginning of the surge.  Doubtless we will hear from them when the surge is over and the US combat forces start to leave Iraq.

Then we will find out what kind of powers are contesting for Iraq and what they are prepared to do in order to win.

Debating YouTube

Should Republican presidential candidates descend to the level of YouTube?  Actually, more to the point, should they subject themselves to the Children-of-the-Welfare-State worldview of the YouTube generation?  Hugh Hewitt says: No.  But Patrick Ruffini thinks that a Republican YouTube debate is on, whether we like it or not.

Governor Romney says that he’d be open to participating in a rescheduled debate. Mayor Giuliani expressed support for a date change[.]

The question for Republicans is whether we can turn the depressing lefty helpless-victim mentality of the YouTube questioners into a plus.

Can a presidential candidate say to a YouTuber: “I’m sorry, but I disagree with your underlying assumptions.  We’ve tried that government-centered approach and it doesn’t work.”  Are you allowed to respectfully disagree with a voter?

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred politicians don’t even try.  Because there is nothing to be gained by insulting anyone.

The thing is: Republicans need to be able to confront the comprehensive and mandatory national government program approach to politics and persuade the American people that they have something better to offer.

Otherwise the American people will sensibly vote for the party that really believes that government can make a difference in peoples’ lives.

Alarm bells on China

Classical liberals thought that they had won the argument over free trade back in the nineteenth century.  But the apologists for directed trade or mercantilism keep popping up again.  Like William Hawkins from the US Business and Industrial Council. 

The "global economy" is not based on the "harmony of interests" once envisioned by 19th century classical liberals, but on cut-throat competition. Winners and losers in these commercial contests impact the national societies in which they operate... There is no world community in any meaningful sense. Energetic nations rise, complacent ones decline.

So the Chinese deliberately keep their currency low in order to build an industrial base.  The gush of cheap Chinese goods puts industrial corporations elsewhere in the world out of business.  If the Chinese are not willing to increase the value of the yen:

it will be necessary to adopt other measures, such as the countervailing duties used to offset other subsidies.

Of course, the assumption that Hawkins makes is that the low yuan policy of the Chinese is in fact the best policy for the Chinese to achieve national power and greatness.  But is it?  There is a cost for the low yuan, the huge overhang of foreign exchange reserves and US sovereign debt.  Hawkins assumes that this strengthens China and weakens the rest of the world.

But Hawkins is supposing that the crude power calculations of politicians is correct, that emphasizing exports is the way to international power. 

More likely it is true that a more balanced growth policy is the better course.  What good did Germany’s national greatness policy after 1871 do for it?  It ended in the ruin of 1918 and 1945.

It could be that China is growing as an energetic nation in spite of its mercantilist policies.

Or it could be that China is emphasizing industrial growth purely as a strategy to mop up the internal migration (said to be as high as 25 million a year) from the country to the city.

"Can I Help You?"

It’s a Gilded Age, writes Peggy Noonan, an age of fabulous wealth, but the manners aren’t so good.  Noonan reports daydreaming into a store on Madison Avenue recently

"Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark.

Hmm. And another store:

"How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

The angle, of course is that the shop assistant is trying to engage, to have a relationship.  And that makes it easier to sell.

No doubt.  But I rather look on the bright side of this.

It is, I believe, hard work to be cheerful and outgoing to every customer that comes into the store.  This is particularly so when you enter the produce department at Safeway and you are greeted by a worker restocking the food displays. 

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

I find this affecting.  There is nothing in the world that I would find more difficult than to stop what I am doing to take a customer half way across the store to find a product and be cheerful about it.  Yet the folks working at Safeway greet me like this every time I go in.

I try to respond by being cheerful in return.

I found out recently why they are so careful to greet me.  They never know when a mystery shopper might come by.  If they don’t greet the mystery shopper then they get into trouble.

They work hard in retail, and they do it right out in the open, not hidden, like many of us, in a cubicle.  I think they deserve our respect and consideration.

It’s a question of manners.

Mean-spirited Universities Sit on Cash

Our Democratic friends in the House of Representatives recently passed an education bill to take $18 billion away from the evil student loan industry and give it to students.  We at Road to the Middle Class have criticized them for this, a mindless shoveling of more cash and subsidies to the universities. Now Senator Kennedy is pushing the bill through the Senate.

But that’s not the real problem, writes Lynne Munson.  The problem is that universities are sitting on piles of cash, like Scrooge, watching it grow through the magic of compound interest.  But do they spend it?  Oh no. 

The value of college and university endowments skyrocketed 17.7 percent last year, while private foundation assets increased 7.8 percent. Just 3.3 percent of the increase in academic endowments is attributable to new gifts. Most of the gain is a result of stingy, outdated endowment payout policies that retain and perpetually re-invest massive sums.

Regular private foundations are required to spend out five percent of their endowments every year.  But universities only average a four percent payout.

How does that work out in an actual university?  Munson takes a look at Stanford.

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

We know why the select universities all charge tuition.  They charge because people will pay it.  Parents are willing to pay big bucks to get their children into Stanford and other select colleges.  Although colleges talk a good game about diversity and broadening access to higher education, in reality they charge whatever the traffic will bear.

Anyway Congress has the whole thing well in hand.  It’s the student loan companies that are to blame!

The Cruelty of the Welfare State

Everyone knows that the welfare state is the most wonderful thing in human history.  Finally, after the madness of the nineteenth century when the poor went unfed and the homeless unsheltered and children uncared-for, we have a system that cares.

Then there are the folks like us here at Road to the Middle Class that believe that the welfare state is the cruelest, most uncaring system in history.  This column by Jennifer Roback Morse, author of Smart Sex and Love and Economics, on the foster-care system suggests that we here are right and “everyone” is wrong.  Well of course we are.

The story concerns the death of a child in foster care.

Malachi Jermaine McBride-Roberts life was brief and difficult. He was born to a teenage mother living in foster care. After she ran away, he was sent to live with another foster family.

So this kid was a second-generation foster kid!  How could it happen?  Well, the short answer is that the system encourages it.  First of all it encourages birth parents to hang on to their parental rights.

Some birth parents consider the best of all worlds to be keeping parental rights, seeing the child once in a while, but letting someone else do the hands-on child-care work. Unfortunately, the system enables, rather than discourages this posture.

Why be surprised?  Isn’t that always how the welfare state works.  And, of course the local bureaucracy of social workers and attorneys live off the process, the process of managing children in foster care.  And the last thing they want to do is make a mistake.

Although California law requires infants to be “fast-tracked” for permanent placement, attorneys and judges don’t want their decisions overturned on appeal.

We know, of course that swift adoption is the best option for the children of children, particularly, as in this case, the child of a teenager with no possible means of support.

Adoption removes a child from the foster-care system. Adoptive parents become accountable for a child in a way that the bureaucratic government agency never can be. Adopted children do better than the children of single mothers. And even the average child of an average single mother has far better life chances than a child in foster care.

But the system doesn’t encourage that.  Instead it rewards bureaucrats and attorneys who dot their “I”s and cross their “T”s.  And of course the reality of adoption politics is that the government bureaucrats and the attorneys get the ear of the legislators.

What would be the best way to define a cruel and unjust society?  I’d say a society that allowed children to moulder away in foster care for their entire childhood.

And that’s what we have under the current cruel and unjust welfare state.

Grabbing The High Ground

Back in the old days before the French Revolution the world was a conservative place. Rigidly conservative.

And the reason was pretty simple.  In the agricultural age if you made a mistake out on the farm it was curtains.  The only thing to do was to stick with what worked: tradition.

But since the Enlightenment tradition has been on the defensive.  In fact even gradual reform has been on the defensive.  Human rights and reason have carried all before them. 

In the old days, the reformer had to prove his point; now the traditionalist had to show cause why mindless tradition should be preferred over rational reform.  And never mind what Edmund Burke said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

That’s a big deal, as Ben Shapiro writes.

In the realm of politics, the question of burden of proof is a vital one. Whoever has the burden of proof is at a disadvantage.

The issue of gay marriage illustrates this.  Reverend Reggie Longcrier asked the Democratic presidential candidates this week:

[W]hy is it still acceptable to use religion to deny gay Americans their full and equal rights?

When you put it that way—and the MSM usually does—you put yourself in the driver’s seat, forcing the opponents of gay marriage to show cause why we should not implement gay marriage immediately.

For the argument against gay marriage is usually an argument from tradition.  That’s the way it’s always been and we don’t know what could happen if we change things.

Actually, in the area of gay marriage we do have rational knowledge.  We know that children need to live with their married mother and father if they are to be safest.  And we know that the “sexual constitution” by which men are socialized from their natural predatory instinct to be faithful fathers and providers is harmed by promotion of “diverse” lifestyles.

We know that where the family is concerned the burden of proof ought to be on the people who want change.

But still.  As of right now the burden of proof is on the traditionalists.  On almost everything.

And that has to change.