Karl Rove and Bush's Legacy

On his last day at the White House, long-time Bush aide Peggy Noonan asks Bush to offer a hand to his adversaries. With the qualified success of the “surge:”

It would be good to see the president calming the waters. Instead he ups the ante. Tuesday, speaking to the American Legion, he heightened his language.

It might.  But I’m inclined to believe that that opportunity was spurned 6 years ago when Democrats decided that they weren’t going to concede the 2000 election, not even after the US Supreme Court ruled on it.  It’s Prisoners Dilemma stuff.  If the other guy stiffs you, you have to stiff him back.

Anyway, I’m not convinced that the Democratic leadership is as left-wing and mad at Bush as they want their base to think.  They know that, whatever the mess in Iraq, we are still in a conflict with fundamentalist Islam for the long haul.

And Bush knows they know it.

Bush to Help Subprime Borrowers

Obviously some sort of assistance to financially strapped homeowners was coming down the pike, and today President Bush is outlining his proposals, Ded Riechmann writes.  Bush will:

- Urge Congress to pass legislation that would give the Federal Housing Administration more flexibility in assisting mortgage holders with subprime mortgages.

- Pledge to work with Congress to reform the tax code to help troubled borrowers rework their loans.

- Call for rigorously enforcing predatory lending laws and strengthening lending practices.

That last item is the classic government ploy of shutting the barn door after the horse has escaped.

Fortunately Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke stands ready to prevent the mortgage crisis from spilling over into the rest of the economy, according to Jeannine Aversa:

The Fed "will act as needed to limit the adverse effects on the broader economy that may arise from the disruptions in financial markets," [he said.]

All I can think is the words of Ludwig von Mises.  A recession, he wrote, is the period of liquidation of the mal-investments of the previous boom.

Actually, you could gussie this up a bit.

• A recession is the period of liquidation of other peoples’ mal-investments made in the previous boom.
• A depression is the period of liquidation of my mal-investments made in the previous boom.

This way of thinking says that neither Presidents nor Feds nor principalities nor powers can end the business cycle.

How to Reclaim the Streets

In the old days, we all know, adults used to correct children who misbehaved.  They corrected their own children and they corrected other peoples’ children.  In public.

But in our day, this ancient practice has become controversial.  Partly it is because all men approaching children are assumed to be sexual predators, and partly it is, as Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Spectator, that many

parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority.

The result is the response of three 10-year-olds to Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who reproved them for cycling on the sidewalk in Sudbury, England.  As Boris Johnson relates, the young sprigs did not respond respectfully to Lord Phillips attempt at correction. 

The 10-year-olds shrieked at the noble lord, who has been married since 1968 and who has three children. They called him a "pervert, a poofter and a paedo".

When one of these little innocents knocked Lord Phillips’ bicycle to the ground he was moved to respond.

He asked a passer-by to call the police, saying to the child: "If you think you can behave like this, you are dead wrong." To which, the boy replied, with a chilling grasp of the changed relationship between children and adults: "I am going to have you for holding me."

When the police arrived they reproved the noble lord for attempting to exercise authority in any way.

There is the problem of modern youthful misbehavior in a nutshell.  If we are to reclaim the streets there cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of a young sprig that any adult has the right to correct him for misbehavior.  And there cannot be the slightest doubt that ordinary citizens have the power, police or no, to arrest troublemakers.

When modern government restrains citizens from keeping the peace it is wrong, dead wrong.

The Three Principles of Government

Now that I’m getting into the guts of Montesquieu’s  The Spirit of Laws, it is time to start dealing with the principle that he asserts underlies each form of government. 

Republics (both democratic and aristocratic) require Virtue, meaning the ability to see beyond your own interest to the general interest; Monarchies require Honor, an unwritten code followed by the nobility in protecting their interests from the monarch; Despotisms require Fear.

The first thing that a conservative like me thinks on reading that is: what about today?  We conservatives think in terms of rules. Virtue to us is the life lived according to the rules.  Honor is the instinctive patriotism we all feel.  Fear is what policemen do to criminals.

What do liberals think?

• Liberals don’t believe in government by virtue, and they do not expect it of their followers.  In fact in the aftermath of the New Deal they constructed a political philosophy that asserted that the good state was the precipitate of the competition of interests.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by honor.  Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History is the courage of the soldier staying in line during battle.  But liberals believe that the height of courage is to be an anti-hero that steps out of line.  Dissidence is the highest form of patriotism, and all that.
• Liberals don’t believe in government by fear.  At least they say they don’t, but they use fear freely in controlling their institutions like schools and colleges where conservatives fear to tread.  And now they are jailing people who defy land-use regulations.

So what do our liberal friends believe in?  We looked at that earlier this week in looking at the failures of education.  We determined that liberals believe in liberty, the notion of “I shall,” and socialism, the notion of “You must.”  They do not understand the conservative notion of “We should.”  We also know that liberals believe that compassion for others justifies government compulsion.

In fact, I believe, liberals believe in anything that gives them power.  They appeal to virtue when it suits them, honor when convenient, and fear when they can get away with it.

And I suspect that they do it in all the wrong places.

Blacks Move to SF Suburbs: Liberals Hardest Hit

The liberal issue de la semaine as we French linguists have it is blacks moving from San Francisco and especially from their traditional home in the Fillmore district.  As John Ritter reports in USAToday:

African-Americans are abandoning this famously progressive city at a rate that has alarmed San Francisco officials, who vow to stop the exodus and develop a strategy to win blacks back to the city. In June, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed a task force to study how to reverse decades of policies — and neglect — that black leaders say have fueled the flight.

You mean that blacks are acting like every other immigrant group that ever huddled in an American city?  They are moving to the suburbs?  No!

American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson can’t take it any more. For instance, did none of these liberal reporters know that the reason that blacks came to live in the Fillmore?

Yet none of the papers bothers to note that African-Americans came to the Fillmore in large numbers only because the previous Japanese-American residents were forcibly evacuated to internment camps during World War II.

Oh really?  Blacks, Lifson notes, are represented in San Francisco at about their California average of 6.7 percent. So what’s the big fuss?  Nobody got all bent out of shape as the white percentage in San Francisco declined from 89.5 percent in 1950 to 53 percent in 2000.  And nobody is mourning about how the Irish moved out of the Castro district as gays moved in.

It just shows how one-track and ignorant your average liberal reporter is.

Because the fundamental demographic movement in the United States is that once an ethnic group gets its skills and its income up it moves from the inner city to the suburbs.

And you know why?  It’s one of the little secrets of American life.  Women like living in suburbs.  So really it’s a good sign that blacks are moving out of San Francisco, as Lifson writes, to:

genuine American Dream suburbs like fast-growing Tracy California, which welcomes all races and hosts a proud and growing African-American community that includes a number of people of my acquaintance.

Here’s a dark thought.  Don’t spread it around too much.  Do you think that some of those blacks that Lifson knows in Tracy, CA could be conservatives or, worse, closet conservatives?

Can Peaceful Christianity Beat Militant Islam?

Robert Spencer’s book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t raises an interesting question, according to a review by John Derbyshire.

If, as the subtitle of his book declares, Christianity is a religion of peace, while Islam is irredeemably militant, what on earth does Spencer think is likely to be the outcome of a conflict between the two?

Good old John Derbyshire.  He comes right to the point.  All this talk about whether Islam is or isn’t a religion of peace, or whether Christianity is more peaceful rather misses the point.  The question is: how to prevent militant Islam from taking over the world.

Spencer gets to reply to Derbyshire here.  The Derb responds here, and Spencer gets the last word here.

But maybe it doesn’t matter.  After all, the nation of shopkeepers beat back the challenge of militant secularist France. Commercial empires US and Britain beat back nationalist and then national-socialist-German-workers Germany.  The US beat back the militant communist Soviet Union.

So maybe it isn’t a question of Christianity vs. Islam.  Maybe it is a question of whether “we” really want to push back on militant Islam.

Whoever “we” are.

Is It Over Yet?

The Dow was down another 280 points today, and so Bill Steigerwald asked Fed historian Allan Meltzer if it’s over yet.

I think it’s too soon to say it’s over. It’s the result of errors on the part of both the regulators but especially the banks and financial institutions. The banks and financial institutions were making loans that they had every reason to know could not possibly survive.

There are, as there always are, two questions here.  The first is liquidity.  Can perfectly sound businesses get credit?  The second is solvency.  Are we going to see a lot of businesses going to the wall in the coming year.

The Fed’s job is to make sure that sound business can get credit.  But as for the future, nobody knows.  Will the mortgage mess cause consumers to stop spending and start saving?

Right now, all the experts except the professional contrarians are saying that the economy is sound.

But then they would say that.  From President Bush to Chairman Bernanke to Wall Street they have to say that everything is all right.

Meltzer thinks that the Fed should make it clear that it won’t be bailing anyone out, that it will support the economy but not the bad actors.

But that is exactly what the Fed cannot afford to say.  Who knows which way the political winds will blow in the next few months?

The Fed can’t say anything about bailouts because it hasn’t a clue what will be coming down the pike.  In the final analysis, the Fed will do what it is told.