Where this contest is won

Pete Du Pont is on fire, today, in his dead-center column on "progressive" economic policies and the likely consequences for the economy.

Don't Pull Back: 'Progressive' policies would cause economic regression

From that column:

"These two governmental takeovers have raised important questions concerning the future course of our country: How much government money and how much government regulation of the private sector should be a part of our market economy? Should America become a Europeanized sort of a nanny state in which the government manages our industries, their boards of directors, their products and their finances?

It shouldn't, but it is clear that the incoming Obama administration believes strongly in governmental control of a great many parts of our economy. During the campaign, Barack Obama called for a 10% to 12% annual increase in government spending, which will likely come on top of our current congressional spending surge, which according to USA Today 'is increasing the federal share of the nation's economic activity close to $1 out of every $4, the highest level since World War II,' and will give us "a budget deficit headed towards a record $1 trillion.'

Mr. Obama is urging several other pieces of government control legislation that would quickly Europeanize America's future.

After automobile manufacturing control, the next effort will be to mandate government regulation and operation of health care: a federal statute regulating the price, content and supervision of health care, and a government council to significantly regulate the content and cost of health care policies (see my November column).

Next, the regulation and downsizing of international trade. Trade creates jobs--some five million Americans work for overseas companies. The export of American products support some six million domestic jobs, the export of services another five million, and U.S. trade as a share of gross domestic product reached 29% in 2007. Mr. Obama opposes trade, from his previously stated opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to his dislike of other regional trade agreements, so we will see our economy shrink if these policies are followed.

As for the environment, the Boxer-Lieberman global warming bill that failed to pass the Senate last June will be back, and with the Democrat Senate's new 58-seat majority instead of the current 51, it is much more likely to pass. This bill would shut down coal-fired plants and contains more than 300 production regulations and mandates, from a federal commission to impose environmental controls on businesses, to a protectionist agency that could impose tariffs on imported goods.

In short, bigger and more intrusive government is rolling down the tracks toward us. Taxes will be higher, government spending will be larger, and matters from automobile manufacturing to health care and trade will be Europeanized. The government will be in charge.

As Mr. Smick concluded: 'Today the United States is a politically polarized nation plagued increasingly with thoughts of class warfare and unable to exert economic leadership in the world. . . . Nervous markets sense that American policy makers are pulling back.'

But America mustn't pull back, it must move forward, with low taxes, expanded global economic trade, and less, not more, government interference in the marketplace. It does not look like we are moving in those directions, but we should be."

There is where this contest will be won and lost, ladies and gentleman. And, I have full confidence, will be won by those who honestly value the free market. In the empirics.

You can make as many weak arguments and construct as much weak propaganda for a position as you please.

But only the strongest understandings and arguments win out in the marketplace of ideas. And the strongest understandings are yielded from the empirical evidence. And, given the trends of almost the entire 20th century, but especially the last 50 years or so, I have very little doubt that general thrust of Pete's argument is correct, here, and that Keynesianism and socialism, in the form of government-sponsored intervention in the economy, will see its last twilight as a serious economic or political theory.

The kids and I had a fantastic discussion, today, actually, getting underneath why the most desperate poverty, in the form of starvation and debilitating and life-threatening disease, can only be addressed through the market, with temporary government interventions being necessary only in the cases of extreme deprivation - hence, the quite sensible public disapproval of the current financial bailouts of affluent industries in the United States; all in the name of socialism, mind you - but a commitment to for-profit and non-profit markets of committed citizens engaged in genuinely democratic efforts to tackle the world's most serious problems is the direction we should be headed, with their ideas and efforts being rewarded or allowed to fail on their own merits.

Pete is quite right that this is exactly the direction that the world should be taking, right now. And I am quite confident that this is exactly the direction the world will be taking. As soon as enough people see the folly of our ways.

And seeing the folly of our ways is what free and democratic peoples do best.

What Prop 8 could never stop

You got to love globalization.



America. Inspiring swishy Maria Carey impersonations since 1776.

Stuff and what matters

A reminder of what matters.

Why Stuff is Not Salvation

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The more things change...

$700 Billion Bailout Celebrated with Lavish $800 Billion Executive Party

How the world really works. A la, the Onion.

Gambatte kudasai

Or good luck. As Milton Friedman might say.

Barack Obama-san

Brilliant article. My favorite bit:

"November 1999: 18 trillion yen. In a "last push," Mr. Obuchi's government spent 7.4 trillion yen to prop up businesses, 6.8 trillion yen for social infrastructure projects like telecommunications and environmental projects, and two trillion yen for housing loans, among other things. Debt-to-GDP reached 128.3%.

Japan's economy grow anemically over that decade, but as the nearby chart shows, its national debt exploded. Only in this decade, with a monetary reflation and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's decision to privatize state assets and force banks to acknowledge their bad debts, did the economy recover. Yet recent governments have rolled back Mr. Koizumi's reforms and returned to their spending habits. But Japan does have better roads."

You gotta read the whole thing.

At bottom, social science is like car mechanics. Either you get the car to go or you don't. And no matter how much you bullshit your friends that you know your way under that hood, when the car won't run, people stop listening.

Or as the Wall Street Journal would put it:

"Now we're told that a similar spending program -- a new New Deal -- will revive the U.S. economy. How do you say 'good luck' in Japanese?"

News item: Keynesians discover that they were right all along

Amusing.

Why Keynes is the Man of the Year

"It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.

This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics. His purpose, as he saw it, was not to destroy capitalism but to save it from itself. He thought that the work of rescue had to start with economic theory itself. Now that Greenspan’s intellectual edifice has collapsed, the moment has come to build a new structure on the foundations that Keynes laid."

Robert Skildesky has obviously not heard of Adam Smith. Or John Stuart Mill. Or Milton Friedman.

It is so ironic that after more than half a century of Keynesian fiscal and regulatory policies doing a find job of undermining their own intellectual premises with or without independent criticism, thank you very much (Robert has apparently forgotten about the stagflation of the 1970's and the price, wage, and other controls that made it possible), leftists are reveling in the "story" that it was just an elaborate conspiracy by conservatives against the unflinching virtue of progressives in the 20th century.

Sweet story, huh? Good guy liberals save the world from mean, evil, greedy conservatives. Ironic that these guys don't believe in good guys and bad guys, isn't it? Ironic that they believe in progress, at all, given that conservatives are still in our midst unawares, apparently, of the righteousness of the left's march of progress?

Never really occurred to them that perhaps they were wrong.

It will.

Because people get tired of the consequences of bullshit long before they get tired of the bullshit, itself. And there are plenty of consequences that neo-Keynsianism will serve up. Progressives will try to talk themselves out of them.

But that's the beauty of a free and open marketplace of ideas. You can run from the consequences of your poorer ideas. But you can't hide.

And, in economic matters as much as in other matters, the truth will set us free.

Bank on it.

All of us blind

It is bizarre to me that the very kinds of treatment of people that leads Westerners, honestly and accurately, to recognize the barbarity and tragedy of life in places like Iran, is what too many in the West and outside the grip of such repression celebrate as the solution to all of our problems. The final solution, you might say.

Iranian Woman Blinded by Spurned Man Invokes Islamic Retribution

"TEHRAN -- Ameneh Bahrami once enjoyed photography and mountain vistas. Her work for a medical equipment company gave her financial independence. Several men had asked for her hand in marriage, but the hazel-eyed electrical technician had refused them all. 'I wanted to get married, but only to the man I really loved,' she said.

Four years ago, a spurned suitor poured a bucket of sulfuric acid over her head, leaving her blind and disfigured.

Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker's eyes, acceding to Bahrami's demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime. The sentence has not yet been carried out."

And here are reactions at MediaTakeOut, back in November, when the sentence was first announced.

"I HATE CRAP LIKE THIS.

WTF? LOOK AT THAT POOR WOMAN'S FACE! THESE IGNORANT, SELFISH, SELF-RIGHTEOUS, JEALOUS MOFOS NEED THE BOOK THROWN AT THEM!

THAT HAD TO BE THE SCARIEST, MOST PAINFUL THING TO HAPPEN TO SOMEONE! JUST GIVE ME A BAT, SOME ROPE AND 15 MINUTES ALONE IN A ROOM WITH THIS FOOL!"

"Oh I am liking THAT EYE FOR AN EYE [EXPLETIVE]!!!! Clear up these jails...do to them what they did to their victims and TRUST me CRIME WILL GO DOWN!!!

We dont need to have these nigggas lounging around wit meals, tv and a work out center, smoking cigs and making clicks and sh!t!!!

DAMN why cant we get GANSTA wit these so called violent offenders!!!"

And my personal favorite:

"Damn, and he claimed he did that out of love? Some people's minds are so warped. Anything goes these days, it's just sad.

No sense of right and wrong, no moral compass, no gut feelings, no guilty conscience, nothing...........I'm so thankful I was born in The Bahamas, which is founded on Christian principles."

We're so enlightened, aren't we?

What happened to this woman was an incomparable tragedy, obviously. But the truth is that we can't decide what we are and what we want to be when something like this happens. We're sure that we are better until we see something ugly like this and then we decide that maybe all that barbarism isn't such a bad thing.

Apparently the Christian commenter forgot that the central and most courageous challenge that Christ posed to the world was that giving into the temptation of an eye for an eye maintained and reinforced all that ugliness in his world, as much as ours. And that the only way out was to give up that temptation.

Repressive societies, like Iran, regularly give into that temptation and regularly have the most serious problems with issues like brutal violence, especially violence against women.

Jesus posited that the two correlate and that if we wanted to end it, we needed to take forgiveness seriously.

Apparently, my man from Nazareth was wrong and the Iranian mullahs are right.

Good thing we got that cleared up.

True love for trolls

For all of those convinced that the secret to life is having the high hand in negotiations, a reminder of where such out-of-touch douchebaggery leads.

Best of craigslist: SWF who isn't asking too much

From that list:

"-must be willing to pay for dinner at least once a week at a Zagat-rated restaurant after proper research and scouting of restaurant

-must own more than 3 items from The North Face jacket line but no more than 5

-owning a car is a plus, but it can't be a hatchback (some standards)

-I ski one weekend a year, so you ski. No shredders.

-must love Gary Larson, and hate Dilbert

-passionate about animal rights, but willing to take in the circus when it comes to town

-must read at least 3 books a month, no comics unless Gary Larson

-must have read complete works of Jane Austen

-must know how to turn a Word document into a PDF

-must be on T-Mobile for Fave 5 access

-must love pinball and not play ping pong

-3 out of your 5 favorite movies should be John Hughes films

-must agree to watch 'The Hills' on MTV on Sundays but hate that bitch Heidi, she is everything wrong with womankind

-must know CPR and have current certification, ++ for SCUBA certification

-must be home from 2-6pm on Saturdays to receive packages; bonus points if you're an Ebay power seller too!

-NO FELONS!!!

-must have all limbs, no quads (not biased, just poor past experience)"

And the kicker:

"I am willing to make a few sacrifices, but not many. If you see yourself in even a FEW of my specifications, you are invited to apply. Think of it more like a guidebook to my heart."

I suppose if you have the heart of a vapid, shallow, self-centered she-cow.

Note to women:

No man is really attracted to such women. Not even hot women. Not after they have used you and your girlfriends for their advanced anatomy study.

Why people waste their lives gratifying their egos in such useless ways I will never know.

Oh, I remember now. Because thet are insufferable fucktards.

Welcome to true love, I suppose. With yourself, wanker. Congrats to the happy couple.

Bank on it

As to be expected, the Economist nails it exactly.

The left's resignation note

"The proudest trophy of the left is the European social model, a web of labour and welfare laws offering a 'high degree of social protection'. The model emerged during the post-war boom, when living standards soared across western Europe. In his book 'Postwar', Tony Judt, a New York-based British academic, lists many causes: governments turned away from protectionism, people started having lots of babies, energy was cheap and Europe had much catching up to do (in 1957 only 2% of Italian homes had a refrigerator, but by 1974 94% did).

Crucially, the European social model also enjoyed an amazingly low degree of external competition. In 1960 a West German car worker had little to fear from Eastern Europe or Asia. Skodas and Nissans were pretty horrid; Chinese workers were lost to the madness of Mao. When China, India and the ex-Soviet block joined the capitalist world three decades later, the global labour pool grew from 1.5 billion to 3 billion: an explosion called the 'great doubling' by Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist.

Never again will west European workers live in a world with so little competition. Honest European politicians know this—and so, deep down, do most voters. That is why trade unions are still shedding members. It is why the mainstream left cannot credibly promise to reverse globalisation, preferring instead to blame the crisis on ill-regulated markets. But attacking market follies is hardly a distinctive position (listen to Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s supposedly centre-right president). Europe’s centre-left is struggling because its 20th century rationale is dying. If it cannot find a less muddled message that explicitly embraces globalisation, this economic crash could deliver it a fatal blow."

20th century leftists either needs to embrace 19th century liberalism or get used to losing elections, down the line.

You know what I love about the marketplace of ideas? It sticks around and sorts through this nonsense even if you don't like it. Fucking brilliant.

The marketplace believes in you even if you don't believe in the marketplace.

And liberalization, now and forever, is the wave of humanity's future.

Bank on it.

Our most fundamental error and our most important virtue

If I had to sum up the most serious problem with people, today and since the dawn of humanity, it is that most people do not understand people very well, at all, and never really have. And we have treated one another poorly in the extreme as a consequence of our ignorance.

Most people believe that they can threaten and overpower others much more than they really can and rationalize the bullying, abuse of power, and repeated tragedy that this often becomes much more than they are willing to acknowledge, and their limitations in their understanding or in the use of that power.

This is what Lord Acton meant when he said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Most people do not respect the limitations of power, enough, nor, more importantly, their own limitations as human beings, to wield power wisely.

And that is the most powerful argument for liberty, which is the foundation for liberal democracy, even as we perpetually rationalize our illiberal impulses.

Most people do not understand power or people well. And most people are too stubborn to admit this is the case. And all over the world, people die, are imprisoned, are oppressed, and our otherwise abused by power and those who seek to wield it over others, all in the name of this most fundamental error of understanding of people and power.

No matter how much we take for granted liberal thinkers like Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wolstonecraft, Frederick Douglas, and the like to promote liberty as the central principle of honest human existence, they have made so much of the liberty and good things that it brings us possible to our lives.

And what liberal and illiberal people of the world, today, need more than any other one thing in our lives, right now, is to appreciate and understand how important that value is in our lives and the limitations of power and our understanding of it and one another.

The kids and I have remarked, many times, that it is terribly tragic and ironic, that, outside of bacteria, viruses, and other sources of disease, the most serious predator for human beings is and may always have been other human beings. And all as a function of this mistake in what is otherwise our most serious strength: our capacity for reason and intelligent thought.

Our most important virtue in the face of this repeated and most serious mistake of reasoning of human existence is our most serious strength as a species versus other comparable animal and other living species: our capacity to learn.

And the virtue that facilitates this learning, best, in the face of the often overwhelming arrogance and abuse of power and the compounded tragedy it creates in the lives of our fellow man and woman is the one most celebrated by the man whose birth people around the world will be celebrating in 12 days, Jesus Christ of Nazareth: forgiveness and love for fellow man, woman, and child.

Jesus did not promote forgiveness and love because he was weak or soft. He promoted forgiveness and love because it was the only way through a world much more brutal and capricious than our own. And because the one group of people most in need of forgiveness are those who refuse to do so, failing to recognize that it is their own sins and mistakes of judgment that are most in need of forgiveness.

There is a reason pride is the deadliest sin.

And we are living the consequences of that sin, today, as we have been since the beginning of humankind.

This season, we should consider forgiving ourselves and one another for that most deadly sin, and loving one another enough to see past our own pride and our mistakes of judgment, and committing ourselves to true progress:

Peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

On second thought

On second thought, I can't do something I will hate for the rest of my life.

I've got to do something with my life that offers me substantially more freedom.

Teaching just isn't going to do it, at this point. Not the way it is governed today.

I've got to do something where I can be happy.

And that cannot be education, given the illiberal direction we have taken.

I don't know. We'll see.

How politics really works

Most of the time, though noone will admit it, this is how politics really works.



When random opinion trumps more substantial and honest reason, this is what you get.

I'm pretty sure we can do better.

Hitler

I think I now understand how Hitler was able to do what he did in Germany.

Because people are, too often, stupid, scared, mean and lazy. And they will believe just about anything they are told.

Until they don't.

Two words

Two words for me, as it concerns my job, right now, and as it concerns all the bullshit and shitheadeness in the world masquerading as something more honest and decent:

Man up.

Life is bullshit, often. The trick is being able to tell the difference between bullshit and something more honest.

In the meantime, I gotta deal with the bullshit. And fuck every last asshole who brings it my way. Your comeuppance is on it's way. Bet on that. Hitler and Stalin thought they were going to rule the world and noone was going to challenge them, either.

And as my students are thoroughly aware, today, with some study: every motherfucker who says he will rule unchallenged goes down. Every single last one of them. Without exception.

Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman included.

Bank on it.

Be prepared to man up.

Hubris

Big Government is Back

Hubris, the Greeks whisper. Hubris.

Who kept us safe?

Someone needed to say it.

Peggy Noonan So Happy George W. Bush Prevented 9/11

As Wonkette puts it (always with eloquence and class):

"Every day is Good Friday in the Wall Street Journal, because Friday is Peggy’s Day, and this week her wonderful Declaration is right there in the headline, “At Least Bush Kept Us Safe.” Wait, what? Let’s just ask the old Internets here and double-check, because it is so hard to remember, say, when TERRORISTS BLEW UP MOTHERFUCKING MANHATTAN, WITH JETS, WHICH RUINED EVERYTHING FOREVER.

Umm, yep, Google says September 11, 2001. Who was president then, anyway? Right, right, Al Gore. That fat faggot, he killed 3,000 innocent Americans who weren’t even in the military, and then he started a war with the wrong place, and luckily he was indicted for War Crimes and then executed on teevee — along with Lieberman, which was extra-awesome — and the Supreme Court appointed George Bush Junior to be president because he actually won Florida, it was finally determined, and Bush kept us safe!...

George Bush Junior will be remembered for many things, for a very long time. But the witless clown who jacked off at his pretend ranch in Crawford while freaked-out FBI agents were frantically begging for White House help in stopping an organized plot unveiling itself within the United States for foreign hijackers to crash passenger jets into high-profile American buildings will certainly the fuck not be remembered by anyone as the guy who 'kept us safe.'

About time someone said it.

Don't mean to burst conservative pretensions but, for all the bluster about testing Presidents terrorists think are weak, nothing even in the ballpark of 9/11 happened on the watches of any previous American President, unless you count the War of 1812. And even then, only 2260 Americans died in action.

If terrorists attack when Presidents are weak, the current President has a lot of explaining to do.

The echo-chamber gets thick in every circle. But this particular theme has been uniquely disingenuous.

Thank God Al Queda didn't attack again. But I'm not 100% sure that George W. had anything to do with it, at all. I'm open to argument. But I'm not open to blatant bullshit. And this one has the stink of the latter.

The Administration deserves thanks for its efforts. But it doesn't deserve credit where credit is not due. And keeping us safe from 9/11 is not something the Bush Administration can claim, because 9/11 happened while he was President, if anyone took notice.

Back to the drawing board, folks. Surely there are better reasons to celebrate this President than ones that aren't true.

For the ladies in my life

For Jenny. Hope life is good, hon.



And for the future Mrs. So-Hot-I-Sizzle-In-A-Sweet-And-Almost-Intellectual-Kind-Of-Way Sutherland.



And, in case the women are into something a little more hardcore. I'm like Ice Cube with vocabulary.



There's more where that came from, ladies. Even stuff I didn't steal from the Land of the Long White Cloud (Yeah, I'm sure they were sippin' tea the night they came up with that one).

Holla.

Do we really need any more evidence?

While I appreciate and agree with Paul Krugman's conclusion that the U.S. auto industry bailout is a short-term effort to avoid facing the more fundamental weaknesses in the American car industry, and, more importantly, to help those responsible for these companies to face that weakness...

Do we really need any more evidence that this guy is just as likely to be a dumbshit like the rest of us, than this conclusion:

Krugman: U.S. Auto Industry Will Probably Disappear

Yes, he really said this. Read the article. I couldn't believe it either.

Paul is not a bad guy. He's a smart guy. He is also politically unhinged, as of late (say over the last 5 years; I bet you can deduce when it started).

And his ideological blinders show in this foolish, foolish notion that somehow America is going to stop producing cars.

You mean like how they stopped producing computers when the Japanese got a jump on that industry? Or how Americans stopped producing electronics as Taiwan got good at that?

Paul, the U.S. auto industry will not be as dominant in the next generation. You and I agree on that point. Too many stronger competitors, especially from Japan (I am biased, since I own a Toyota). But the U.S. auto industry will still be around. GM and Ford are not going anywhere (Chrysler might be another story, but I still think it is likely that someone will pick up that Chrysler brand name and run with it, even if their cars are kind of shit. Did I just say that out loud? I'm actually joking. I don't know dick about cars, is the truth. But I do have some understanding of business. And I have a feeling that someone will want to keep making money off of Chrysler's name, even if they lose market share).

People are not going to stop buying Fords and Chevies just because Toyotas are often better. They will just buy fewer of them.

And, in the meantime, that generalization does not at all hold for individual car models and car purchases, all of which are made on an incalcuable multitude of many different individual reasons and calculations.

Paul Krugman's not a bad guy. He's a smart guy. He's also full of shit. Often. And this little zinger, which derives from the field of analysis that won Krugman the Nobel Prize, international trade patterns and economic geography, remember, should illustrate that fact really well.

Don't worry, Paul. I mean that, bud. We all fuck up. I still like you. You're still a smart guy. You got plenty of good things to say, that's for sure. You just needed a little humbling.

It looks like you might be finding some. That's what it looks like to get honest, Paul.

If that's the case, proud on ya.

Choices (or I've Got Soul, But I'm Not a Soldier)

Back in July, I posted about a really outstanding soldier, Lieutenent Matthew Gallagher, known as Lieutenant G to his men, who was featured in a Washington Post article I caught awhile back, and who was being harrassed by a superior because he was asserting his right to leave the armed forces instead of going professional military. Matthew featured this Killers' song, All These Things That I've Done, on his website, Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal.



And I have to say that after dealing with the bullshit and bureaucracy and limitations on my ability to do a better job in my own work, I completely understand this soldier's dilemma, today.

What he was going through, I think, and definitely what I am experiencing, now, is that I cannot imagine living a life where everything I do is controlled and compromised by the machinations of people who don't care as much as I do about the doing the job well and the freedom I need to do it.

And, at some level, if they can't respect my right to make my own choices - because they don't care as much about what they're doing, is the truth, not enough to question their own egos - then I need to go do something where I don't have to deal with such assholes until they can face up to their bullshit.

I'm not going to spend my life being controlled by people who care less about what they're doing. And less about me than they do about their own egos.

Fuck 'em, I say. Do it without me. I'll be just fine without anyone who disrespects me and my choices like that.

For all you babyboomers out there (especially leftists):

You remember how you felt about the draft during Vietnam?

That's how I feel about having my choices coerced by you, too. And if you can't respect that, I'll have to let you do the work on your own.

And that is the choice - as I decide if I'm staying with teaching, for a living - that I am facing, today.

Our romance with power

This is what is wrong with romanticizing power. No matter how much damage and destruction people do to the lives of others in its name, noone ever wants to take responsibility.

The Real Bill Ayers by Bill Ayers

Here's hilzoy's spot-on response to Bill Ayers stank solipsism:

"Starting his narrative in 1970 allows Ayers to omit the time when Weatherman was not trying not to harm people: for instance, the Days of Rage:

'The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at.'

Nor should we forget Bernardine Dohrn's comment on the Manson murders at the Flint War Council in 1969: 'Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!' At the same meeting, Weathermen 'debated the ethics of killing white babies, so as not to bring more 'oppressors' into the world, and denounced American women bearing white babies as 'pig mothers.' (p. 159) And they sang songs about a lawyer, Richard Elrod, who had broken his neck during the Days of Rage: 'Stay Elrod stay/ Stay in your iron lung/ Play Elrod play/ Play with your toes a while.' (p. 159)

The 'accidental explosion' Ayers refers to occurred when three Weathermen blew themselves up while making nail bombs to detonate at a dance at Fort Dix. One was Ayers' girlfriend, 'who was later identified from a fragment of finger.'

After three of their own were blown up, Weatherman tried not to hurt people, though they did blow up property, and seem to have placed a lot of trust in their ability to tell, for instance, whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed. And after that explosion, according to Ayers, the Weather Underground got a new name. But when his co-Weathermen blew themselves up, they were planning to kill a whole lot of people. Weatherman was never nonviolent.

Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground did more than 'cross lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense.' They were, by any syandard I can think of, terrorists. As one historian says, 'The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence (...) I don't know what sort of defense that is.'

They say they did it to end the war in Vietnam. But how, exactly, that was supposed to happen is a total mystery. It's the Underpants Gnome theory of political activism:

Phase 1: Set a bunch of bombs.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The war ends!

That level of tactical idiocy is one thing when you're collecting underpants. It's quite another when you're setting bombs.

Ayers may think that there's still a debate about the Weather Underground's effectiveness. And he might also think that he 'acted appropriately in the context of those times.' To me, though, he's just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole.

He has done enough harm already. Now he should do the decent thing and leave us in peace.'

Actually, there is one more important twist to Bill Ayer's retardation.

It was consistent with the same theory dominant in most mainstream political circles now and then: that with enough pressure, they could get their way.

Everyone who is everyone believes this line of nihilism. As long as they can justify it in the name of their cause. Bill Ayers and his pals just took it to all extremes they could conjure. Which makes them bigger shitheads than everyone else, that's for sure.

But it doesn't exactly get everyone else off the hook.

Lord Acton was not joking. Power tends to corrupt. Absolutely power corrupts absolutely. It doesn't matter who has it or who wants it.

That is why we value liberty. Because those who seek to exercise power never know a limit to its use. Unless we take liberty seriously.

Strangely, no matter how much power those who romanticize it gather and no matter how long our regressive obsession with it, we always come back to that principle.

When we say we live in a liberal democracy, today, or that we get a liberal education, or that we love liberal values, this is what we mean.

It has nothing to do with ideology. Left-wing, right-wing or otherwise. It has to do with freedom. And affirming a democratic government that respects it and takes it seriously.

And that is our challenge this generation and will be as long as those who are hostile to liberty kill, imprison, and repress those who love it.

Most people may not know Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wolstonecraft. They might recognize James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin and any and all of the early liberals that made our liberty central to our governance and our lives.

They did not fight and sacrafice for our liberty so we could pretend that it was all an elaborate hoax by naive idealists who did not understand the nasty and brutish world as it is. They made those sacrafices so we could cherish it.

We can romanticize power out of our free will. But we ought not do all of the things that we can.

It will up to us to decide if their sacrafices were made in vain.

Real courage

For all of those romanticizing the Chinese government and repression, generally, a reminder of what it looks like. And what it looks like when people have the courage to challenge it.



Repression is not progress. No matter the propaganda. Progress is reducing and ending repression as the means of democratic engagement, not its increase and impunity.

Courage is our capacity to honestly account for this mistaken direction for humanity.

Freedom is not a dirty word

Thank goodness somewhere freedom is not a dirty word.

Defending political freedom in Russia and Britain

Progress

It is amazing to me how much humanity fumbles forward rather than walking there in some kind of straight line. For each of us and all of us together. We often inch forward despite ourselves as much as because of ourselves. It's just the natural human propensity to screw up and the learning that happens as a result.

When people fail to make progress is when they just won't admit their mistakes. Each of us and all of us together. When we just can't even imagine that maybe the problem is us.

And that is how we make progress. When people figure out and when we figure out that it is us and not the other guy. Or when it is all of us and not the asshole who keeps protesting that we're the ones screwing up. Jesus was one such asshole. He happened to be right. And after they killed them, all of those people responsible must have been thinking, "Who's the asshole, now?"

Probably about right

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

The wisdom of markets and George Will

It is on the subject of markets that George Will is genius.

Markets, Not Economists, Will Help the Economy

"In recent years, in normal conditions, the economy has 'lost' tens of millions of jobs through capitalism's 'creative destruction' (Joseph Schumpeter's phrase). It also has created a few million more than that, which is why the destruction is creative. Investor's Business Daily reports:

'Since Eisenhower's first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan's first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House.'

Because the economy's job-creation is not quite as predictable as a solar eclipse, Obama, by promising 2.5 million jobs by 2011, is a bit more audacious than was Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, who astonished King Arthur's court by commanding an eclipse that he knew was due. Still, because scores of millions of today's jobs will exist two years from now, who will be able to dispute a presidential claim that administration policies 'saved' some portion of them?

If you must forecast tomorrow's weather, you will be tolerably accurate more often than not if you say it will be sort of like today's. In normal times, the rule for forecasting next year's economy is similar. The problem is that economic forecasts matter most in abnormal times, such as these. The question is: How abnormal are these times?

A snapshot of a moving target is of limited use, but: Sales the day after Thanksgiving were 3 percent higher than last year. Over the weekend, 172 million people, shopping in stores and online, spent an average of $372.57, a 7.2 percent increase over a year ago, when 147 million shoppers spent $347.55 per person. Is this evidence that the recent deleveraging of indebted households has breathed fresh life into personal consumption, which normally is 70 percent of economic activity? Is it evidence of underestimated strength of an economy in which more than 93 percent of those who want to work are employed, and more than 93 percent of mortgages are being paid on time? Is it evidence that Washington's jaw-dropping interventions with hundreds of billions of dollars are having their intended psychotherapeutic effects? How much is it evidence of the decline of the price of a gallon of regular gasoline from $4.10 in July to $1.81 today? Over a year, every 1 cent decline is a $1.5 billion saving to consumers.

Whatever else historians will say about Washington's response to today's crisis, they are not apt to say the government did too little. It certainly has not suffered the fate of Buridan's ass, the animal in a philosophic puzzle who, placed equidistant from two piles of hay, starved to death from indecision. Some Washingtonians can remember when the federal government first had a budget of $100 billion (1962); this year's decisiveness might contribute to a deficit next year of $1 trillion.

In his wise book 'Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery,' John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes' central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that 'the state is wise and the market is stupid.' Mueller continues: 'Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.'

Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes' followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists."

Please read the entire piece. There is more brilliance where that came from.

I know it is hard to believe. But letting the markets do their magic is exactly what the doctor ordered, right now. What this period should demonstrate to people with their eyes open is that, truth be told, folks in government generally do not have the foggiest clue what to do about an economic downturn. And, except in clear emergencies - like, say, 25% unemployment and when they can actually do some good - they should, generally, let people who know what they are doing better resolve problems in the market.

One of the more important reasons we need to make a transition to a free for-profit and non-profit market economy is because of the propensity of those who are sure that only their advice will fix things for everyone - and then only when, good or bad, their ideas are enforced on a population - to never own up when their solutions fail. And to manipulate the political conversation until they get the action they want, even when it is ineffective or makes things worse.

What this period should demonstrate to Americans, I hope, is that their instincts that government handles economic matters poorly - as well as many other matters outside of their core responsibilities that no other institution can manage - are good ones.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of power and people with power to solve your problems for you.

The best one is that usually they cannot.

This one's for you, Donald

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Quitting

I'm a bit more serious about quitting, today, after a meeting, last night, and the millionth new requirement that gets in the way of my teaching. I'm just at my wits end, I guess is what I'm saying. And so I'm looking much more seriously at options if I were to quit, today, than I was before last night.

I wouldn't love making money more. But I would love investing for profit and for causes I care about. It'd be nice to be on the money end of stuff I really care about: democracy promotion, promotion of free markets, promotion of liberal education, promotion of liberal values, microloan and poverty alleviation, preventing and treating diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, clean water and sewage, and various other causes that keep more people alive, safe, and living decent lives.

I'd still write my book. I'm just not convinced that working at a university or a school job is really what I want to do with my life. I need independence to strive for excellence and not be burdened with the imposition of mediocrity by others.

Whatever I do, it needs to be independent, I need to be able to achieve excellence, and it needs to be something I love and I can adequately raise a family doing for the rest of my life.

I'm thinking about it. I'll share what I decide.

Anyway.

Stupid fish

Mocking sanctimony and hypocrisy was never so easy.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

MSNBC Replaces Fox News

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Except with really stupid fish.

Merry Christmas

First Stephen Colbert. Now Larry the Cable Guy.



This will, indeed, be a Merry Christmas.

As long as my relatives stay out of the gay apparel. Except for my brother, who everyone knows is a flaming homosexual (that one's for you, Sam).

Me. Myself. I. All of us.

This is why we need free democracies and free markets.

Global AIDS crisis overblown?

So we have more money available for all of these needs, from more abundant resources, rather than persistently competing for more finite resources.

Many progressives just don't get this. And the people they seek to help are hurt and die as a consequence.

Zimbabwe should be case in point for all of the most serious arguments for free democracies and free markets.

Zimbabwe's repressive politics and economic policies not only have crippled the Zimbabwean economy. They have undermined the ability to do what the U.S., European nations, and most more developed free economies are able to do: to provide their own funds for their own humanitarian crises.

But undermining a free economy in America also undermines giving to causes like the Zimbabwean humanitarian crisis, AIDS, diarrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, and a host of afflictions that the world's population faces.

And, worse, it gives rhetorical cover to repressive regimes like Mugabe's by giving him all the justification he needs for his murderous ways:

Because people must be forced to do good and only someone with a strong hand can make it happen.

There are a million little Robert Mugabe's with the same self-righteous, self-centered, circular, and seriously flawed reasoning all around the globe. In America. In Europe. In the developing world.

All around the world, there are billions of little Mugabe's arguing that people cannot be good unless forced to do so.

And no matter how many of the world's evils are perpetrated by those with power against those without power, we cannot even imagine that, just perhaps, people who do real good in the world do so out of their free will. And those who seek to compel the will of others to do their bidding generally make the world an ugly place.

It is so obvious to anyone who is not rationalizing this nonsense.

In the meantime, people die for our self-righteousness. As they always have.

And as they always will. Until we face up.

And there will be only one person and one group of people who will be responsible for all of this when all is said and done.

Me. Myself. I.

All of us.

Mumbai

The Economist offers some sober reflection on the attacks in Mumbai.

Mumbai counts the costs

"India’s friends and neighbours can hope for a measured reaction, but they should not assume it. After an attack on its national parliament in 2001, India mobilised hundreds of thousands of troops on the border with Pakistan. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in power, routinely accuses its successor, the Congress party, of being soft on terrorism. The desperate spectacle in Mumbai could damage Congress's prospects in pending state polls and even cost it the next general election, which must be held by May. The BJP is now choosing its words carefully but a front-page newspaper advert, presumably commissioned before the Mumbai attacks, accused Congress of being “incapable and unwilling” to fight terror; a sentiment illustrated with a large splatter of blood.

The Indian government, in turn, hopes for restraint from its own people, particularly in crowded, polyglot Mumbai. The metropolis is sometimes called “Maximum City”, because it is always pressed up hard against its limits. Its commuter trains are crushed with passengers each morning; its squalid slums hum with industry and ambition. No other city in India bears such colossal inconveniences with such phlegmatic grace. No Mumbaikar would describe the city as liveable; yet many Mumbaikars cannot imagine living anywhere else.

But this attack on its people and landmarks represents an enormous test of Mumbai’s civic temperament. Its assailants may have wished to provoke a backlash against Muslim inhabitants—which in turn would help to radicalise India’s vast Muslim minority. Even after the last of the terrorists have been killed or captured, that is how they could still hope to win."

That last reflection is what we need more of in our efforts to combat terrorism. We need observers and political leaders who can think past their outrage to consider long term consequences of how we respond.

The Economist is right. A backlash against India's Muslim community or a rush to judgment against Muslim Pakistan's intelligence forces (a rush to judgment that is now a regular pattern among India's Hindu population) without evidence and without discriminate action against only those responsible would be foolhardy and reap serious political consequences, in the long term, especially more civilian and military deaths.

Those responsible should have been confronted better at the time of the attacks, if accounts of military and law enforcement not firing on these terrorist actors are true.

At this point, as much as possible and resonable, any of those conspiring or responsible who are still alive need to be brought to justice alive and face trial. If they must be killed because other options are impossible, then so be it. But we are smarter to bring them to justice, when possible, to avoid polarizing Muslim public opinion and losing support from Muslims in India and in the world, generally, for otherwise worthy efforts.

I can always count on the Economist for clearheaded consideration of these types of events. Living and thinking about these matters in a country that has successfully engaged political efforts to end terrorism gives one some pause for reflection on all the best alternatives to deal with this kind of ugliness.

I don't know enough about the until recently unknown group responsible for these attacks, the Deccan Mujadeen, to know if they can be politically coopted. I know those responsible must be brought to justice. It does appear that part of their grievance has to do with Kashmir, a resolution of which situation - one that would, ideally, involve self-determination for Kashmir, independent of both India and Pakistan - would likely help reduce the basis for such grievances, though groups like this may find grievances where others fall away.

The Foreign Policy blog speculates that the Deccan Mujadeen may be related to the Lashkar-e-Toiba, an Islamist group based out of Lahore, Pakistan and founded in the Kunar provice of Aghanistan, whose grievances are also related to Kashmir, in addition to broader aims of Islamic rule. And the BBC is reporting that the one attacker captured alive, Azam Amir Qasab, is now saying that the group had received training from Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that has found backing, in the past, from Pakistani intelligence.

Foreign Policy is reporting that terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna is indicating that the Deccan Mujadeen are most likely related to the Indian Mujadeen, an Islamist group responsible for at least 5 attacks in India in 2007 and 2008, and considered a shadow group for Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), who is suspected to be fronted by the Indian Mujadeen and to have been infiltrated by Al Queda. Both groups have strong Islamist claims, in addition to grievances associated with the Kashmiri province, meaning their aims are Islamic rule, in addition to more narrow claims against the Indian government.

I have to say that the emails from the Indian Mujadeen and those claiming to be the Deccan Mujadeed look very different to me.

The Indian Mujadeen emails appear to me to be more directly Islamist in their language, focussing more on the religious grievances of an Islamist group against Hindus fighting Muslim mujadeen and is more offensive in its aims of imposing Islamist "justice" on a recalcitrant Hindu population.

One such email reads:

"... Here we are back - the Mujahideen of India - the terrorists on the disbelievers - the radicals of Islam - after our triumphant and successful assault at Jaipur, once again calling you all, who disbelieve in Allah and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to accept Islam and bear witness that there is none to be worshipped except Allah, and that Muhammad (peace be upon him) is the Messenger of Allah. Accept Islam and save yourselves.

O Hindus! O disbelieving faithless Indians! Haven’t you still realized that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute idols are not at all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered?

We call you, O Hindus, O enemies of Allah, to take an honest stance with yourselves lest another attack of Ibn-e-Qasim sends shivers down your spines, lest another Ghauri shakes your foundations, and lest another Ghaznawi massacres you, proving your blood to be the cheapest of all mankind! Have you forgotten your history full of subjugation, humiliation, and insult? Or do you want us to repeat it again? Take heed before it is too late!

So wait! ................ Await now……….! Wait only for five minutes from now! .... Wait for the Mujahideen and Fidayeen of Islam and stop them if you can - who will make you feel the terror of Jihad. Feel the havoc cast into your hearts by Allah, the Almighty, face His Dreadful Punishment, and suffer the results of fighting the Muslims and the Mujahideen. Await the anguish, agony, sorrow and pain. Await, only for 5 minutes, to feel the fear of death...".

The Deccan Mujadeen email, on the other hand, emphasizes political grievances and is more defensive in its posture, still referring to the historical political and military conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, but not with the same focus of punishing Hindus for their religious leanings.

From the Deccan Mujadeen email:

"We inform and warn India's government to stop the continuing injustice against the Muslims. Return all the states seized from the Muslims. We are that "nation" that never forgets its history and repeats its history again and again. The fresh examples of which are Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and Kashmir.

Whatever you had to do you did that and what we had to endure we endured that … This is now our innings and we won't let it go from our hands. We will play our innings with style …

We know India government won't take this warning seriously…. So we are determined that this warning be made real … You have already seen its vivid example in Mumbai.
Hindus, don't think India's ATS [anti-terror squad] and army are laced with modern weapons and are also courageous.

This attack is a reaction to those actions that Hindus have been carrying out since 1947. There would be no actions now, only reactions. … And it will continue till we take revenge for every injustice done to us. … It will continue till we take back all our seized states …

Hindus now give up thinking that martyring of Muslims' mosques, weakening Muslims' economic condition through riots, and putting educated youths in prison will weaken the confidence. No, not at any cost. …

Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan"

This email by the Indian Mujadeen from September 13, 2008, reported on in the following Monday in the Deccan Herald, has a more similar political tone, perhaps nullifying that distinction:

"The Indian Mujahideen, which has claimed responsibility for the Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Jaipur blasts killing at least 130 people in a span of four months, has now threatened to carry out attacks in Mumbai, report Agencies.

Accusing Mumbai Police’s ATS of harassing Muslims, Indian Mujahideen said in its email that it was closely watching the ATS.

'You should know that your acts are not at all left unnoticed; rather we are closely keeping an eye on you and just waiting for the right time to execute your bloodshed. We are aware of your recent raids at Ansarnagar, Mograpada in Andheri and the harassment and trouble you created there for the Muslims,' the group said in the email they sent to various media houses on Saturday evening.

'You threatened to murder them and your mischief went to such an extent that you even dared to abuse and insult Maulana Mahmood-ul-Hasan Qasmi and even misbehaved with the Muslim women and children there,' the email said.

'If this is the degree your arrogance has reached, and if you think that by these stunts you can scare us, then let the Indian Mujahideen warn all the people of Mumbai that whatever deadly attacks Mumbaikars will face in future, their responsibility would lie with the Mumbai ATS and their guardians – Vilasrao Deshmukh and R R Patil,' the email said. 'You are already on our hit-list and this time very very seriously.'

The terror outfit also threatened to target a senior Rajasthan police official. 'All the Mujahideen who shook Jaipur are absolutely safe and secure, and are preparing for our next targets, one of which is A K Jain – the DIG of Rajasthan,' claimed Indian Mujahideen.

Jain has been instrumental in arresting several SIMI members in Rajasthan in connection with the May 13 serial blasts in Jaipur. The mail bears two signatures at the end – Guru Alhindi and al-Arbi."

I don't really know if this is a distinction enough to make a difference. Either the Indian Mujadeen are resposible or they are not. But it does cast some doubt in my mind that this might be the case, especially since the Indian Mujadeen is also a very recently organized group for grievances that I'm sure are widespread throughout India and Pakistan. Meaning groups could crop up anywhere and without notice, until attacks occur. Meaning it still could be an independent group. Hard to know.

What I do know is that those responsible must be brought to justice. I would highly advise that they be killed only if other options are unreasonably dangerous. The political and potential military consequences of capture (meaning more civilians and military personell killed) versus killing those responsible are serious enough to give pause to those who would seek to shoot first and ask questions later.

The resolution of Kashmir needs attention completely independent of these attacks. But working on a resolution of that problem would likely undermine a significant source of grievance for such groups. I don't know enough about India's political system to know in what ways opening up their political process might dissuade Muslims (and Hindu nationalists) from violence, but it is worth exploring.

The more the Indian government stays focussed on bringing those responsible to justice and not on retaliation, the more cooperation they are likely to get from the Muslim population and the less likely they are to engage in the kind of attack that might alienate and radicalize Muslims in the way the Economist is describing in this article. The resolution of Kashmir nor any other political effort should be done in haste as some kind of reinforcement for this behavior. But, long term, finally resolving that matter will go a long way to undermining the political oxygen for groups like this.

Let us hope that the Indian government takes measured action that will leave the people of Mumbai, India, and others more safe rather than less safe as a consequence. We saw how terrorists could provoke a mature democracy like the United States into missteps following 9/11. I am concerned that a more volatile and less grounded democracy like India's will be similarly provoked.

Mistakes will be made. Though, in this game, they have very grave consequences. The most important priority is that they be avoided as much as possible, because people die when they are made, and that we learn from them when they are made, and when people die as a consequence.

There are many in America, today, who are still unwilling to acknowledge our mistakes post-9/11.

But the hopeful fact of American democracy that I pray will be true of India, as well, is that enough people recognized problems in our responses that a reconsideration is being made in the United States for how we respond more thoughtfully and less reactively to future threats.

Let us hope that India follows the wise advice from the Economist, here, and avoids mistakes that could cost more lives.

Facts are a bitch

Amity Shales writes a very nice rebuttal to Paul Krugman's spend-tax-and-regulate proposals, as of late.

The Krugman Recipe for Depression

In a social scientific debate, facts are a bitch. Mr. Krugman is about to discover that they even trump a Nobel Prize.

The most brilliant man in fake news (or any news, for that matter)

A thoughtful profile of the most effective and brilliant modern day Mark Twain.

60 Minutes with Stephen Colbert
by Meowbay

God bless ya, Stephen Colbert.

Don't we all need someone to remind us that even angels have stinky feet.

My generation

This is the way it's supposed to be.



It's a whole new generation.

The big if in the middle of the room

Paul Krugman will lose this debate. Mark my words. Because he's wrong.

About That New New Deal

Two nobel prize winners (among many, many others). One of them has to be right and one of them has to be wrong.

I'll give you a clue about who's wrong. It isn't Milton Friedman. Or Mona Charen, on this question.

"The conventional wisdom has had a rough time of it lately among scholars. You know the fairy tale. You were probably taught it in school. During the 1920s, America practiced laissez-faire economics. The 1920s were seen, as historian Amity Shlaes put it, as a period of 'false growth and low morals.' Greedy businessmen got out of control and created a market crash in 1929. President Hoover, obedient to Republican ideas concerning noninterference in the market, did nothing. The economy spiraled into a depression. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, banished fear, inaugurated the New Deal, and put America back to work.

A series of recent books has demolished the myth. Some of Roosevelt's reforms were salutary (the Securities and Exchange Commission, reform of the Federal Reserve) but the New Deal's chief object was never achieved -- it did not solve the nation's unemployment problem. The CATO Institute's Jim Powell points out in 'FDR's Folly,' 'From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2. At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent. ... Living standards remained depressed until after the war.' Stanford University history professor David Kennedy has acknowledged, 'Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one.'

Amity Shlaes' 'The Forgotten Man' reminds us that FDR was a class warrior with a vengeance, always at pains to pin the nation's ills on 'economic royalists' who had, he claimed, depressed wages, fixed prices, and conspired to keep all of the nation's wealth in their own greedy hands. FDR's war on businessmen (which featured not just rhetorical but actual criminal prosecutions) spread fear and timidity throughout the entrepreneurial sector. Shlaes writes, 'The New Yorker magazine's cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.'

It is only recently that the New Deal myth has really taken hold. At the time there was less pretense. In 'New Deal or Raw Deal?' Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College quotes Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Testifying before the House Ways & Means Committee in May of 1939, the FDR ally and acolyte did not sugarcoat it:

'We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot.'

On balance, the New Deal damaged the nation profoundly by extending and deepening the Great Depression. No other downturn in American history lasted so long or afflicted so many."

Mona Charen and Milton Friedman are right about this. Paul Krugman is wrong. And Mr. Krugman is about to get a serious comeuppance, Nobel Prize or not.

That's why we have social sciences. To keep us honest. Someone is right and someone is wrong here. I have few doubts about who that is.

If Paul Krugman doesn't, he should have doubts very soon. If he's honest, that is.

That's the big if in the middle of the room.

The fruits of a life well lived

What a sweet life.

Indiana woman dies at 115 as world's oldest person

She was a teacher in a one room school house who never touched liquor or tobacco, who loves education, but, following custom, left the field to raise children. She nevered married after her husband died in 1939. And she dies on Thanksgiving, 115 years after her birth.

A long life of family, love, and learning.

Doing good never yielded better rewards.

Godspeed, Edna.

Being bad is so good

The trick is not necessarily to indulge this part of ourselves (though that happens to). It is to embrace it and accept it.

See more Rachael Harris videos at Funny or Die

That's why Jesus said love your neighbor. In his heart, he might be just as big a dick. But, in his life, he's likely to be just as decent a guy.

Happy Thanksiving, everyone.

Kathleen Parker is everything I want in a woman (and she's a hottie)

Goddamn. I am digging Kathleen Parker a lot, these days. It helps that she's hot. But it's far more important that she is brilliant and has my kind of thinking and values.

Looking for Change in the Wrong Places

"Again, setting aside specific policies, Obama's example could have society-altering effects, especially in the African American community. By his example, he telegraphs the following messages: Being smart is good; education is good; being a good father is essential. Being an egghead is cool.

Conservatives insist, correctly, that culture matters. Many liberals think so, too, by the way. Why, some liberals even stay married their entire lives to the same person and raise children to do the same.

You want Ward Cleaver? Meet Barack Obama. Michelle is June Cleaver with a law degree. Family values don't get more traditional than those of the Obamas, who ooze marital bliss and whose adorable daughters make feminist cynics want to bake cookies and learn to smock.

Though we may perish of boredom, the Obamas may do more to elevate the American family than all the pro-marriage initiatives conceived by those who claim to speak for the deity. As a family unit, they're not significantly different from the Bushes, but they can be an inspiration in particular to African Americans.

Despite strides in some areas, the African American community is the most damaged in our culture, in part because of misguided policies that have decimated the family. Aid to Families With Dependent Children, for instance, was predicated on no man in the house, sending fathers fleeing from parental responsibility. Although other demographic groups are fast catching up, blacks today have the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate -- about 70 percent.

The fallout from fatherless homes can be measured in poverty and crime rates. Justice Department figures from mid-2005 show that 12.9 percent of black men in their late 20s were in prison or jail, compared with 4.3 percent of Hispanics and 1.6percent of whites.

Bias undoubtedly plays a part in the imbalance (the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparity is but one example). But the correlation between absent fathers and crime has been well established by decades of social science.

The change we've been waiting for may not be immediately quantifiable, but personal responsibility, educational ambition and smart public diplomacy -- all by example rather than exhortation -- could go a long way toward curing what ails us."

Nothing hotter about a woman who is unapologetically caring, genius, and has the courage of an independent mind.

Kathleen, if your husband ever leaves you, and you need a shoulder to cry on, I am a really great listener (I'll probably tell you to go work things out, but I wouldn't mind a little conversation with you). And if you have a sister, call me.

"An eye for any eye makes the whole world is blind"

For those who yearn for the world to get medieval.

Iranian man sentenced by court to be blinded by acid

It always seems insane to me that we still live in a world that has not learned the lessons about an eye for an eye. And that our excuses, as my main man, Jesus of Nazareth, The Baddest Carpenter in Town, famously opined, always fail to account for the fact that it is not others that most need forgiveness.

It is us.

Climate change and liberal democracy

Bjorn Lomborg writes powerfully in The New Economy about the policy choices we face with climate change.

Misusing the inaction argument

"One commonly repeated argument for doing something about climate change sounds compelling, but turns out to be almost fraudulent. It is based on comparing the cost of action with the cost of inaction, and almost every major politician in the world uses it.

The president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, used the inaction argument when he presented the European Union’s proposal to tackle climate change earlier this year. The EU promised to cut its CO2 emissions by 20 percent by 2020, at a cost that the Commission’s own estimates put at about 0.5 percent of GDP, or roughly €60bn per year. This is obviously a hefty price tag – at least a 50 percent increase in the total cost of the EU – and it will likely be much higher (the Commission has previously estimated the cost to be double its current estimate).

But Barroso’s punchline was that “the cost is low compared to the high price of inaction.” In fact, he forecasted that the price of doing nothing “could even approach 20 percent of GDP.” (Never mind that this cost estimate is probably wildly overestimated – most models show about three percent damages.)

So there you have it. Of course, politicians should be willing to spend 0.5 percent of GDP to avoid a 20 percent cost of GDP. This sounds eminently sensible – until you realise that Barroso is comparing two entirely different issues.

The 0.5 percent-of-GDP expense will reduce emissions ever so slightly (if everyone in the EU actually fulfills their requirements for the rest of the century, global emissions will fall by about four percent). This would reduce the temperature increase expected by the end of the century by just five-hundredths of a degree Celsius (nine-hundredths Fahrenheit). Thus, the EU’s immensely ambitious programme will not stop or even significantly impact global warming.

In other words, if Barroso fears costs of 20 percent of GDP in the year 2100, the 0.5 percent payment every year of this century will do virtually nothing to change that cost. We would still have to pay by the end of the century, only now we would also have made ourselves poorer in the 90 years preceding it.

The sleight of hand works because we assume that the action will cancel all the effects of inaction, whereas of course, nothing like that is true. This becomes much clearer if we substitute much smaller action than Barroso envisions.

For example, say that the EU decides to put up a diamond-studded wind turbine at the Berlaymont headquarters, which will save one ton of CO2 each year. The cost will be $1bn, but the EU says that this is incredibly cheap when compared to the cost of inaction on climate change, which will run into the trillions. It should be obvious that the $1bn windmill doesn’t negate the trillions of dollars of damage from climate change that we still have to pay by the end of the century.

The EU’s argument is similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg. Of course, the aspirin doesn’t prevent that outcome. The inaction argument is really terribly negligent, because it causes us to recommend aspirin and lose sight of smarter actions that might actually save the leg.

Likewise, it is negligent to focus on inefficiently cutting CO2 now because of costs in the distant future that in reality will not be avoided. It stops us from focusing on long-term strategies like investment in energy R&D that would actually solve climate change and at a much lower cost."

The larger question for me on global warming is how we square ourselves with the policy failures of efforts like the Kyoto protocol and engage more effective efforts through more genuine public-private partnership.

I am not encouraged that we will see that kind of genuine partnership anytime soon, given the left-wing celebration of strong-arming public policy questions, these days.

The most promising climate change measures are coming from the market, at this point, I'm convinced. It is not for the failure of good intentions among environmentalists leveraging for regulation. It is because of the general failure of regulatory approaches like Kyoto to deliver when more genuine collaboration is needed to tackle problems like global warming.

It will take some years of failure with this more regulatory approach for liberal demoracies to adopt policies that support more genuine, collaborative private-public partnerships, which are the only efforts that have much change of success.

And thank goodness for a liberal democracy where our policies can be honestly debated and discussed so that our efforts can be focused on solving problems rather than defending our failures.

That broader marketplace of ideas, and not power or even the rule of law, is the brilliance of liberal democracies. And thank goodness we are able to take that fact of liberal democratic life for granted.

Liberal education

A fascinating look at educational opportunity in developing countries at the Economist.

The yawning gap in education within developing countries

"GLOBAL public spending on education rose from a median 4.5% of GDP in 1999 to 4.9% in 2006, according to a new report by UNESCO, the UN's education agency. The poorest countries invested 3.5%, compared with 5.6% by the slightly richer middle income countries, and 5.3% by developed countries. But spending money wisely also matters. Huge inequalities exist between the richest and poorest within many countries. In India, a 17-22 year old in the richest quintile has had an average of 11.1 years in education, compared with only 4.4 years for those in the poorest quintile. This gap is also big in Peru and the Philippines. The difference in Bangladesh is similar to that in Nicargaua, a much richer country, showing it is using resources more effectively."

Check out the article for a fascinating graphic breakdown of average number of years of education in each country.

Education is one of the central matters of concern to me that keeps my liberal commitments honest. It is plainly clear to me that liberal education, meaning the development of the conscience and intellect, is one that is best done consistent with liberal principles, meaning ones that respect independence of thought and action, freedom of choice and conscience, free and honest substantive engagement and learning, and an honest attempt to address inequities while acknowledging that inequalities of effort, commitment, and merit are inevitable in any society, and especially a liberal society that does and should reward merit.

Socialism is not liberal, in this context, insofar as it, inherently violates the consciences and judgments of independent actors in a liberal democracy. A commitment to one's neighbor is neither mutually exclusive with a democracy that respect freedom of conscience and choice and it is best facilitated by that kind of freedom that better acknowledges that coerced commitments are not real commitments at all and that free commitments are the only ones likely to deliver the highest quality opportunities for all people.

Public education in developed countries and developing countries, as conservative free market economist Milton Friedman and liberal poverty economist Amartya Sen both argue, are ones that must occur consistent with liberal principles, meaning a respect for freedom of conscience and choice by rich and poor alike.

Public education, hence, must become more liberal and democratic, meaning more free and self-determined, for real progress to occur on this front and almost all fronts of liberal democratic progress. School choice and commitments to educational opportunity for all children are necesary for this kind of progress. Government-funded education is a compromise on this principle that is worthy in many instances. But it is not the ideal that a more genuinely liberal democratic education - that is voluntarily provided and funded by independent schools, teachers, and administrators and chosen freely by independently-acting parents and students - has to offer.

The compromise of this principle by government funding to assure educational opportunity should not be confused with a more genuinely liberal education, that is freely chosen, engaged, committed to, and funded, to develop free and independent consciences and intellects.

Force is generally inconsistent and mutually exclusive with a genuinely liberal education, except in the case of real physical danger to those involved. It's use should be minimized and avoided as much as is reasonably possible and voluntary efforts should replace compulsory efforts as long as we take the principles of a liberal education and liberal democracy seriously.

This is not just a matter of abstraction. Such education is critical to undermining the oppressive hold of repressive and illiberal governments and institutions around the world. North Korea is no more liberal for its leftist dictatorship than Saddam Hussein was conservative for his right wing authoritariasm, and both, rightly, are most powerfully challenged by citizens with liberal commitments. And liberal education - meaning education that embraces a commitment to free and independent conscience and intellect - is necessary to debate, criticize, and undermine the illiberal commitments of governments organized around force as a governing philosophy rather than by a respect for individual conscience and choice. And those liberal commitments are fundamental to almost all of the most important quantity and quality of life indicators for people around the world.

Freedom makes possible both the safety and substantially better quality of life enjoyed in liberal democracies, and education is fundamental to developing the commitments, including and especially a commitment to reason as the foundation for understanding and resolving important problems in a culture, that guarantee that more people live, live longer, healthier, more decent, more honest, worthwhile lives. Almost all serious quality of life indices correlate broadly with stronger liberal commitments. And liberal education is the fundamental commitment that makes possible others within a culture.

This is one of the most critical questions for the 21st century and future of liberal democracies. The stakes are too high to take liberal education commitments less seriously than they deserve and to guarantee the freedom of conscience and choice that are fundamental to the development of robust liberal democracies that offer better lives for all of us.

This is the commitment of a liberal conscience. That all people should have better lives. No matter who or where they might be.

Ideals and what I can live with

I generally agree with this argument. Though I do not cry when courts affirm individual liberties when they are not explicitly given expression in the law.

Gay Marriage and the California Courts

Griswold v. Connecticut is not based on an explicit protection for privacy in the Constitution. But I do think the individual liberties involved warrant some kind of legal affirmation, even as I prefer that affirmation to come from democratic politics.

I definitely think a culture that affirms individual liberties is a stronger and more reliably mature liberal democratic culture. But I'm not in a hurry to revisit every court decision that affirms liberties based on our liberal democratic traditions.

What matters to me is that America and all liberal democracies take their liberal and democratic traditions more seriously and strengthen their commitments to free and self-governing socieities, independent of courts. Democratic outcomes - referendums, initiatives, legislative decisions, and the individual attitudes in the culture, generally - are better barometers of that commitment. Court rulings, generally, I think, offer protections for freedoms when majorities are not prepared to support them. That is a precarious way to affirm liberty, long term. But it is not a mortal sin. And challenges to majority rule based on principles of individual liberties and constitutional principle is a long and proud tradition in American juris prudence and the history of liberal democracies.

I don't know if majorities support the rights of Aghani women to vote and get an education. I certainly hope they do or will come to such a commitment. But I have no issue when Afghani courts interpreting that Afghani constitutional principles affirm such rights even if they do not explicitly make such affirmations or if majorities do not support them. They may be reversed. They also happen to be on the right side of the question.

Democracy is ideal. Court decisions that come down on the right side I can live with.

The truth will set us free

Thomas Sowell has some very nice perspective on the current economy and its would-be political saviors.

'Jolting the Economy'

From that column:

"Amid all the political and media hysteria, national output has declined by less than one-half of one percent. In fact, it may not have declined even that much-- or at all-- when the statistics are revised later, as they very often are.

We are not talking about the Great Depression, when output dropped by one-third and unemployment soared to 25 percent.

What we are talking about is a golden political opportunity for politicians to use the current financial crisis to fundamentally change an economy that has been successful for more than two centuries, so that politicians can henceforth micro-manage all sorts of businesses and play Robin Hood, taking from those who are not likely to vote for them and transferring part of their earnings to those who will vote for them.

For that, the politicians need lots of hype, and that is being generously supplied by the media.

Whatever the merits of trying to shore up some financial institutions, in order to prevent a major disruption of the credit flows that keep the whole economy going, what has in fact been done has been to create a huge pot of money-- hundreds of billions of dollars-- that politicians can use to give out goodies hither and yon, to whomever they please for whatever reason they please.

No doubt we could all use a few billion dollars every now and then. But the question of who actually gets it will be strictly in the hands of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It is one of the few parts of the legacy of the Bush administration that the Democrats are not likely to criticize.

Much as we may deplore partisanship in Washington, bipartisan disasters are often twice as bad as partisan disasters-- and this is a bipartisan disaster in the making.

Too many people who argue that there is a beneficial role for the government to play in the economy glide swiftly from that to the conclusion that the government will in fact confine itself to playing such a role.

In the light of history, this is a faith which passeth all understanding. Even in the case of the Great Depression of the 1930s, increasing numbers of economists and historians who have looked back at that era have concluded that, on net balance, government intervention prolonged the Great Depression.

Many of those who have, over the years, praised the fact that this was the first time that the federal government took responsibility for trying to get the country out of a depression do not ask what seems like the logical follow-up question: Did this depression therefore end faster than other depressions where the government stood by and did nothing?

The Great Depression of the 1930s was in fact the longest-lasting of all our depressions.

Government policy in the 1930s was another bipartisan disaster. Despite a myth that Herbert Hoover was a "do nothing" president, he was the first President of the United States to step in to try to put the economy back on track.

With the passing years, it has increasingly been recognized that what FDR did was largely a further extension of what Hoover had done. Where Hoover made things worse, FDR made them much worse.

Herbert Hoover did what Barack Obama is proposing to do. Hoover raised taxes on high-income people and put restrictions on international trade, in order to try to save American jobs. It didn't work then and it is not likely to work now.

Perhaps the most disastrous of all the counterproductive policies of the federal government was the National Industrial Recovery Act under FDR, which set out to do exactly what the politicians today want to do-- micro-manage businesses."

The empirics on this are pretty clear, actually, to objective observers who have not bought into the hype. This downturn is not a depression. And even the romanticism of the New Deal legacy reflects a poor and terribly incomplete understanding of the Depression. This was straightforward consensus among economists before the disillusionment with the Bush Administration. I very much doubt that the current politicial moment will sustain a substantial and long-standing change in that consensus.

Because the facts just do not support the revision.

In fact, if there were a period where the facts will flatly contradict an important ideological lens on events, this is as good as period as any.

What matters is what is true, not what I can make a case for. That is the nature of empirical observation and conclusions.

And the truth, mark my words on this one, will set us free.

George Will, pimpin' large

Congress has made bureaucrats into legislators

Sutherland's maxim: Adherents to ideology are at their best when they are illustrating what fuckin' morons adherents to other ideologies are when they are at their worst.

Newsflash: The Rich and Powerful in America Lend a Hand to the Rich and Powerful in America

Progress.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.