Socialism Surveyed and in the Abstract

Read Victor Vashi's story of communism from 1917 to 1967, in entertaining sardonic cartoons, thanks to the digitizing efforts of Jack Lewis at elevenoclock.com.

from How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder? by R.J. Rummel:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)	Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)	Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Robert Owen (1771-1858)	"Karl" Moses Mordecai Marx Levy (1818-1883)
Frederick Engels (1820-1895)	Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov "Lenin" (1870-1924)
Josef Vissarionvitch Dshugashvili "Stalin" (1879-1953)	Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)	Mao Tse Tung (1893-1976)
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)	Fidel Castro (1926-)

from City Journal, 2010-Winter, by Peter Sloterdijk:

The Grasping Hand
The modern democratic state pillages its productive citizens.

To assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it is useful to recall the historical kinship between two movements that emerged at its birth: classical liberalism and anarchism. Both were motivated by the mistaken hypothesis that the world was heading toward an era of the weakening of the state. While liberalism wanted a minimal state that would guide citizens almost imperceptibly, leaving them to go about their business in peace, anarchism called for the total death of the state. Behind these two movements was a hope typical of the European nineteenth century: that man's plunder of man would soon come to an end. In the first case, this would result from the elimination of exploitation by unproductive classes, that is, the nobility and the clergy. In the second case, the key was to reorganize traditional social classes into little groups that would consume what they produced. But the political history of the twentieth century, and not just in its totalitarian extremes, proved unkind to both classical liberalism and anarchism. The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money.

This metamorphosis has resulted, above all, from a prodigious enlargement of the tax base—most notably, with the introduction of the progressive income tax. This tax is the functional equivalent of socialist expropriation. It offers the remarkable advantage of being annually renewable—at least, in the case of those it has not bled dry the previous year. (To appreciate the current tolerance of well-off citizens, recall that when the very first income tax was levied in England, at the rate of 5 percent, Queen Victoria worried that it might have exceeded acceptable limits. Since that day, we have become accustomed to the fact that a handful of productive citizens provide more than half of national income-tax revenues.)

When this levy is combined with a long list of other fees and taxes, which target consumers most of all, this is the surprising result: each year, modern states claim half the economic proceeds of their productive classes and pass them on to tax collectors, and yet these productive classes do not attempt to remedy their situation with the most obvious reaction: an antitax civil rebellion. This submissiveness is a political tour de force that would have made a king's finance minister swoon.

With these considerations in mind, we can see that the question that many European observers are asking during the current economic crisis—“Does capitalism have a future?”—is the wrong one. In fact, we do not live in a capitalist system but under a form of semi-socialism that Europeans tactfully refer to as a “social market economy.” The grasping hand of government releases its takings mainly for the ostensible public interest, funding Sisyphean tasks in the name of “social justice.”

Thus, the direct and selfish exploitation of a feudal era has been transformed in the modern age into a juridically constrained and almost disinterested state kleptocracy. Today, a finance minister is a Robin Hood who has sworn a constitutional oath. The capacity that characterizes the Treasury, to seize with a perfectly clear conscience, is justified in theory as well as in practice by the state's undeniable utility in maintaining social peace—not to mention all the other benefits it hands out. (In all this, corruption remains a limited factor. To test this statement, it suffices to think of the situation in post-Communist Russia, where an ordinary party man like Vladimir Putin has been able, in just a few years as head of state, to amass a personal fortune of more than $20 billion.) Free-market observers of this kleptocratic monster do well to call attention to its dangers: overregulation, which impedes entrepreneurial energy; overtaxation, which punishes success; and excessive debt, the result of budgetary rigor giving way to speculative frivolity.

Free-market authors have also shown how the current situation turns the traditional meaning of exploitation upside down. In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital. This reversal would imply the coming of a post-democratic age.

At present, the main danger to the future of the system involves the growing indebtedness of states intoxicated by Keynesianism. Discreetly and ineluctably, we are heading toward a situation in which debtors will once again dispossess their creditors—as has so often happened in the history of taxation, from the era of the pharaohs to the monetary reforms of the twentieth century. What is new is the gargantuan scale of public debt. Mortgaging, insolvency, monetary reform, or inflation—no matter, the next great expropriations are under way. Today, the state's grasping hand even reaches into the pockets of generations unborn. We have already written the title of the next chapter of our history: “The pillage of the future by the present.”

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher; his article was translated by Alexis Cornel.

from the New Criterion, 2010-Jan, by Roger Kimball:

Introduction: democratic despotism comes of age

An Introduction to “The New Statism and the Assault on Individual Liberty,” a symposium organized jointly by The New Criterion and London's Social Affairs Unit.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
—C. S. Lewis, 1953

This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them for ourselves.
—Ronald Reagan, 1964

Although we have lately seen a sudden upsurge in statist sentiment in this country and in Europe, it is important to understand that statism and the blandishments of socialism are not novelties but peren- nial temptations. Were they novelties they would be less dangerous. The late Irving Kristol, who died last year at 89, was exquisitely sensitive to the role of intellectuals in the metabolism of this debate, and I’d like to start by quoting from a speech he gave to the American Enterprise Institute in 1973. “For two centuries,” Mr. Kristol noted,

the very important people who managed the affairs of this society could not believe in the importance of ideas—until one day they were shocked to discover that their children, having been captured and shaped by certain ideas, were either rebelling against their authority or seceding from their society. The truth is that ideas are all-important. The massive and seemingly solid institutions of any society—the economic institutions, the political institutions, the religious institutions—are always at the mercy of the ideas in the heads of the people who populate these institutions. The leverage of ideas is so immense that a slight change in the intellectual climate can and will—perhaps slowly but nevertheless inexorably—twist a familiar institution into an unrecognizable shape.

The ideas that are percolating down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Capitol Hill, and Brussels these days are not new. That, indeed, is one of the depressing things about the new statism: it inspires a sense of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.” We’ve been down this road before. We know where it leads. It is that forlorn byway that Friedrich von Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. Do we really have to travel down it again?

Perhaps the best anatomy of the sorts of statist initiatives we see popping up all around us these days was given nearly two centuries ago by Alexis de Tocqueville in his dissection of what he called “Democratic Despotism.” In a justly famous passage from Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes this “tutelary despotism” that “does not tyrannize” but rather infantilizes.

Democratic despotism, Tocqueville points out, is unlike despotisms of old. It pre- fers the carrot to the stick. The goal of the operation is the same—the achievement of conformity and the consolidation of power—but the means of choice is not terror but dependence. Accordingly, Tocqueville writes, democratic despotism is despotic at one remove. It does not, unless stymied, terrorize. Rather, it “hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”

For decades, the United States has been drifting towards the shoals of that enslavement. With the ascension of our current President and his plans to inspan us all in his “spread-the-wealth-around” socialism, we are nearing the point of shipwreck. “The devilish genius of this form of tyranny,” as the commentator Michael Ledeen has pointed out, “is that it looks and even acts democratic. We still elect our representatives, and they still ask us for our support… . Freedom is smothered without touching the institutions of political democracy. We act out democratic skits while submitting to an oppressive central power that we ourselves have chosen.” The element of seduction that is so central to this sort of managerial despotism is one of the things that makes it so hard to resist. Its power, Tocquville noted,

is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

I mentioned Hayek a moment ago. In The Road to Serfdom (1943), Hayek reminds us that the upsurge of socialism in a society has an internal as well as an external aspect. Socialism is not only something that the state does to individuals. It is also something that individuals do to themselves when they decide that freedom is too expensive to fight for and that the consolations of dependency are worth the tax on individual liberty.

The really depressing thing about the renewed calls for increased government intervention, more onerous and insinuating regulation, and bailouts for all is what it portends for the future of freedom. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek quoted David Hume’s observation that “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” The biggest challenge we face now is not to our stock portfolios or 401K accounts (renamed “201K accounts” by one wag) but rather the psychological conditions for political liberty, among which a spirit of individual initiative, i.e., taking responsibility for oneself and one’s family, figures prominently.

As Hayek observed, “The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of a people.” It doesn’t happen all at once. You don’t, in a modern democracy, go to bed free on Friday and wake up in chains on Saturday. It takes, Hayek notes, “perhaps… one or two generations.” Where do you suppose we are in the process?

The crucial point, Hayek says, is that “the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.”

If you ask where it all tends, what the change or alteration that socialism (what he also calls “extensive government control”) brings about in the character of a people, you need look no further than Hayek’s title: The Road to Serfdom.

Tocqueville’s and Hayek’s observations are so familiar that I hesitated to trot them out again. But as I listen to our leaders tell critics to “get out of the way” so they can enact ruinous energy legislation or appropriate a sixth of the U.S. economy under the banner of “health care reform,” I wonder whether the significance of their teaching is anywhere near as familiar as it should be.

In October 2008, shortly before the election, Barack Obama told a crowd of his followers that they were only a few days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Question: Do we really want to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America? Of course, people say a lot of grandiose things on the campaign trail, and I suspect that many people regarded candidate Obama’s statement as hustings hyperbole. Since January 20, 2009, however, we have seen that he was in earnest about transforming the United States from a country devoted to democratic capitalism and individual liberty to a socialist regime in which egalitarian- ism, not individual freedom, provides the guiding principle.

One of President Obama’s primary tools to accomplish this goal is money—that ubiquitous but deeply mysterious power that is both one of the world’s greatest engines of liberty and, when frustrated, an awful tool of enslavement. In his book The Servile State, Hilaire Belloc observed, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” This is an insight that democratic despots the world over understand and savor. They make up an anodyne name for the result of their delectation—a “tax code,” for example—but to the rest of us it is indistinguishable from an instrument for the redistribution of wealth.

When it comes to money, President Obama seems curiously divided in his mind. On the one hand, he is not averse to spending gobs and gobs of it—millions, billions, trillions. (A canny bumper sticker: “It’s a good thing Obama doesn’t know what comes after ‘trillion’.”) There’s always more, he seems to think, where that came from. It’s the spigot theory of economics: just turn the handle of government authority, and presto! the tax receipts, the fees, the garnishments, the sundry redistributed adjustments flow in like rain water after a storm.

As I say, money for the President is the great tool—the great weapon, even—of social reconstitution. There are piles and piles of it about, and all he needs to do to fulfill his campaign promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” is move some rather hefty piles from your squares on the gameboard over to the squares marked “nationalized health care,” “educational reform,” “fairness,” and the like.

On the other hand, President Obama is deeply suspicious of money. He seems to believe it carries a moral taint, especially when any significant amount of it finds its way into the hands of ordinary citizens. I don’t mean to suggest that he has any objection to money personally. Clearly, he thinks it is OK that his wife pads off for a photo op at a local soup kitchen in sneakers that cost $540. But in the larger sense—i.e., when he thinks about society as a whole—he deprecates wealth and the acquisitive instincts that make its accumulation possible. It seems to me, though, that there is a lot to be said for Anthony Trollope’s observation, which he puts into the mouth of Plantagenet Palliser, in his novel Can You Forgive Her? Responding to a character who announces that he lacks “mercenary tendencies,” Palliser observes that

There is no vulgar error so vulgar,—that is to say, common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray.

I think Trollope is right. And I believe that abandoning the philosophy of mercenary tendencies, rightly understood (as Tocqueville might put it), is a prescription not only for impoverishment but also for immiseration and, ultimately, for the soft tyranny of democratic despotism.

I know that President Obama is not alone in dissenting from this philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, shared his suspicion of wealth, as did his heir Karl Marx and countless other would-be benefactors of mankind. But who, in the end, has actually benefitted mankind more, the capitalist with his wealth-producing “mercenary tendencies,” or the do-gooder who deprecates wealth (at least in others) for the sake of a “higher” good? Hint: we have here a road paved with good intentions: where do you suppose it leads? Was Lenin malevolent? He didn’t think so. He thought he was laboring on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. Many Western intellectuals believed him. True, his policies—like socialist policies wherever they’re imposed—led to vast impoverishment, loss of freedom, and the growth of an unaccountable ruling nomenklatura. But he didn’t start off wanting to precipitate misery: he meant to bring about paradise on earth.

Like President Obama, Lenin wanted to “spread the wealth around.” And like the President, Lenin saw that to do that you need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights. If you were in earnest about effecting the sort of “redistributive change” that Obama, in an unguarded moment, spoke about, you needed to be bold, move swiftly, and not let yourself be impeded by such petty things as the rule of law. The “stimulus” package. The Chrysler bondholders. Cap-’n’-trade. Government-run health care. We’ve got a utopia to build here: get out of the way!

Last Spring, when the Obama administration took over General Motors and forced out G.M.’s chairman, Rick Waggoner, one commentator spoke of the “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government” this extraordinary intervention signalled. Time was, the role of government in a capitalist society was primarily to secure an environment in which private enterprise could thrive. Today, the role of government is increasingly to nationalize private enterprise, i.e., destroy it in the name of a “higher” good, what President Obama has called with Orwellian piquancy a “new era of responsibility” in which government bureaucrats tell you how to run your business, whom to employ, and how much to pay them.

A “tectonic change in the relationship between business and government”: remember that phrase. And note that a “tectonic,” that is, a fundamental, change between business and government is also a tectonic change between the individual and government. “What our generation has forgotten,” Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, “is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.”

The tectonic change in the relationship between business and government, between the individual and government, signals more than the expansion of government control. It also signals the contraction of individual freedom in the name of what President Obama calls “fairness.” From the very beginning of his campaign, President Obama made it clear that economic “fairness” was his political lodestar. He made it clear, but did we really understand him? “Fairness”: that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Who can be against “fairness”?

But what if by “fairness” he meant not “impartial justice” but “equalized outcomes”? What if by “fairness” he meant “spreading the wealth around”? What then? “Who can doubt,” Hayek asked, “… that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work?”

The chapter of The Road to Serfdom in which these words appear is called “Who, Whom?”—the question that, said Lenin, was the fundamental fulcrum of politics.

“Who, Whom?” Hitherto, the genius of the American system has been to short-circuit that question by distributing the power of the subject. Lenin’s “Who” is no longer a central and centralizing authority but a multiplicity of actors each with his native interests and prerogatives. Edmund Burke spoke of the importance to liberty of those “little platoons” that claim our daily allegiance. James Madison, in Federalist 51, made a similar point when he observed that “the policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives” helped encourage the distribution of power and hence the growth of liberty.

The tectonic change contemplated by the Obama administration would have us disband those little platoons and assimilate ourselves to the swarming army of the state. Madison’s “opposite and rival interests,” for these collectivists, impede the progress of “fairness” and interrupt the process of equalizing wealth.

Earlier in The Federalist, Madison observed that there were “two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.”

Madison thought it self-evident that both courses, being inimical to liberty, spelt disaster. He believed that the protection of that “diversity of faculties” which underwrote the diversity of property was the “first object of government.” Our current masters in Washington disagree. They seem willing to experiment with both of the expedients Madison warned against in order to achieve their egalitarian goals. Last March it was Rick Waggoner who had to go. Last September, we read that the government wishes to determine how much banks will be allowed to pay their employees. And tomorrow? Who can say? When a tectonic change takes place, things can happen awfully fast.

One of the most rebarbative features of the Obama administration’s effort to bring government-control to a life near you is its combination of the antiseptic rhetoric of utilitarian social science with old-fashion- ed central planning. Consider Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who is a top White House advisor on health care reform. Dr. Emanuel has famously argued that doctors “take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously.” He wants to concentrate medical services not on those who need it most—the elderly, seriously impaired children, etc.—but on those who are likely to contribute to “the continuation of the polity,” “ensure healthy future generations,” and so on. Forget about “first do no harm.” “Services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens,” quoth Dr. Emanuel, “are not basic and should not be guaranteed.”

Got a loopy grandparent or a kid who is playing with half-a-deck? What can they contribute to “the continuation of the polity” or “healthy future generations”? The internet blogger Glenn Reynolds made the observation, amusing and scary in equal measure, that what we’re dealing with here bears an awful similarity to the troubled “cash for clunkers” program: “First Grandma’s Caprice then Grandma.”

One of the most depressing things about all these government expropriations is the fact that they operate like a one-way ratchet undermining freedom and extending the control of the state. Once the government sinks its teeth into you, it is extremely difficult to wiggle free. The income tax and social security tax, we tend to forget, were both instituted as temporary, emergency measures. That’s why 1895 is one of my favorite years in U.S. history: in that banner year the Supreme Court ruled that the income tax was unconstitutional. Needless to say, the ruling didn’t last long.

Ultimately, I suspect, President Obama is ostentatiously committed to what he calls “health care reform” (“reform”?) not for medical but for political reasons. By appropriately another sixth of the U.S. economy, he will not help Americans live longer or lead healthier lives. But he will greatly extend the government’s prerogatives over the details of your life.

Contemplating the Democrats’ almost fanatical push to enact health care legislation now, today (forget about actually reading the bill), I thought of Ronald Reagan’s warning about how socialists so often use health care as a wedge to extract not only money but also freedom, including freedom of choice, from the citizenry. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed back in the 1970s, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

My only quibble is with the word “disguise.” The effort to further socialism by means of a government takeover of health care is not something disguised as a humanitarian project. It is a humanitarian project in its purest left-wing form: a humanitarian project imposed on the unwilling “for their own good”—a “good,” naturally, that is defined by a government bureaucracy.

The name of that reluctance President Reagan identified is compassion. Compassion is a noble human emotion. But it can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians and twisted into self-flagellating feelings of guilt, on one side, and the self-regarding emotion of virtue, on the other.

And this brings me to another aspect of the President’s program. There is, he said, “a moral imperative to health care.” Is there? What he meant was that if you agree with his proposal, you are an upstanding citizen who deserves the warm, self-regarding glow of moral infatuation. If you disagree with him, however, you are a greedy, selfish, unenlightened person who needs … well, the President hasn’t gotten around to that part of the scenario yet, except to note that anyone who is solvent can expect higher taxes.

I doubt whether most of the people who turned up at townhall meetings last summer to express their dismay about the President’s plans to revolutionize American health care had Tocqueville or Hayek in mind. But the people that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs disparagingly referred to as the “Brooks Brothers Brigade” sense that a lot is at stake in the controversy over the future of health care. It’s not just a question of what doctors you can see when, or even what sort of doctors will be available to be seen in a government-run health care system. No, it’s a question of what Reagan called “imposing statism” in the name of pursuing a humanitarian project.

More and more people are waking up to the fact that statism is what lurks behind (and not very far behind) the Democratic plans for health care. They sense it, and they don’t like it. This, I think, provides a glimmer of hope, a silver lining, if you will, to the specter of statism that is haunting us. The essays that follow conjure with various manifestations of the specter and go far in restoring a healthy modicum of gloom by explaining why we would be ill advised to put too much faith in the hope those dissenting voices inspire.

Notes

1. “The New Statism and the Assault on Individual Liberty,” a symposium organized jointly by The New Criterion and London’s Social Affairs Unit, took place on September 25, 2009 in New York City. Participants were Jeremy Black, Tim Congdon, Michael Gleba, Daniel Johnson, Roger Kimball, Herbert I. London, Andrew McCarthy, Michael Mosbacher, Charles Murray, James Piereson, David Pryce-Jones, Lionel Shriver, and Mark Steyn. Discussion revolved around earlier versions of the essays printed in this special section.

from Commentary's Contentions blog, 2010-Jan-2, by Jennifer Rubin:

Not as Planned

Obama and the Left more generally expected the financial meltdown of 2008 and the resulting recession to undermine the public's faith in the private sector. As they pushed the Great Depression narrative, they strived to make way for a new, New Deal, in which the public would be willing to accept (in what had heretofore been private-sector decision-making) a far greater degree of government intervention than had been attempted in decades. Government would be entrusted to seize car companies, regulate executive compensation, and direct lending practices. But the “cure” for what supposedly ailed the American economy would not be limited to economic matters or to financial regulation. Obama spoke of a “new foundation,” meaning that government would also seek to expand its reach into health care, as well as to regulate all industries' carbon emissions. A larger government, higher taxes, and a shrunken realm of private decision making would ensue.

But the public remained stubbornly resistant to government power grabs. The increase in spending and massive accumulation of debt spooked them. The obvious inability of the government to “create or save” jobs and its scatterbrained rush to pass health-care reform (thus  taking over a sixth of the economy) did not endear to the public the prospect of a bigger, more powerful government. After less than a full year of Democratic control, the public's faith in big government is on the decline.

It is not only Tea Party protestors and town-hall attendees who have recoiled against the overreach of the Obama agenda. It is the mass of ordinarily nonpartisan independents who have looked upon the corrupt Cash for Cloture deals and the government spend-a-thon with unease. They may not be enamored of big business, but neither are they excited by the prospect of big government, let alone a big government in league with big insurance companies.

Then along comes the Christmas Day bombing plot. The Obama team stumbles about like hapless bureaucrats. First denial that anything much was wrong and then the acknowledgment that yes, they had failed to do their jobs. The “solution” is a flurry of reports and reviews. And we expect to see a series of bureaucratic shuffling, some personnel departures, and some “reforms” that don't amount to much at all other than vows to do what we thought the government was supposed to be doing since 9/11. Meanwhile, the public sees that the only real line of defense comes from private citizens. Their government is, in its most fundamental task, not to be trusted.

Obama's new New Deal initiatives have not worked out as planned. Only a fraction of that ambitious agenda has been enacted. The public, including nonpartisan independents, has been jarred by the ambition of Obama's designs. Large majorities are concerned about the prospect of tax hikes, a massive deficit, and an overactive government. Moreover, there is a growing sense, made worse by the bungling of the Christmas Day bombing, that rather than improve governance, the Obama administration has made things worse.

It is ironic in the extreme that Obama has been unable to dazzle the public with his effectiveness and, more generally, to impress Americans with the ability of the government to reorder society and improve their lives. It was, of course, the Democrats' critique of the Bush administration's competence – its handling of Katrina, the hapless Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, the Walter Reed scandal, the failure of financial oversight, and the mishandling of the pre-surge Iraq war – that formed the basis of their winning campaign rhetoric in 2006 and 2008. The Left assured us that sloth or distain for governance were at the root of the Bush administration's failures but that its own candidates, graduated from the finest schools and enthusiastic proponents of government, would spare Americans from incompetence and corruption and would, moreover, rescue us from the excesses of the private sector. Washington was the place where “good ideas went to die,” Obama told us in the campaign. Puffed up with their own credentials and convinced that they were smarter than all who came before them, the members of Obama's team assured us that this administration would be different. We were to get a cabinet of “geniuses.” Diplomacy was to be “smarter,” science would rule the day, and ideology was out. But alas it was not to be. The basic tasks of government — vetting, not scaring the populace (with a low Air Force One flyover), and rendering a timely decision on war strategy — seemed at times utterly beyond them.

It was perhaps unfortunate that Obama himself showed so little interest in the details of major domestic legislation. It became evident that, really, any health-care bill would do, so long as Obama got his signing ceremony. So we are on the verge of pasing a bill indefensible on the merits and which the public detests. And if Congress wanted to pass a junk-filled stimulus bill, that was alright with Obama as well. Now the public rightly regards it as a failure, a clumsily constructed waste of their tax dollars. We learned that the smart set really didn't care about getting exquisitely crafted legislation passed; they simply wanted to demonstrate their own political muscle.

But the heart of the problem was not in a lack of competence or attention to detail but in arrogance – the hubris of believing that government bureaucracies could micromanage complex decisions and order the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans without severe adverse consequences. Never do Obama and his minions seem to recognize that centralizing and regulating millions and millions of intricate interactions is fraught with peril. They never do acknowledge that the track record of government in duplicating and supplanting free markets and individual decision-making is a poor one indeed. They certainly don't seem to grasp the notion that expanding government and adding trillions to expenditures would merely multiply the opportunities for fraud, corruption, and waste.

So in the end the Obama team has not succeeded in persuading Americans that government should do more, spend more, and be trusted more. For decades, conservatives have made principled arguments as to the dangers of avaricious government, but experience is often the best teacher. After a year of governance by the Obama administration, the public has not learned to love big government but instead has relearned that it is wise to be wary of a growing and intrusive federal government. Had the Obama team been more competent and less ambitious, they might have, by small and irreversible steps, made the case for their ambitious agenda and inured the public to the steady expansion of the public sector. That didn't happen, however, and the result is a new resurgence of anti-government populism and a fair amount of anger. Americans are reaching the conclusion that even when it comes to the most essential function of government, protecting them from foreign enemies, they are being ill-served. Perhaps if government did less, it would attend with greater focus to its most essential tasks.

The Bush administration never recovered the public's confidence after Katrina. Americans had seen enough and thereafter tuned out. We will see if the Obama team can avoid that fate after its first year. It might help their cause if they tried to do less, focused more on the business of governing, and spent less time and effort attacking political enemies and recycling shopworn campaign rhetoric. They won't likely again enjoy the level of goodwill and support that greeted them in the initial days of the administration, but they can perhaps recover a measure of the public's respect by sober, modest, and competent governance.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2010-Jan-4, by Heather Mac Donald:

A Crime Theory Demolished
If poverty is the root cause of lawlessness, why did crime rates fall when joblessness increased?

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the "root causes" theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

The notion that crime is an understandable reaction to poverty and racism took hold in the early 1960s. Sociologists Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin argued that juvenile delinquency was essentially a form of social criticism. Poor minority youth come to understand that the American promise of upward mobility is a sham, after a bigoted society denies them the opportunity to advance. These disillusioned teens then turn to crime out of thwarted expectations.

The theories put forward by Cloward, who spent his career at Columbia University, and Ohlin, who served presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, provided an intellectual foundation for many Great Society-era programs. From the Mobilization for Youth on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1963 through the federal Office of Economic Opportunity and a host of welfare, counseling and job initiatives, their ideas were turned into policy.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration. Even law enforcement officials came to embrace the root causes theory, which let them off the hook for rising lawlessness. Through the late 1980s, the FBI's annual national crime report included the disclaimer that "criminal homicide is largely a societal problem which is beyond the control of the police." Policing, it was understood, can only respond to crime after the fact; preventing it is the domain of government welfare programs.

The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. The academy's commitment to root causes apologetics nevertheless persisted. Andrew Karmen of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice echoed Cloward and Ohlin in 2000 in his book "New York Murder Mystery." Crime, he wrote, is "a distorted form of social protest." And as the current recession deepened, liberal media outlets called for more government social programs to fight the coming crime wave. In late 2008, the New York Times urged President Barack Obama to crank up federal spending on after-school programs, social workers, and summer jobs. "The economic crisis," the paper's editorialists wrote, "has clearly created the conditions for more crime and more gangs—among hopeless, jobless young men in the inner cities."

Even then crime patterns were defying expectations. And by the end of 2009, the purported association between economic hardship and crime was in shambles. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, homicide dropped 10% nationwide in the first six months of 2009; violent crime dropped 4.4% and property crime dropped 6.1%. Car thefts are down nearly 19%. The crime plunge is sharpest in many areas that have been hit the hardest by the housing collapse. Unemployment in California is 12.3%, but homicides in Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, dropped 25% over the course of 2009. Car thefts there are down nearly 20%.

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

***

The spread of data-driven policing has also contributed to the 2000s' crime drop. At the start of the recession, the two police chiefs who confidently announced that their cities' crime rates would remain recession-proof were Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. As New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, Mr. Bratton pioneered the intensive use of crime data to determine policing strategies and to hold precinct commanders accountable—a process known as Compstat. Commissioner Kelly has continued Mr. Bratton's revolutionary policies, leading to New York's stunning 16-year 77% crime drop. The two police leaders were true to their word. In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.

The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality.

The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city's economy revived because crime was cut in half. Keeping crime rates low now is the best guarantee that cities across the country will be able to exploit the inevitable economic recovery when it comes.

Ms. Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

from the New York Times, 2010-Jan-23, printed 2010-Jan-24, p.WK12, by Nicholas D. Kristof:

What Could You Live Without?

It all began with a stop at a red light.

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that's what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It's a book that, frankly, I'd be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

At a time of enormous needs in Haiti and elsewhere, when so many Americans are trying to help Haitians by sending everything from text messages to shoes, the Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference — for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help. In a column a week ago, I described neurological evidence from brain scans that altruism lights up parts of the brain normally associated with more primal gratifications such as food and sex. The Salwens' experience confirms the selfish pleasures of selflessness.

Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house.

“We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can't figure out why everybody wouldn't want that deal.”

One reason for that togetherness was the complex process of deciding how to spend the money. The Salwens researched causes and charities, finally settling on the Hunger Project, a New York City-based international development organization that has a good record of tackling global poverty.

The Salwens pledged $800,000 to sponsor health, microfinancing, food and other programs for about 40 villages in Ghana. They traveled to Ghana with a Hunger Project executive, John Coonrod, who is an inspiration in his own right. Over the years, he and his wife donated so much back from their modest aid-worker salaries that they were among the top Hunger Project donors in New York.

The Salwens' initiative hasn't gone entirely smoothly. Hannah promptly won over her parents, but her younger brother, Joe, was (reassuringly) a red-blooded American boy to whom it wasn't intuitively obvious that life would improve by moving into a smaller house and giving money to poor people. Outvoted and outmaneuvered, Joe gamely went along.

The Salwens also are troubled that some people are reacting negatively to their project, seeing them as sanctimonious showoffs. Or that people are protesting giving to Ghana when there are so many needy Americans.

Still, they have inspired some converts. The people who sold the Salwens their new home were so impressed that they committed $100,000 to the project. And one of Hannah's closest friends, Blaise, pledged half of her baby-sitting savings to an environmental charity.

In writing the book, the Salwens say, the aim wasn't actually to get people to sell their houses. They realize that few people are quite that nutty. Rather, the aim was to encourage people to step off the treadmill of accumulation, to define themselves by what they give as well as by what they possess.

“No one expects anyone to sell a house,” said Hannah, now a high school junior who hopes to become a nurse. “That's kind of a ridiculous thing to do. For us, the house was just something we could live without. It was too big for us. Everyone has too much of something, whether it's time, talent or treasure. Everyone does have their own half, you just have to find it.”

As for Kevin Salwen, he's delighted by what has unfolded since that encounter at the red light.

“This is the most self-interested thing we have ever done,” he said. “I'm thrilled that we can help others. I'm blown away by how much it has helped us.”

from the New York Times, 2010-Jan-16, printed 2010-Jan-17, p.WK10, by Nicholas D. Kristof:

Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving

Want to be happier in 2010? Then try this simple experiment, inspired by recent scholarship in psychology and neurology. Which person would you rather be:

Richard is an ambitious 36-year-old white commodities trader in Florida. He's healthy and drop-dead handsome, lives alone in a house with a pool, and has worked his way through a series of gorgeous women. Richard's job is stressful, but he spent Christmas in Tahiti. Unencumbered, he also has time to indulge such passions as reading (right now he's finishing a book called “Half the Sky”), marathon running and writing poetry. In the last few days, he has been composing an elegy about the Haiti earthquake.

Lorna is a 64-year-old black woman in Boston. She's overweight and unattractive, even after a recent nose job. Lorna is on regular dialysis, but that doesn't impede her active social life or babysitting her grandchildren. A retired school assistant, she is close to her 67-year-old husband and is much respected in her church for directing the music committee and the semiannual blood drive. Lorna believes in tithing (giving 10 percent of her income to charity or the church) and in the last few days has organized a church drive to raise $10,000 for earthquake relief in Haiti.

I adapted those examples from ones that Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, develops in his fascinating book, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” His point is that while most of us might prefer to trade places with Richard, Lorna is probably happier.

Men are no happier than women, and people in sunny areas no happier than people in chillier climates. The evidence on health is complex, but even chronic health problems (like those requiring dialysis) may have surprisingly little long-term effect on happiness, because we adjust to them. Beautiful people aren't happier than ugly people, although cosmetic surgery does seem to leave patients feeling brighter. Whites are happier than blacks, but only very slightly. And young people are actually a bit less happy than older folks, at least up to age 65.

Lorna has a few advantages over Richard. She has less stress and is respected by her peers — factors that make us feel good. Happiness is tied to volunteering and to giving blood, and people with religious faith tend to be happier than those without. A solid marriage is linked to happiness, as is participation in social networks. And one study found that people who focus on achieving wealth and career advancement are less happy than those who focus on good works, religion or spirituality, or friends and family.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees,” Professor Haidt said. “We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don't do as well when freed from hives.”

Happiness is, of course, a complex concept and difficult to measure, and John Stuart Mill had a point when he suggested: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

But in any case, nobility can lead to happiness. Professor Haidt notes that one thing that can make a lasting difference to your contentment is to work with others on a cause larger than yourself.

I see that all the time. I interview people who were busy but reluctantly undertook some good cause because (sigh!) it was the right thing to do. Then they found that this “sacrifice” became a huge source of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.

The implication is that we are hard-wired to be altruistic. To put it another way, it's difficult for humans to be truly selfless, for generosity feels so good.

“The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people,” says Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train, which helps tens of thousands of children each year who are born with cleft lips and cleft palates. Mr. Mullaney was a successful advertising executive, driving a Porsche and taking dates to the Four Seasons, when he felt something was missing and began volunteering for good causes. He ended up leaving the business world to help kids smile again — and all that makes him smile, too.

So at a time of vast needs, from Haiti to our own cities, here's a nice opportunity for symbiosis: so many afflicted people, and so much benefit to us if we try to help them. Let's remember that while charity has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. Helping others may be as primal a human pleasure as food or sex.

from Secular Right, 2009-Dec-26, by Heather Mac Donald:

Post-Christmas economic vent

If I hear one more Democrat (and occasional Republican) in the House or Senate condescend to business, I am going to throw up. Today it's insurance and drug companies, tomorrow it's oil producers, toy companies, banks, chemical manufacturers, or any number of other enterprises that offer necessary or simply life-enhancing products and services. The preening self-righteousness towards for-profit economic activity is not specific to any particular legislative initiative such as “health care reform,” it is part of the psychological make-up of many politicians and huge swathes of educated professionals, including virtually the entire academic world and non-profit sector, the media, and many high-paid lawyers. It is simply unbearable to hear these sheltered senators and congressmen look down upon people who have had the guts to try to create something that other people want to buy; who have had to figure out intricate supply chains and methods of financing; who have had to organize and motivate their employees; and who take financial risks with no guarantee of reward. For the anti-business mindset, the fact that businessmen need to make a profit in order to continue operating renders them prima facie suspect, if it doesn't outright undercut any claim that they might have to contribute to the public good.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders recently encapsulated one fallacy regarding for-profit activity prevalent among intellectual elites: “The point of insurance companies is not to provide health care but to make a profit,” he said, as if these were mutually exclusive goals. Sanders complained that for-profit insurance companies are too bureaucratic and, in a flight of fancy that would have seemed like a fringe conceit just a year ago, asserted that they require government to provide efficiency-inducing competition. The hilarious idea that government is less bureaucratic and more efficient than private sector companies will endure even if the seemingly nine-lived public option finally stays dead.

The anti-business mindset often takes a more specific form: it is “corporations” that are the enemy, not, by implication, the corner grocer. Glenn Greenwald, for example, denounces “corporate interests” as part of a defensible critique of government entanglement with business. My guess, however, is that he sees “corporate interests” as a cancer upon the land in general, not just because Washington bailed out some banks. I have always wondered whether, when unwashed NoGlobal protesters and their more presentable soul-mates in government and Hollywood rail against corporations, they are carefully singling out limited liability for criticism and would shut up if all business were organized as partnerships, or if they are simply using “corporation” as a shorthand for all for-profit activity. I tend towards the latter view.

In any case, this knee-jerk contempt for business is worthy of a pampered adolescent who is searching for a cause with which to display his unique moral sensibility. It is not worthy of an adult who should be able to use his imagination, if not actual experience, to appreciate the extraordinary human effort that has gone into creating the delightful tools that we daily take for granted. On my desk sit various humble objects—a tiny clock, a stapler, a paper clip box, a Lucite cook book stand for holding up drafts and other papers while I type. Each object represents a fractal geometry of complexity, composed as it is of parts that themselves require enterprise to manufacture, assemble, and deliver, all born along on waves of energy and infrastructure to which yet another set of entrepreneurs contributed. The fact that all of those distributors and manufacturers tried to make a profit does not detract from the fact that they offered goods which enhance our lives.

Bernie Sanders presumably thinks that he is worth every penny of his $174,000 salary and not one cent less, for he would never do anything as contemptible as make a profit on his Herculean labors in the Senate. The same goes for the tenured faculty in the nation's most prestigious universities who look down upon corporate profit-takers: each is a bargain at $250,000 a year. Greed is a vice that only affects other people; the beneficiary of a rent-controlled apartment is not being greedy in expecting to pay a below market rent, but merely collecting her due. It's her landlord who's avaricious in thinking he might make a market return on his investment.

Legislative grandiosity is the flip side of the disparagement of business. Legislators portray their passage of bills in heroic terms, as if they were personally responsible for keeping society humming along, even though it's other people who will carry out the actions that the legislators require and without whose daily labors they would have nothing to regulate. Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro exuded magnanimity during a recent House End-of-Year Wrap-Up Session captured on CSPAN, so much so as to result in an unfortunate slip of the tongue,: “This House–we understand, we're there,” she said. “You can count on us because we believe that it's our moral responsibility to make sure that you and your family need our help.”

Health insurance companies may not always act as we would wish, especially since we expect them to function not as actual insurance but as automatic deep pockets for ongoing, foreseeable medical consumption. But to interpret their behavior exclusively as a function of the profit motive is absurd when they operate in a market distorted by government mandates on coverage and limits on where and how they can operate, mandates that are only going to become more complex under the new bills. And whether health care is backstopped by insurance companies or the government will not make a huge difference in the looming question of how society as a whole will pay for ever more complex and costly procedures to prolong human existence past its natural shelf life.

Businesses make negligent as well as reckless mistakes, and irrationality takes as large a toll on economic behavior as on other forms of behavior. Some owners and employees are crooks. I know of no evidence that the scoundrel factor is higher in business than in politics or the non-profit sector, however. Government regulation of business is inevitable; externalities like pollution and noise cannot easily be reduced to optimal levels through market exchange. But let regulation be done with trepidation and humility, in recognition of our ignorance of the myriad factors that go into vibrant economic life. Is it too much to hope that even if most elected bodies are immaculately free of anyone who has owned a business, that some small portion of the political class try hard to imagine the difficulty of charting future growth and hiring with no idea what tax levels or regulatory mandates will be in coming years, much less the difficulty of operating under a burdensome regime of existing taxes and regulations?

It is the ingratitude that kills me the most among anti-business types. The materials that furnish a single room in an American home required daring, perseverance, and organizational skill from millions of individuals over generations. I hope they all got filthy rich.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-8, p.A18:

Why the Berlin Wall Fell
From Truman to Reagan, the benefits of moral clarity.

In the debate over who deserves credit for causing the Berlin Wall to collapse on the night of November 9, 1989, many names come to mind, both great and small.

There was Günter Schabowski, the muddled East German politburo spokesman, who in a live press conference that evening accidentally announced that the country's travel restrictions were to be lifted "immediately." There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.

All of these figures played their part, as did a previous generation of leaders who insisted that the West had a moral duty to defend the little enclave of freedom in Berlin.

Fulfilling that duty came at a price—71 British and American servicemen lost their lives during the Berlin Airlift—that more "pragmatic" politicians might have gladly forgone for the promise of better relations with the Soviets. Not a few NATO generals thought the defense of Berlin needlessly exposed their forces in a militarily indefensible position while giving the Russians an opportunity to blackmail the West as they advanced on strategically more vital ground, particularly Cuba.

Yet if the West's stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance's weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system.

Yet it bears recalling that even these obvious political facts were obscure to many people who lived in freedom and should have known better. "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy," said CBS's Dan Rather just two years before the Wall fell. And when Reagan delivered his historic speech in Berlin calling on Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," he did so after being warned by some of his senior advisers that the language was "unpresidential," and after thousands of protesters had marched through West Berlin in opposition.

It is a tribute to Reagan's moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Nov-4, p.A25, by John Steele Gordon:

Obama and the Liberal Paradigm
The sheep are quite capable of looking out for themselves. Someone tell the Democrats.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama, recently explained the White House war on Fox News as an example of "speaking truth to power." Much of the American political world collapsed in laughter, pointing out that her boss was president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth. His every word is news around the world. Fox News is a cable channel rarely watched by more than a few million people at a time. How could she have so blithely said something completely out-of-sync with reality?

Simple: She's a liberal.

As a liberal she carries around in her head the liberal paradigm of how the world works and what needs to be done to make it work better. There's nothing wrong with that. We all use paradigms to make sense of what we see around us and couldn't get along without them. Unfortunately, the basic liberal paradigm hasn't shifted in a hundred years, while the world we live in has changed utterly since the late 19th century, when modern liberalism was born.

What is that paradigm? The basic premise is that the population is divided into three groups. By far the largest group consists of ordinary people. They are good, God fearing and hard working. But they are also often ignorant of their true self-interest ("What's the matter with Kansas?") and thus easily misled. They are also politically weak and thus need to be protected from the second group, which is politically strong.

The second group, far smaller, are the affluent, successful businessmen, corporate executives and financiers. Capitalists in other words. They are the establishment and it is the establishment that, by definition, runs the country. They are, in the liberal paradigm, smart, ruthless and totally self-interested. They care only about personal gain.

And then there is the third group, those few, those happy few, that band of brothers, the educated and enlightened liberals, who understand what is really going on and want to help the members of the first group to live a better and more satisfying life. Unlike the establishment, which supposedly cares only for itself, liberals supposedly care for society as a whole and have no personal self-interest.

Thus the liberal paradigm divides the American body politic into sheep, wolves, and would-be shepherds. The shepherds must defeat the efforts of the wolves.

This paradigm, while never wholly accurate and, of course, always self-serving (as political philosophies tend to be), had a basis in reality in the late 19th century. Then, industrial capitalism was being born and the rules needed to ensure that it worked for all, not just the capitalists, were only beginning to evolve.

A few lived at an incredible level of affluence, such as can be seen in the summer "cottages" in Newport, R.I., and had disproportionate influence with government. In 1900 one-third of the Senate were millionaires at a time when a million dollars made you very, very rich. But millions of Americans lived in abject poverty, toiling long, dangerous hours as industrial workers or as sharecroppers in the impoverished South. These millions were indeed ignorant and weak.

Even as late as 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his great second inaugural address, could quite accurately note the fact that he could "see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished."

But by that time, liberals had stormed—and taken—the citadel of power. Between 1896 and 1932, the Republicans had been the majority party in this country and the conservatism of that day the ruling doctrine. Then, in 1932, Democrats swept into control of both Congress and the White House. They were now the establishment, as liberalism became the dominant American political philosophy, a status it kept for more than 40 years.

A liberal revolution from the top began as the New Deal created a safety net for American families and reformed the banking and financial systems by greatly enlarging the government and what it regulated. At the end of World War II, college education became far more affordable, thanks to the GI Bill and other measures. The GI Bill also fostered home ownership, which for the first time became the norm among nonfarm families, giving them significant wealth. The sheep were becoming capitalists too.

Between 1947 and the mid-1960s, the civil-rights movement overturned centuries of racial discrimination and greatly narrowed the gap between American claims of liberty and equality and American reality.

By the 1970s, the percentage of Americans living in poverty had been greatly reduced and those still below the poverty line were receiving assistance such as food stamps, housing assistance, and refundable tax credits that lifted most of them above the line. Race was no longer a barrier to accomplishment. The majority of American families now lived at a level of affluence and financial security known only to a few in the early 20th century.

The liberal revolution of the middle third of that century was, in short, one of the greatest—and most peaceful—political triumphs in history. And because of it, most of the sheep are now more than able to look out for themselves, having the means and education to do so. The wolves have been fitted for electric collars that largely keep them from straying into the wrong fold.

Now if only someone would tell the shepherds about their own success.

Ms. Jarrett still sees herself and her political allies as being on the outside, speaking truth to power, even when speaking from the Oval Office. The Congressional Black Caucus still routinely sees a pervasive racism, even though both the president of the United States and the chairman of the Republican National Committee are black. The rich are still looked upon by liberals as enemies of the poor and disadvantaged, even though Mr. Obama not only carried a majority of voters earning less than $50,000 but also a majority of those earning over $200,000. He did, in other words, as well among the wolves as he did among the sheep.

Not only does the liberal paradigm not even come close to agreeing with the social and economic reality on the ground today, worse, it has largely congealed into a political religion, especially in the nearly 30 years since Ronald Reagan shifted the nation's political center of gravity, just as FDR had done 48 years earlier. Since liberals care about the sheep, all who disagree with liberalism must not, making them morally inferior if not downright immoral. Thus the nastiness in American politics is largely on the left. Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, her treatment in the liberal press was ugliness personified.

The conservatives of today bear little resemblance to those of the 1930s that cartoonist Peter Arno immortalized heading down to Manhattan's Trans-Lux theater to hiss newsreels of FDR. They are instead abubble with ideas to reform aspects of American politics and economics that badly need reform, such as the tax and legal systems, and the impending entitlements crisis. They want to utilize the great power of markets to force efficiency, drive down costs, and drive up yields. But liberals refuse to engage those ideas, simply because they are not liberal ideas and must, therefore, be wrong if not the latest plot by the wolves to exploit the sheep.

But in a world where a majority of Americans work at white-collar jobs, have high-school and college degrees, own their own homes, and hold financial securities in their own right, the so-called wolves are now a majority. If liberals don't begin to take that fact into account in formulating policy, the Obama administration will not only be an unsuccessful liberal administration, it may well be the last liberal administration.

Mr. Gordon is the author of "Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt," out in a revised edition by Walker & Co. early next year.

from the Washington Examiner, 2009-Aug-16, by Michael Barone:

Young voters should take another look at Obama

Dear Young Obama Voter,

    Congratulations. You have truly changed America. Those of you under 30 voted 66 percent to 32 percent for Barack Obama, an unprecedented margin. Your elders 30 and over voted for him too, but only by a 50-to-49 percent margin. You converted a 2000-like margin to a solid majority and added significant numbers to the Democratic majorities in Congress.

You voted, as your candidate and our president said, for hope and change. But I ask you to consider whether the policies which the president has proposed and in some cases pushed through really amount to that.

I ask you to examine them through the prism of a book published in 1999, when most of you were too young to vote: “The Future and Its Enemies,” by Virginia Postrel (an Obama voter, too, by the way). Postrel assesses policies based not on whether they are liberal or conservative but on whether they are dynamist — promoting or leaving room for change — or stasist — tending to freeze institutions and people in place.

By my reckoning, the Obama policies are more stasist than dynamist. The unions' card check bill that he backs would effectively abolish the secret ballot in union elections and impose mandatory federal setting of wages and work rules after 120 days of union-management negotiations. Centralized mediators would determine your pay and work rules, modeled perhaps after those between the United Auto Workers and what we used to call the Big Three automakers. They have 5,000 pages of work rules. Don't change that lightbulb; you have to wait for the right union guy to do it. Is this the way to enable you to exercise creativity and initiative in your work?

Then there is the cap-and-trade bill to address what we are told is man-caused global warming. Noble intentions here. But it means paying more for electricity in the meantime for a very distant goal. A similar law in California is threatening blackouts. Renewables sound great, but the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. How is holding down economic growth going to help you to shape your future?

And there is health care. The intention here — Obama said it back in 2003 and hasn't denied it since — is to send us down a road that leads to government-provided health insurance. His latest trial balloon is a centralized medical procedures board that would decide which treatments the government would pay for and which it wouldn't.

This would inevitably stifle innovations in drugs and medical devices — stasism, not dynamism. Centralized government isn't fast on the uptake. I've lived nearly 10 years longer than my grandfathers did because I take pills that didn't exist when they were alive. Don't you want the benefits of innovations and discoveries, like tailored genetic treatments, which don't exist yet? Freezing health care is stasist, not dynamist.

Let's take a look also at foreign policy. You probably didn't like the Iraq war very much, although you might have noticed that we are headed for victory there now with Obama's help, I should note. But I suspect that you do want America to be a force for good in the world.

That leads me to wonder whether you were dismayed when Obama responded with stony indifference to the people in the streets of Iran protesting a fraudulent election and demanding freedom and democracy. Some called for the end of a regime that subordinates women and executes homosexuals, things I'm sure you don't like at all. Although Obama eventually indicated some sympathy, he seemed to regard those demands as a nuisance getting in the way of negotiating with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs.

The foreign policy experts call this “realism.” I call it stasist. It leaves America standing not for hope and change, but for the status quo and despair.

I am sure that you find it inspiring that America elected its first black president (I do, too). And I am sure you appreciate Obama's openness to alternative lifestyles, although you may have noticed that he, like George W. Bush and unlike Dick Cheney, opposes same-sex marriage.

The larger point is this: You want policies that will enable you to choose your future. Obama backs policies that would let centralized authorities choose much of your future for you. Is this the hope and change you want?

Your friend and admirer,
Michael Barone

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Oct-10, p.A14:

The Stressed German Model
It took the Germans 125 years to figure out that their health-care system doesn't work.

What if the Obama health-care proposal turned out to be the biggest public-policy mistake in 125 years?

Yesterday, these columns discussed the Congressional Budget Office's efforts to push the square peg of the Obama plan through the round hole of affordability. Meanwhile in Germany, often cited by American liberals as the "model" of a well-run health-care plan, the political debate is running in the opposite direction. Chancellor Angela Merkel's new coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, is pressing her to claw back the state's participation in a system that now insures nine of 10 Germans.

Germany's health-care system was brought to life in 1883 by Otto von Bismarck and became the model for virtually every such state-directed national insurance plan since. Alas, the German system is starting to come apart at the financial seams. Germany's system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.

Pointedly, the insurers made clear that cutbacks alone won't solve the problem. They said the government would have to consider raising premiums on the insured or, you guessed it, raise taxes. Currently, German workers pay a fixed-rate premium into the insurance scheme; that rate is now set at 14.9% of gross pay.

Chancellor Merkel, something of a political acrobat, was previously allied in coalition with leftist Social Democrats. She's now resisting calls from the Free Democrats to get off the state-pulled health-care train. The FDP's spokesman on health, Daniel Bahr, wants a "shift in direction away from state-run medicine." Why? Because "the current financial figures have showed us that the health-care fund doesn't work."

With Congress inching ever closer to passing a greater federal presence in providing health insurance under ObamaCare, let's hope it doesn't take the U.S. until the year 2134 to figure out it isn't working.

from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009-Aug-21, by Yuri N. Maltsev:

What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition.

These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What's not to like?

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying "They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working," resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today's Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver's salary.

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a "nonpaying" patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually "not available" for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.

Being a People's Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save "precious" X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.

Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl's parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl's grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin's socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the "gray masses" and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.

Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don't count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don't even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.

In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.

Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.

Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]

After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn't it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?

The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of "barbarous" Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In "civilized" England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.

Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.

Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.

In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.

In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the "active taxpayers," enjoys priority treatment.

Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.

Now we in the United States are being prepared for discrimination in treatment of the elderly when it comes to healthcare. Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama's healthcare-reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama's White House chief of staff. Foster Friess reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to

individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.[3]

An equally troubling article, coauthored by Emanuel, appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January 2009. The authors write that

unlike allocation [of healthcare] by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.[4]

Socialized medicine will create massive government bureaucracies — similar to our unified school districts — impose costly job-destroying mandates on employers to provide the coverage, and impose price controls that will inevitably lead to shortages and poor quality of service. It will also lead to nonprice rationing (i.e., rationing based on political considerations, corruption, and nepotism) of healthcare by government bureaucrats.

Real "savings" in a socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and denying care — there is no other way to save. The same arguments were used to defend the cotton farming in the South prior to the Civil War. Slavery certainly "reduced costs" of labor, "eliminated the waste" of bargaining for wages, and avoided "unnecessary duplication and parallelism."

In supporting the call for socialized medicine, American healthcare professionals are like sheep demanding the wolf: they do not understand that the high cost of medical care in the United States is partially based on the fact that American healthcare professionals have the highest level of remuneration in the world. Another source of the high cost of our healthcare is existing government regulations on the industry, regulations that prevent competition from lowering the cost. Existing rules such as "certificates of need," licensing, and other restrictions on the availability of healthcare services prevent competition and, therefore, result in higher prices and fewer services.

Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people's health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and total control.

Most countries enslaved by the Soviet empire moved out of a fully socialized system through privatization and insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others, including many European social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system in the long run and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals and other units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and humane system.

Yuri N. Maltsev, senior fellow of the Mises Institute, worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before defecting to the United States. He is the editor of Requiem for Marx. He teaches economics at Carthage College. Send him mail. See his article archives. Comment on the blog.

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Notes

[1] "Russian Life Expectancy on Downward Trend" (St. Petersburg Times, January 17, 2003).

[2] CRS Report for Congress: "Life Expectancy in the United States." Updated August 16, 2006, Laura B. Shrestha, Order Code RL32792.

[3] Foster Friess, "Can You Believe Denying Health Care to People with Dementia Is Being Considered?" (July 14, 2009). See also Ezekiel J. Emanuel, "Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet"[Download PDF] (The Hastings Center Report, vol. 26, no. 6).

[4] Govind Persad, Alan Wertheimer, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions" (The Lancet, vol. 373, issue 9661).

from the Times of London, 2009-Oct-12, by Anil Dawar:

Iraq veteran dies of cancer after lung transplant from heavy smoker

An Iraq war veteran died after receiving cancerous lungs from a heavy smoker in a transplant.

Matthew Millington, 31, a corporal in the Queen's Royal Lancers, had the operation to save him from an incurable respiratory condition.

But the organs were from a donor who was believed to have smoked 30 to 50 roll-up cigarettes a day. A tumour was found after the transplant, and its growth was accelerated by the drugs that Mr Millington took to prevent his body rejecting the organs.

Because he was a cancer patient, he was not allowed to receive a further pair of lungs, under hospital rules. The soldier had radiotherapy but died at home in Stoke-on-Trent in February last year.

His widow, Siobhan, said: “All Matthew wanted was another set of lungs. He said: `They have given me a dud pair, get me another set'. He thought he could beat it, but his condition deteriorated so fast from then.”

Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, the country's main heart and lung transplant centre, carried out the operation. It said that early X-rays on the organs did not find any signs of cancer.

Mr Millington had learnt that he had a serious lung condition in 2006 and was given two years to live unless he had a transplant.

A donor was found and the double lung transplant went ahead in April 2007. The cancer was discovered only six months after the operation, because of a lack of communication between radiographers and consultants. The tumour had grown from 9mm to 13mm in that period.

An inquest was told last week that an internal investigation at Papworth pinpointed a string of problems, including difficulties with communication, record-keeping and patient handover.

In Mr Millington's case a radiographer had failed to highlight the growth of the cancerous tumour.

Discounting verdicts of neglect or misadventure, Ian Smith, the North Staffordshire Coroner, delivered a narrative verdict, recording that Mr Millington had died from “complications of transplant surgery”.

The hospital defended using smokers' lungs for transplants, saying that all organs were screened rigorously.

Speaking after the inquest, Mr Millington's father Lester, 61, said: “I have never contemplated further action. I wanted to get to the inquest but I was 99.9 per cent certain that nothing they did wrong was done wrong wilfully. It is a fact that 51 per cent of all lungs transplanted at Papworth come from donors who smoked.

“Without using such lungs many more people would die without receiving a transplant.”

These next two articles show how the pursuit of heaven on earth — a condition of pervasive and easy material provision — ends up creating a sort of hell on earth, a pervasive desperate misery of the walking dead and criminally insane.

from the American Enterprise Institute via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-24, by Charles Murray:

Europe Syndrome
The trouble with taking the trouble out of everything.

When I began to work on this lecture a few months ago, I was feeling abashed because I knew I couldn't talk about either of the topics that were of the gravest national importance. Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not publicly said a word on foreign policy since I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1973. Regarding the economic crisis, I am not an economist. In fact, I am so naive about economics that I continue to think that we have a financial meltdown because the federal government, in its infinite wisdom, has for the last two administrations aggressively pushed policies that made it possible for clever people to get rich by lending money to people who were unlikely to pay it back.

The topic I wanted to talk about was one that has been at the center of my own concerns for more than 20 years, but I was afraid it would seem remote from these urgent immediate issues. How times change. As of the morning of Feb. 24, this is the text I had written to introduce the topic: "It isn't usually put this way, but the advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe?" And then on the evening of the 24th, President Obama unveiled his domestic agenda to Congress, and now everybody is putting it that way. As Charles Krauthammer observed a few days later, "We've been trying to figure out who Barack Obama is, where he's really from. From Hawaii? Indonesia? The Ivy League? Chicago? Now we know: he's a Swede."

In short, the question has suddenly become urgently relevant because President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe's social democrats. There's nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe's regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America's and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.

Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don't seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There's a lot to like--a lot to love--about day-to-day life in Europe, something that should be kept in mind when I get to some less complimentary observations.

The European model can't continue to work much longer. Europe's catastrophically low birthrates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that. So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe's demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?

Tonight I will argue for the answer "no," but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies, and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.

My text is drawn from Federalist 62, probably written by James Madison: "A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained." Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish--it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right.

First, the problem with the European model, namely: It drains too much of the life from life. And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors--even more to the lives of janitors--as it does to the lives of CEOs.

I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world's great religions or one of the world's great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase "a life well-lived" has meaning. That's the phrase I'll use from now on.

And since happiness is a word that gets thrown around too casually, the phrase I'll use from now on is "deep satisfactions." I'm talking about the kinds of things that we look back upon when we reach old age and let us decide that we can be proud of who we have been and what we have done. Or not.

To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies. Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation and faith. Two clarifications: "Community" can embrace people who are scattered geographically. "Vocation" can include avocations or causes.

It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are. The stuff of life--the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships--coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness--occurs within those four institutions.

Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Put aside all the sophisticated ways of conceptualizing governmental functions and think of it in this simplistic way: Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things. Sometimes, taking the trouble out of things is a good idea. Having an effective police force takes some of the trouble out of walking home safely at night, and I'm glad it does.

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. It's inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it's so much fun to respond to our neighbors' needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met--family and community really do have the action--then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

If we knew that leaving these functions in the hands of families and communities led to legions of neglected children and neglected neighbors, and taking them away from families and communities led to happy children and happy neighbors, then it would be possible to say that the cost is worth it. But that's not what happened when the U.S. welfare state expanded. We have seen growing legions of children raised in unimaginably awful circumstances, not because of material poverty but because of dysfunctional families, and the collapse of functioning neighborhoods into Hobbesian all-against-all free-fire zones.

Meanwhile, we have exacted costs that are seldom considered but are hugely important. Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people needed to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn't affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: "He is a man who pulls his own weight." "He's a good provider." If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn't. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people--already has stripped people--of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, "I made a difference."

I have been making a number of claims with no data. The data exist. I could document the role of the welfare state in destroying the family in low-income communities. I could cite extensive quantitative evidence of decline in civic engagement and document the displacement effect that government intervention has had on civic engagement. But such evidence focuses on those near the bottom of society where the American welfare state has been most intrusive. If we want to know where America as a whole is headed--its destination--we should look to Europe.

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

What's happening? Call it the Europe Syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. After the speech, a few of the 20-something members of the audience approached and said plainly that the phrase "a life well-lived" did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality. Let me emphasize "spreading." I'm not talking about all Europeans, by any means. That mentality goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble--and, after all, what good are they, really? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

The same self-absorption in whiling away life as pleasantly as possible explains why Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. When life is a matter of whiling away the time, the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening. What explains Europe's military impotence? I am surely simplifying, but this has to be part of it: If the purpose of life is to while away the time as pleasantly as possible, what can be worth dying for?

I stand in awe of Europe's past. Which makes Europe's present all the more dispiriting. And should make its present something that concentrates our minds wonderfully, for every element of the Europe Syndrome is infiltrating American life as well.

We are seeing that infiltration appear most obviously among those who are most openly attached to the European model--namely, America's social democrats, heavily represented in university faculties and the most fashionable neighborhoods of our great cities. There are a whole lot of them within a couple of Metro stops from this hotel. We know from databases such as the General Social Survey that among those who self-identify as liberal or extremely liberal, secularism is close to European levels. Birthrates are close to European levels. Charitable giving is close to European levels. (That's material that Arthur Brooks has put together.) There is every reason to believe that when Americans embrace the European model, they begin to behave like Europeans.

This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians. (If that seems too harsh, I am sure that the Republican politicians in the audience will understand when I say that the last dozen years do raise a credibility problem when we now hear you say nice things about fiscal restraint and limited government.)

And yet there is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, 21st-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.

The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard's Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled "Consilience." As the 21st century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.

What are they finding? I'm afraid that I don't have anything to report that you will find shocking. For example, science is proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that males and females respond differently to babies. You heard it here first. The specific findings aren't so important at this point--we are just at the beginning of a very steep learning curve. Rather, it is the tendency of the findings that lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring, and they offer nothing but bad news for social democrats.

Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I will label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise."

The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people--men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays, the children of poor people and the children of rich people--will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life--the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. For the last 40 years, this premise has justified thousands of pages of government regulations and legislation that has reached into everything from the paperwork required to fire someone to the funding of high school wrestling teams. Everything that we associate with the phrase "politically correct" eventually comes back to the equality premise. Every form of affirmative action derives from it. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that it is true.

Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. Gender differences will be first, because the growth in knowledge about the ways that men and women are different is growing by far the most rapidly. I'm betting that the Harvard faculty of the year 2020 will look back on the Larry Summers affair in the same way that they think about the Scopes trial--the enlightened versus the benighted--and will have achieved complete amnesia about their own formerly benighted opinions.

There is no reason to fear this new knowledge. Differences among groups will cut in many different directions, and everybody will be able to weight the differences so that their group's advantages turn out to be the most important to them. Liberals will not be obliged to give up their concerns about systemic unfairnesses. But groups of people will turn out to be different from each other, on average, and those differences will also produce group differences in outcomes in life, on average, that everyone knows are not the product of discrimination and inadequate government regulation.

And a void will have developed in the moral universe of the left. If social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the restoration of the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by open, abundant opportunity for individuals. It is to be measured by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.

The second bedrock premise of the social democratic agenda is what I call the New Man premise, borrowing the old Communist claim that it would create a "New Man" by remaking human nature. This premise says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions.

The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will broadly confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise human observers have thought for thousands of years, and that is going to be wonderful news for those of us who are already basing our policy analyses on that assumption.

The effects on the policy debate are going to be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe--the single most important driving force behind the growth of the underclass. But while I and other scholars have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new ingenious program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding and they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, that little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. These same reasons explain why child abuse is, and always will be, concentrated among family structures in which the live-in male is not the married biological father. And these same reasons explain why society's attempts to compensate for the lack of married biological fathers don't work and will never work.

Once again, there's no reason to be frightened of this new knowledge. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. Social democrats will simply have to stop making glib claims that the traditional family is just one of many equally valid alternatives. They will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth. The same concrete effects of the new knowledge will make us rethink every domain in which the central government has imposed its judgment on how people ought to live their lives--in schools, workplaces, the courts, social services, as well as the family. And that will make the job of people like me much easier.

But the real effect is going to be much more profound than making my job easier. The 20th century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the twentieth century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, the "Nicomachean Ethics" had nothing to teach us.

The nice thing about adolescence is that it is temporary, and, when it passes, people discover that their parents were smarter than they thought. I think that may be happening with the advent of the new century, as postmodernist answers to solemn questions about human existence start to wear thin--we're growing out of adolescence. The kinds of scientific advances in understanding human nature are going to accelerate that process. All of us who deal in social policy will be thinking less like adolescents, entranced with the most titillating new idea, and thinking more like grown-ups.

That will not get rid of the slippery slope that America is sliding down toward the European model. For that, this new raw material for reform--namely, a lot more people thinking like grown-ups--must be translated into a kind of political Great Awakening among America's elites.

I use the phrase "Great Awakening" to evoke a particular kind of event. American history has seen three religious revivals known as Great Awakenings--some say four. They were not dispassionate, polite reconsiderations of opinions. They were renewals of faith, felt in the gut.

I use the word "elites" to talk about the small minority of the population that has disproportionate influence over the culture, economy and governance of the country. I realize that to use that word makes many Americans uncomfortable. But every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America's elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands. We have a lot of examples of both kinds in this room tonight.

When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America's elites, what I mean is that America's elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it. Let me close with a few remarks about what that will entail.

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I'm thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn't seem to be any good reason for it. That's quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America--by and large, Americans celebrate others' success instead of resenting it. That's just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism--the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.

Underlying these symptoms of American exceptionalism are the underlying exceptional dynamics of American life. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a famous book describing the nature of that more fundamental exceptionalism back in the 1830s. He found American life characterized by two apparently conflicting themes. The first was the passion with which Americans pursued their individual interests, and made no bones about it--that's what America was all about, they kept telling Tocqueville. But at the same time, Tocqueville kept coming up against this phenomenal American passion for forming associations to deal with every conceivable problem, voluntarily taking up public affairs, and tending to the needs of their communities. How could this be? Because, Americans told Tocqueville, there's no conflict. "In the United States," Tocqueville writes, "hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue. . . . They do not deny that every man may follow his own interest; but they endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous." And then he concludes, "I shall not here enter into the reasons they allege. . . . Suffice it to say, they have convinced their fellow countrymen."

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone's imagination, and it has been wonderful. But it isn't something in the water that has made us that way. It comes from the cultural capital generated by the system that the Founders laid down, a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government's job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government's job to stage-manage how people interact with each other. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we love about Americans can go away. In some circles, they are going away.

Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don't get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I've got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.

The center still holds. It's the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it's the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It's not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities--"gated" literally or figuratively--where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.

Haven't the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today's highly specialized workplaces.

Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers and factory workers--and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There's nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.

But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.

I am not suggesting that America's elites sacrifice their own self-interest for everybody else. That would be really un-American. I just want to accelerate a rediscovery of what that self-interest is. Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well-lived requires engagement with those around us. That is reality, not idealism. It is appropriate to think that a political Great Awakening among the elites can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more fun to lead a textured life, and to be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives. Perhaps events will help us out here--remember what Irving Kristol has been saying for years: "There's nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be cured by a long, hard depression."

What it comes down to is that America's elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. I am not being theoretical. Not everybody in this room shares the beliefs I have been expressing, but a lot of us do. To those of you who do, I say soberly and without hyperbole, that this is the hour. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. And so it is our job to make the case for that reawakening. It won't happen by appealing to people on the basis of lower marginal tax rates or keeping a health care system that lets them choose their own doctor. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.

Mr. Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the recipient of AEI's 2009 Irving Kristol Award. He delivered this lecture at the award dinner earlier this month.

from City Journal, 2008-Winter, by Theodore Dalrymple:

The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare
Novelist J. G. Ballard exposes the fragility of the affluent society.

Despite unprecedented prosperity, we British are not as happy as we should be, at least if the causes of human happiness were mainly economic. It turns out, however, that ever-rising consumption is not the same thing as ever-greater contentment. Yet no one is quite sure what else is necessary. Antidepressants in the water supply, perhaps? Urban life—and in the modern world, most life is urban—has an unpleasant edge in Britain, even in the midst of plenty. You hardly dare look a stranger in the eye, lest he take violent offense; the young, poor and prosperous alike, have imposed a curfew on the old after dark, and on everyone on Friday and Saturday nights; the age at which fellow citizens provoke fear declines constantly, so that one avoids even aggregations of eight-year-olds, as though they were piranhas in a jungle river.

The British state, for its part, is able to bully and regulate at will, thanks to technology—yet it seems to carry out these actions for their own sake, not for any higher purpose. The privatization of morality is so complete that no code of conduct is generally accepted, save that you should do what you can get away with; sufficient unto the day is the pleasure thereof. Nowhere in the developed world has civilization gone so fast and so far into reverse as here, at least to the extent to which civilization is made up of the small change and amenities of life.

No contemporary British writer captures our malaise better than does J. G. Ballard. In a writing career dating back half a century now, he has explored with acuity, from the aerie of his respectable suburban home outside London, the anxieties of modern existence—of what he calls the marriage of reason and nightmare. The reason is our technological advance, the nightmare the uses to which we have put it.

Much in Ballard’s biography explains his sensitivity to aspects of modern decomposition that escape more superficial observers. But a biography cannot explain everything: as Pasteur once said, chance favors only a mind prepared. It is not only experience, therefore, but reflection upon it that makes the writer. A rich seam of ore is worthless without the will and ability to mine it.

Ballard’s ore is his childhood. Born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of well-to-do British parents, he did not come to Britain until he was 16. The defining experience of his life, coloring all of his writing, was his internment by the Japanese, at 13, in a civilian camp during World War II. But it was not the internment alone that marked him; rather, it was the contrast with his earlier life. “Anyone who has experienced a war at first hand knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality,” Ballard has observed. “You never feel quite the same again. It’s like walking away from a plane crash; the world changes for you forever.”

The protagonist of his autobiographical 1984 novel, Empire of the Sun, is Jim, a British boy also interned by the Japanese near Shanghai. Jim has led a privileged existence in a luxurious house with nine household servants, whom he knows not by name but by function or position, such as Amah, Number One Boy, and Number Two Boy. For Jim, the servants are not full human beings but animated objects whose purpose is to do his bidding.

Neither especially good nor especially bad, rather a normal, thoughtless boy, he inherits the habit of command and takes his privileged way of life for granted. Not that he fails to notice the difference between his situation and that of most of the population around him; on the contrary, he is curious about life outside the European enclave. It is just that the difference for him is a brute fact about the constitution of the universe.

With the outbreak of war, everything changes. The Japanese sink a British ship and capture an American one, overthrowing the racial hierarchy. An amah slaps Jim in the face on no real provocation. He realizes suddenly two things about her that might have been evident earlier, had he stopped to think about them: first, that her life of constant labor has given her considerable strength; and second, that her previous passive obedience flowed neither from consent nor from lack of feeling but from fear, coercion, and an absence of alternatives. In that slap is concentrated all the resentment, humiliation, and hatred that an adult placed at the orders of a privileged and spoiled child comes to feel; and thus the Japanese victory is also an irreversible moral education for Jim. He will never again be able to conceive of the world as made solely for his convenience.

More than the racial hierarchy is overturned. In the struggle for survival that follows the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Jim discovers many things: that civilized conduct is a veneer that unaccustomed hardship strips away; that previously prominent people can become insignificant under new conditions; that pride of race, of nation, of position are no protection against demoralization; that cruelty is common and self-sacrifice rare; in short, that everything that he has assumed about the world is wrong.

In Empire of the Sun, Ballard describes childhood sights that must affect a person’s outlook forever: “Fifty yards away the corpse of a young Chinese woman floated among the sampans, heels rotating around her head as if unsure in what direction to point that day.” On the way to the camp where he will be interned, illness and death already striking down his fellow prisoners, Jim takes in his surroundings: “It seemed that the two missionary women on the floor were barely alive, with blanched lips and eyes like those of poisoned mice. Flies swarmed over their faces, darting in and out of their nostrils. . . . Their husbands sat side by side and stared at them in a resigned way, as if a taste for lying on the floor was a minor eccentricity shared by their wives.”

Jim learns that the survival instinct easily trumps most forms of human solidarity. Desperate, his group of prisoners reaches a camp where a British official, evidently left some power and discretion, refuses them entry, fearing that they will spread disease. They must seek another camp; more prisoners die on the way.

The internment camp in which Jim eventually finds himself fosters a horrifying loss of moral compunction, but it has its compensations. He forms an alliance of convenience with a young American, Basie, a small-time crook and wheeler-dealer of the kind that tends to do well in such situations. Ballard contrasts Basie with Jim’s father, a stern and upright, if distant, figure. “At home, if he did anything wrong, the consequences seemed to overlay everything for days,” Ballard writes. “With Basie they vanished instantly. For the first time in his life Jim felt free to do what he wanted.”

In other words, the breakdown of the formalized social order, and its replacement with one based on more ruthless, informal, spontaneously generated rules, can liberate in a certain sense, in that it permits what was previously impermissible. In Freudian terms, the id escapes the power of the superego; what results both repels and attracts. This lesson Ballard never forgot.

Ballard arrived in England during the austere postwar years, the austerity lengthened by government policy that saw in it an opportunity for ideologically inspired social engineering. (Even now, one occasionally senses nostalgia in medical journals for the era of rationing, which imposed a scientifically approved diet on the population.) Ballard began medical school, but dropped out after two years to become a writer. He never entirely lost his interest in medicine, however, and it is worth noting that doctors are important figures in his novels, the first of which came out in 1962.

All of Ballard’s novels have a Robinson Crusoe theme: What happens to man when the props of civilization are removed from him, as they so easily are, by external circumstances or by the operation of his secret desires or by both in concert? Ballard’s past gave him an awareness of the fragility of things, even when they appear most solid; and in the introduction to his collected short stories, he tells us that he is “interested in the real future that I could see approaching.” His method: extrapolate something—a trend, a feeling of dissatisfaction—that he detects in the present; magnify it; and then examine its consequences. He is a recorder of what he calls “the visionary present,” a sociological Swift who claims (half-mistakenly, I think) that he does not write with a moral purpose but instead serves as “a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.”

In Ballard’s earlier novels, the decomposition of society results largely from natural processes. For example, in his debut novel, The Drowned World, the earth has undergone an extremely rapid warming. (Ballard has an uncanny ability to anticipate future anxieties.) This warming, however, is the consequence not of man’s activities but rather of huge sunspots. The sea has risen, flooding almost everything. London is under water, with only the upper heights of the taller buildings left above the surface. Most of the population has retreated to the cooler Arctic circle, while tropical vegetation has taken over the remaining landmasses; the fauna has begun swiftly to devolve to the Triassic era.

In these circumstances, it is not only the physical environment that changes, notes Dr. Bodkin, one of the book’s characters. “How often most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons all too well,” he points out. “However selective the conscious mind may be, most biological memories are unpleasant ones, echoes of danger and terror. Nothing endures for so long as fear.” He adds: “Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs.”

Later in Ballard’s work, as in his 1973 novel Concrete Island, the cause of the regression to the primitive becomes man-made. “Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane in central London,” the story begins. Maitland’s car has a blowout at 70 miles per hour, and it plunges 30 yards down an embankment. Maitland finds himself in a small piece of wasteland, from which the only escape is up the embankment to the highway. He climbs up and tries to attract attention, but “his jacket and trousers were stained with sweat, mud and engine grease—few drivers, even if they did notice him, would be eager to give him a lift. Besides, it would be almost impossible to slow down here and stop. The pressure of the following traffic . . . forced them on relentlessly.”

A passing taxi driver sees him and taps his head, signaling that Maitland must be mad. The castaway’s situation is a vision of hell: “Horns blared endlessly as the three lines of vehicles, tail lights flaring, moved towards this junction. As Maitland stood weakly by the roadside, waving a feeble hand, it seemed to him that every vehicle in London had passed and re-passed him a dozen times, the drivers and passengers deliberately ignoring him in a vast spontaneous conspiracy.” Trying to cross the highway, he is injured and thrown back down the embankment. He cannot escape from his desolate patch, isolated amid an agglomeration of millions of people. Now he must live by his wits, wresting from the wasteland whatever living he can.

It is significant that Maitland is an architect, for it is the architects, with their modernist dreams of making the world anew according to implacably abstract principles, who have created the wasteland in the first place. Ballard captures the socially isolating nature of modern architecture—and the modern way of life associated with it—with great symbolic force. The taxi driver, encased in his cage of pressed steel, can see in Maitland only a lunatic with whom he shares no humanity. The other drivers have lost their ability to choose: once on the road, they must inexorably move forward. They do not control the situation; the situation controls them. What should liberate—the car, with its theoretical ability to take you anywhere you want to go, whenever you want to go—becomes dehumanizing.

In the same year, Ballard published his most controversial book, Crash, later made into an equally disturbing film by David Cronenberg. The book is a kind of visionary reductio ad absurdum of what Ballard sees as the lack of meaning in modern material abundance, in which erotic and violent sensationalism replace transcendent purpose: the book’s characters speed to the sites of auto accidents to seek sexual congress with the dying bodies and torn metal. Ballard’s method is Swift’s, though with a less general target. To object that Ballard exaggerates the existential predicament of the modern middle classes is to miss the point, just as to object that Swift exaggerates man’s absurdity, pretensions, and nastiness is to miss the point.

In his next book, High-Rise, published in 1975, Ballard sets a small civil war in a luxurious 40-story apartment building, where “the regime of trivial disputes and irritations . . . provided [the] only corporate life” of the 2,000 inhabitants. Robert Laing is a doctor who is divorced, like all of Ballard’s protagonists.

“This over-priced cell, slotted almost at random into the cliff face of the apartment building, he had bought after his divorce specifically for its peace, quiet and anonymity,” Ballard writes. It seems to be part of the modern condition that people find difficulty in living together, preferring an isolation in which human contact becomes superficial, fleeting, and primarily instrumental to immediate needs or desires.

Where people have few affective ties but nonetheless live together in close proximity, the potential for conflict is great. Though all the residents are well-heeled, a version of class war breaks out in the high-rise, pitting the residents of the upper floors, who have paid the most for their apartments, against those of the lower floors. Boredom and a lack of common purpose provoke aggression, and self-destruction follows. Prosperity is not enough.

If anything, Ballard’s vision has darkened. Twenty years after High-Rise, prosperity had increased enormously, and Ballard published Cocaine Nights, an attack on the very idea of the good life engendered by British consumer society. The novel is set in imaginary rich expatriate enclaves on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, towns “without either centre or suburbs, that seem to be little more than dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools.” As one character says, “It’s Europe’s future. Everywhere will be like this soon.”

The utter vacuity of the abundant life that the inhabitants have worked to achieve, enabling them to retire before 50, is reflected in the enclaves’ architecture and social atmosphere. “I looked down on an endless terrain of picture windows, patios and miniature pools,” relates the protagonist, a travel writer:

Together they had a curiously calming effect, as if these residential compounds were a series of psychological pens that soothed and domesticated. . . . Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.

Everywhere satellite dishes cupped the sky like begging bowls. The residents had retreated to their shady lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes.

The residents are refugees from a disordered world: “There’s excellent security and not a trace of graffiti anywhere—most people’s idea of paradise today.” Freed from economic anxiety, they are also “refugees from time”: in fact, they have “travelled to the far side of boredom” and are now “desperate for new vices.”

A young tennis coach, Crawford, responsible for arranging the social life of the enclaves, hits on the idea of crime as the solution to the prevailing boredom. Unknowingly, he recapitulates sociologist Emil Durkheim’s view that criminals fulfill an important social function by providing the rest of the population with a cause for solidarity: for one can exercise solidarity only against something and somebody else. “How do you energize people, give them some sense of community?” Crawford asks. Politics is boring, religion too demanding. “Only one thing is left which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. . . . Crime and transgressive behaviour. [They] provoke us and tap our need for strong emotion, quicken the nervous system and jump the synapses deadened by leisure and inaction.” His conclusion: “A certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.”

By arranging for crimes to be committed at random, including a deliberate fire that kills five, Crawford brings the enclaves back to life, including cultural life. The residents start to play music and participate in theater productions. Instead of living in solipsistic isolation, they now meet regularly. Ballard is not suggesting that the immolation of people is a worthwhile price if only people take to the violin and footlights as a result. He is suggesting that, absent a transcendent purpose, material affluence is not sufficient—and may lead to boredom, perversity, and self-destruction.

In his two most recent novels, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, Ballard treats England as a country gripped by a consumerist fever, half-aware that something more is necessary to lead a bearable human life, and thus vulnerable to an inchoate revolutionism whose inspiration is part fascist, part socialist. The books’ characters are, as usual in Ballard, educated and middle class; no member of the underclass ever appears in his pages. This is not accidental. It is the educated class that is essential to running the country and that sets its moral tone; but “sheltered by benevolent shopping malls,” Ballard writes in Kingdom Come, it “waits patiently for the nightmares that will wake [it] into a more passionate world.” Believing in nothing, sated materially, it is capable of anything to escape boredom.

This represents an important insight. When I briefly served as a kind of vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper—it sent me anywhere the British gathered to behave badly—I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors. They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians. It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.

In Millennium People, the residents of an affluent housing project called Chelsea Marina “had set about dismantling their middle-class world. They lit bonfires of books and paintings, educational toys and videos. . . . They had quietly discarded their world as if putting out their rubbish for collection. All over England an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.”

This strikes me as a suggestive metaphor for much that has happened over the last four decades, not only in England (though especially here) but also throughout parts of Western society. We have become bored with what we have inherited, to which, for lack of talent, we have contributed so humiliatingly little. Ballard understands why educated people, haunted by the pointlessness of their lives, feel the need to protest, and he satirizes it in Millennium People. The book’s protagonist, a psychologist, infiltrates the growing middle-class revolutionary movement and attends a protest against a cat show in a London exhibition hall with Angela, a revolutionary:

Angela stared across the road with narrowed eyes and all a suburbanite’s capacity for moral outrage. Walking around the exhibition two hours earlier, I was impressed by her unswerving commitment to the welfare of these luxurious pets. The protest rallies I had recently attended against globalisation, nuclear power and the World Bank were violent but well thought out. By contrast, this demonstration seemed endearingly Quixotic in its detachment from reality. I tried to point this out to Angela as we strolled along the line of cages.

“Angela, they look so happy. . . . They’re wonderfully cared for. We’re trying to rescue them from heaven.”

Angela never varied her step. “How do you know?”

“Just watch them.” We stopped in front of a row of Abyssinians so deeply immersed in the luxury of being themselves that they barely noticed the admiring crowds. “They’re not exactly unhappy. They’d be prowling around, trying to get out of the cages.”

“They’re drugged.” Angela’s brows knotted. “No living creature should be caged. This isn’t a cat show, it’s a concentration camp.”

“Still, they are rather gorgeous.”

“They’re bred for death, not life. The rest of the litter are drowned at birth. It’s a vicious eugenic experiment, the sort of thing Dr. Mengele got up to.”

The press recently ran obituaries of Peter Cadogan, whom one paper called a “professional protester.” Another wrote that Cadogan “spent fifty years on a long quest of resistance to global injustices.” He appeared inseparable from a megaphone, and no man would have been more disappointed to wake one day to a world denuded of injustice. Apparently, someone read the protest poems of William Blake to him on his deathbed, and these roused him temporarily from a coma. Protest was the meaning of his life. His dying words evoked Blake: “Live differently.” Not better, but differently.

This mind-set can result in the violence from which, as Ballard discovered early in life, we are always but a hairbreadth away, however solidly founded our comfort may seem. Civilization’s fragility does not make it unreal or valueless—quite the reverse. And while I suspect that Ballard would dislike seeing conservative implications drawn from his work, they are most certainly there.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

from City Journal, 2009-Winter, by Theodore Dalrymple:

The Persistence of Ideology
Grand ideas still drive history.

Corbis Ideological politics: the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem salutes Bosnian Muslim recruits to the Waffen-SS in 1943.

In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell published The End of Ideology, in which he argued that ideology—understood in the sense of a coherent, single-minded philosophical outlook or system of abstractions intended as much as a lever to change society as a description to explain it—was dead, at least in the West, and in the United States in particular. A combination of democracy and mass prosperity had “solved” the political question that had agitated humanity since the time of Plato. There were to be no more grand and transformative, if woefully erroneous, ideas; all that remained was public administration, with, at most, squabbles over small details of policy. The new version of the old saw, mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body, was a capitalist economy in a liberal democratic polity. That was the lesson of history.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were reforming—indeed collapsing—so rapidly that it became clear that Communism could not long survive anywhere in Europe, Francis Fukuyama went one step beyond Bell and wrote an essay for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” In this soon-to-be-famous article, later expanded into a book, Fukuyama suggested that the end of ideology that Bell saw in the West was now global. By “the end of history,” he did not mean the end of events, of course; one team or another would continue to win the Super Bowl, and there might yet be wars between national rivals. But broadly, history had given its lesson and mankind had taken it. Henceforth, those who resisted the march of liberal democracy were like the Luddites, those English workers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution who smashed machines, blaming them for destroying the independent livelihoods of workers at home.

At the end of his essay, however, Fukuyama—more concerned to understand the world than to change it, by contrast with Marx—implicitly raised the question of the role of ideology in the world’s moral economy. With no ideological struggles to occupy their minds, what will intellectuals have to do or think about? Virtually by definition, they like to address themselves to large and general questions, not small and particular ones: as Isaiah Berlin would say, by temperament, they are hedgehogs, who know one large thing, not foxes, who know many small things. Fukuyama admitted that he would miss ideology, if only as something to oppose. “I have ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its North Atlantic and Asian offshoots,” he wrote. “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

As it turned out, of course, we did not have long (let alone centuries) to suffer existential boredom. Our dogmatic slumbers—to use Kant’s phrase for the philosophic state from which reading David Hume roused him—had barely begun when a group of young fanatics flew commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, thus demonstrating that pronouncements of the death of both ideology and history were somewhat premature.

In truth, we should have known it, or at least guessed it, without needing to be reminded. Fukuyama’s concluding sentences contain a hint of the psychological function that ideology plays. It is not just disgruntlement with the state of the world that stimulates the development and adoption of ideologies. After all, disgruntlement with society there has always been and always will be. Dissatisfaction is the permanent state of mankind, at least of civilized mankind. Not every dissatisfied man is an ideologist, however: for if he were, there would hardly be anyone who was not. Yet ideology, at least as a mass phenomenon, is a comparatively recent development in human history.

Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.

If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be.

One of the first to notice the politicization of intellectuals was the French writer Julien Benda, whose 1927 La trahison des clercs—“the treason of the clerks,” with “clerk” understood in its medieval sense as an educated person distinct from the uneducated laity—gave a phrase to educated discourse. Today, people most frequently use the phrase to signify the allegiance that intellectuals gave to Communism, despite the evident fact that the establishment of Communist regimes led everywhere and always to a decrease in the kind of intellectual freedom and respect for individual rights that intellectuals claimed to defend.

Benda meant something much wider by it, though support for Communism would have come under his rubric: the increasing tendency of intellectuals to pursue lines of thought not for the sake of truth, or for guiding humanity sub specie aeternitatis, but for the sake of attaining power by adopting, justifying, and manipulating the current political passions of sections of humanity, whether national, racial, religious, or economic. The political passions that Benda most feared when he wrote his book were nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism, which then had plenty of intellectual apologists, and which indeed soon proved cataclysmic in their effects; but really he was defending the autonomy of intellectual and artistic life from political imperatives.

That ideological ways of thinking have survived the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would not have surprised Benda. The collapse did severely reduce Marxism’s attractiveness, and despite decades of attempts by intellectuals to dissociate the doctrine’s supposed merits from the horrors of the Soviet system, it was only natural that many people believed that the death of Marxism meant the death of ideology itself. But as Benda might have predicted, what resulted instead was the balkanization of ideology—the emergence of a wider choice of ideologies for adoption by those so inclined.

The most obvious example of an ideology that came into prominence—or better, prominently into our consciousness—after Communism’s fall was Islamism. Because of its emphasis on returning to Islamic purity, and its apparent—indeed noisy—rejection of modernity, most people failed to notice how modern a phenomenon Islamism was, not just in time but in spirit. This is evident from reading just one of Islamism’s foundational texts: Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, first published in 1964. The imprint of Marxism-Leninism is deep upon it, especially the Leninist component.

Qutb starts with cultural criticism that some might find eerily prescient. “The leadership of mankind by Western man is now on the decline, not because Western culture has become poor materially or because its economic and military power has become weak,” he writes. “The period of the Western system has come to an end primarily because it is deprived of those life-giving values which enabled it to be the leader of mankind.” Since, according to Qutb, those “life-giving values” cannot come from the Eastern Bloc, he thinks (like Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentinean dictator, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister) that a Third Way must exist: which, he says, can only be Islam.

Just as in Marx only the proletariat bears the whole of humanity’s interests, so in Qutb only Muslims (true ones, that is) do. Everyone else is a factionalist. In Qutb’s conception, the state withers away under Islam, just as it does—according to Marx—under Communism, once the true form is established. In Marx, the withering away comes about because there are no sectional material interests left that require a state to enforce them; in Qutb, there is no sectional interest left once true Islam is established because everyone obeys God’s law without the need for interpretation and therefore for interpreters. And when all obey God’s law, no conflict can arise because the law is perfect; therefore there is no need for a state apparatus.

One finds a unity of theory and praxis in both Qutb’s Islamism and Marxism-Leninism. “Philosophy and revolution are inseparable,” said Raya Dunayevskaya, once Trotsky’s secretary and a prominent American Marxist (insofar as such can be said to have existed). And here is Qutb: “Thus these two—preaching and the movement—united, confront ‘the human situation’ with all the necessary methods. For the achievement of freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth—it is necessary that these methods should work side by side.”

Like Lenin, Qutb thought that violence would be necessary against the ruling class (of bourgeois in Lenin’s case, unbelievers in Qutb’s): “Those who have usurped the authority of God and are oppressing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching.” Again like Lenin, Qutb believed that until human authority disappeared, the leader’s authority must be complete. Referring to “the Arab” of the Meccan period—an age whose moral qualities he wants to restore—Qutb says: “He was to be trained to follow the discipline of a community which is under the direction of a leader, and to refer to this leader in every matter and to obey his injunctions, even though they might be against his habit or taste.” Not much there with which Lenin could have disagreed. The British Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote of himself: “The Party had the first, or more precisely, the only real claim on our lives. . . . Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed.”

Qutb is as explicit as Lenin that his party should be a vanguard and not a mass party, for only a vanguard will prove sufficiently dedicated to bring about the revolution. And like Leninism, Qutb’s Islamism is dialectical:

[Islam] does not face practical problems with abstract theories, nor does it confront various stages with unchangeable means. Those who talk about Jihaad in Islam and quote Qur’anic verses do not take into account this aspect, nor do they understand the nature of the various stages through which the movement develops, or the relationship of the verses revealed at various occasions with each stage.

Compare this with Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder:

Right doctrinairism persisted in recognizing only the old forms, and became utterly bankrupt, for it did not notice the new content. Left doctrinairism persists in the unconditional repudiation of certain old forms, failing to see that the new content is forcing its way through all and sundry forms, that it is our duty as Communists to master all forms, to learn how, with the maximum rapidity, to supplement one form with another, to substitute one for another, and to adapt our tactics to any such change that does not come from our class or from our efforts.

There are many other parallels between Leninism and Qutb’s Islamism, among them the incompatibility of each with anything else, entailing a fight to the finish supposedly followed by permanent bliss for the whole of mankind; a tension between complete determinism (by history and by God, respectively) and the call to intense activism; and the view that only with the installation of their systems does Man become truly himself. For Qutb’s worldview, therefore, the term Islamo-Leninism would be a more accurate description than Islamofascism.

Qutb was a strange man: he never married, for example, because (so he claimed) he found no woman of sufficient purity for him. You wouldn’t need to be Freud to find the explanation suspect, or to find his reaction to Greeley, Colorado, in 1950, where he spent time on a scholarship—he saw it as a hotbed of unrestrained vice—somewhat hysterical, a cover for something seething deeply and disturbingly inside him. Devotion to an ideology can provide an answer of sorts to personal problems, and since personal problems are common, it isn’t surprising that a number of people choose ideology as the solution.

Ideological thinking is not confined to the Islamists in our midst. The need for a simplifying lens that can screen out the intractabilities of life, and of our own lives in particular, springs eternal; and with the demise of Marxism in the West, at least in its most economistic form, a variety of substitute ideologies have arisen from which the disgruntled may choose.

Most started life as legitimate complaints, but as political reforms dealt with reasonable demands, the demands transformed themselves into ideologies, thus illustrating a fact of human psychology: rage is not always proportionate to its occasion but can be a powerful reward in itself. Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation.

How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity! At all costs, one must keep at bay the realization that came early in life to John Stuart Mill, as he described it in his Autobiography. He asked himself:

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

This is the question that all ideologists fear, and it explains why reform, far from delighting them, only increases their anxiety and rage. It also explains why traditional religious belief is not an ideology in the sense in which I am using the term, for unlike ideology, it explicitly recognizes the limitations of earthly existence, what we can expect of it, and what we can do by our own unaided efforts. Some ideologies have the flavor of religion; but the absolute certainty of, say, the Anabaptists of Münster, or of today’s Islamists, is ultimately irreligious, since they claimed or claim to know in the very last detail what God requires of us.

The most popular and widest-ranging ideology in the West today is environmentalism, replacing not only Marxism but all the nationalist and xenophobic ideologies that Benda accused intellectuals of espousing in the 1920s. Now, no one who has suffered respiratory difficulties because of smog, or seen the effects of unrestrained industrial pollution, can be indifferent to the environmental consequences of man’s activities; pure laissez-faire will not do. But it isn’t difficult to spot in environmentalists’ work something more than mere concern with a practical problem. Their writings often show themselves akin to the calls to repentance of seventeenth-century divines in the face of plague epidemics, but with the patina of rationality that every ideology needs to disguise its true source in existential angst.

For example, a recent column in the Guardian, by the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, carried the headline the planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us. Monbiot, it is true, does not offer us heaven on earth if we follow his prescriptions; only the bare—and by no means certain, for “we might have left it too late”—avoidance of total biological annihilation. But behind Monbiot’s urgency, even hysteria, one senses a deep lust for power. He cannot really believe what he says, for starters. “Do we want to be remembered,” he asks rhetorically, “as the generation that saved the banks but let the biosphere collapse?” If it is really true that we must either have “total energy renewal” or die, however, we cannot be remembered as the generation that let the biosphere collapse, for if we let it collapse, ex hypothesi no one will be around to remember us. This reminds me of patients I used to see who would threaten suicide, in the clear expectation of a long life ahead, unless someone did what they wanted. And though Monbiot says that it is uncertain that anything we do now will make any difference, he nevertheless proposes that every human being on the earth follow his prescriptions.

The environmentalist ideology threatens to make serious inroads into the rule of law in Britain. This past September, six environmentalists were acquitted of having caused $50,000 worth of damage to a power station—not because they did not do it but because four witnesses, including a Greenlander, testified to the reality of global warming.

One recalls the disastrous 1878 jury acquittal in St. Petersburg of Vera Zasulich for the attempted assassination of General Trepov, on the grounds of the supposed purity of her motives. The acquittal destroyed all hope of establishing the rule of law in Russia and ushered in an age of terrorism that led directly to one of the greatest catastrophes in human history.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is Not with a Bang but a Whimper.

from City Journal online, 2009-Apr-27, by Theodore Dalrymple:

Between Experience and Reflection
Paul Hollander anatomizes ideology, evil, and human contradiction.

The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism, by Paul Hollander (Lexington Books, 291 pp., $39.95)

Sociologists do not always write with clarity, let alone with grace. A friend of mine studying sociology once showed me some of the writing of the late Talcott Parsons, a longtime professor at Harvard, and I thought that anyone who waded through its obscurities deserved a degree for effort and determination alone, though not for wisdom and judgment.

Paul Hollander is not one of those sociologists who disdains to make his meaning clear to the average man, or at least to the average educated man. Though English was not his mother tongue, he writes with force, clarity, and even elegance. More important still, he does not treat human beings as if they were iron filings in a magnetic field. He knows that the search for meaning is one of man’s most salient characteristics, and he is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it.

Hollander is preeminently what one might call a sociologist of ideology, or perhaps a psychosociologist of ideology, because the history of individual intellectuals, of which he has accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge, interests him as much as that of groups. He is best known for his now-classic book Political Pilgrims, which examined the phenomenon of twentieth-century Western intellectuals who allowed themselves to be seduced and duped by radical revolutionary regimes of the most patent despotism and brutality. How and why did so many intelligent, cultivated, and educated people come to believe such obvious nonsense? Pilgrims was a tragicomic study of how the cherished ideas of the self-important can so easily overwhelm their common sense, and how education can serve to blind as well as to enlighten.

His most recent book, a collection of mainly short pieces, takes its title from Hollander’s acute observations of anti-Americanism, both foreign and domestic. America, he notes in The Only Superpower, is seen as the most modern of all countries, in the vanguard of almost everything, so all the discontents and disappointments of modernity—which are many, serious, and often contradictory—are laid at its door. For Hollander, anti-Americanism is a form of inverted utopianism: if it weren’t for America, mankind would be living in a latter-day Garden of Eden.

Other essays offer insight into the life of our societies. Hollander can find social significance in the apparently trivial detail, like the phrase uttered by all of his retired friends and colleagues: “Busier than ever.” (I have used it myself, often, since I retired from hospital practice.) Why should the elderly in our society be busier than ever rather than, say, contemplative, as they are in other societies? Secularization has led to the general belief that human life has no transcendent meaning beyond itself; it is necessary, therefore, to pack as much into it as possible, to prolong it as long as possible, and to ward off disturbing thoughts of dissolution. Ceaseless activity will accomplish these things. The hyperactivity of American retirees suggests that religious belief is much less rooted in American life than is commonly believed. Americans, and modern Europeans, have no answer to Dryden’s question:

Hast thou not, yet, propos’d some certain end
To which thy life, thy every act may tend?

Another small phenomenon that Hollander analyzes with wit and compassion is the personal ads in the New York Review of Books. He finds them significant for two reasons. First, they suggest a degree of social isolation: substantial numbers of intelligent and educated people are unable to find partners by the customary routes of work, friendship, community, and so forth. There is an underlying melancholy in this.

Second, the self-descriptions of the people who place the personal ads are revealing of the tastes, worldview, and ideals of a sector of the population that is important well beyond its demographic size. Readers of the Review are, of course, likely to be members of the liberal intelligentsia. Their ads give a powerful impression not so much of hypocrisy as of lack of self-knowledge. The ads’ authors claim to be profoundly individual, yet there is an underlying uniformity and conventionality to everything that they say about themselves. Their desire to escape convention is deeply conventional. Their opinions are democratic, but their tastes are exclusive: Tuscany and good claret mean more to them than beach resorts and the Boston Red Sox. They think of themselves as funny and demand humor in others, but they succeed in conveying only earnestness and the impression of deadening solemnity. (Demanding that someone be funny is a bit like demanding that he be natural for the camera.) Contented with, and even complacent about, their position in the world, they somehow see themselves as enemies of the status quo. They are ideologically egalitarian, but psychologically elitist: Lord, make everyone equal, but not just yet.

With their memories of the sixties, when to be young was very heaven, they still believe that an oppositional stance in pursuit of perfection is virtuous in itself—indeed, is the prime or sole content of virtue. And it is this belief that renders them interesting to Hollander, for it makes genuine moral reflection about the nature of various governments and policies impossible. It transforms merely personal discontents into matters of supposedly great general importance.

Near the end of the book, Hollander provides an understated account of his own intellectual development. Born in 1932 a bourgeois, assimilated Jew in Hungary, he escaped death toward the end of World War II by successfully posing as a Gentile. The Communist regime installed in Hungary after the war was less life-threatening than the Nazi occupiers had been, but still horribly despotic, economically disastrous, and suspicious of his family because of its bourgeois past. Having witnessed slaughter in the streets in the 1940s, he saw it again in 1956, the year he managed to escape to the West.

These experiences were surely enough to make anyone distrust totalizing ideologies of whatever stripe; but studying in England, Hollander also came under the influence of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that human desires and desiderata are permanently in conflict with one another. (Hollander’s piece on travel in this volume illustrates how educated, prosperous, but slightly dissatisfied Westerners roam the world in search of self-contradictory gratifications; I blushed to see myself portrayed in this way.)

His background makes clear why Hollander has always been interested in evil, and why he sees the avoidance of evil as politically even more important than the quest for the good. Man is permanently dissatisfied with his lot because he wants contradictory things simultaneously: excitement and security, anonymity and community, routine and variety, and so on. No political arrangements will ever satisfy him entirely; this does not mean that hell on earth is unavoidable, though it has been often enough produced by those who believe they can reconcile the irreconcilable by means of absolute power.

It is a pleasure to read a sociologist who can distinguish so clearly and with wit the less than perfect from the evil; who understands the benefits of environmental conservation without turning such conservation into a quasi-totalitarian ideology; who can see the frivolity, vulgarity, and worthlessness of industrially produced popular culture while appreciating just how quickly dislike of such culture can mutate into contempt for the people who consume it; who, in short, keeps the limits of human possibilities constantly before him. Paul Hollander’s work is an example of the dialectic between lived experience and abstract reflection, of which all work in the humanities should—but alas, seldom does—partake.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

from the Claremont Review of Books, 2009-Feb-5, via the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-18, by William Voegeli:

The Roots of Liberal Condescension
Snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major.

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion. The comedian Bill Maher scoffed at the idea that "this stewardess" would be first in the line of succession. The scorn moved The Atlantic Monthly's Clive Crook to write that "the metropolitan liberal, in my experience, regards overt religious identity as vulgar, and evangelical Christianity as an infallible marker of mental retardation. Flag-waving patriotism is seen as a joke and an embarrassment."

The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Buckley's identification of the political fault line running beneath the campus quadrangle was confirmed by "UD," a blogger for "Inside Higher Ed." Belittling Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho, UD concluded, "A lot of Americans don't seem to like highly educated people, and they don't want them running the country." He continued:

We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents' religion. If they don't get this in college, they're not going to get it anywhere else.

Thus, higher education is remedial education, and the affliction it remedies is an American upbringing.

Buckley, it must be noted, was an improbable champion of conservative populism. By 1963, still in his 30s, he had already created a public persona "that may be unique in our cultural history," according to a recent Boston Review article by the journalist William Hogeland. "Buckley's perfectly phrased insults and languorous polysyllabery made him the pop-culture model of intellectual, cultural, and verbal advancement, an unflappable connoisseur, guardian of the best ever thought and said by man." Even when siding with the masses against the professoriate, Buckley formulated his preference with the sort of fusty grammatical precision ("I should sooner live") appreciated in faculty lounges but alien to VFW halls.

We can make sense of this incongruity by moving beyond his famous line about the telephone directory to the rarely quoted explanation for why he would oppose being governed by eminent scholars:

Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors—who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify; and, when they are paying homage to the wisdom of our ancestors, tend to do so with a kind of condescension toward those whose accomplishments we long since surpassed.

Later in the essay, "The Aimlessness of American Education," Buckley elaborated on the "common premise" the university rejected: "The Ten Commandments do not sit about shaking, awaiting their inevitable deposition by some swashbuckling professor of ethics. Certain great truths have been apprehended. In the field of morality, all the basic truths have been apprehended."

Buckley's position, then, is not really populist. The ism of populism is the idea that the people are inherently more sound and virtuous than the elites. Buckley is saying, less categorically, that we live in an age when the people happen to possess better judgment than the professors. If the reverse were true, if the professors had more respect than the people for God's laws and tradition's wisdom, Buckley's argument would have favored entrusting government pari passu (as he would have said) to scholars instead of citizens.

What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the "democracy of the dead," incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.

The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring. Their "intellectual arrogance" is a consequence of the assumptions of progressivism, an ism that treats progress as the fundamental reality. The belief in progress is the belief that the present is better and wiser than the past, and the future will be better and wiser than the present. Truths outside of history, such as the laws of nature and nature's God, either don't exist, can't be known, or don't matter. Unlike the Marxist, the progressive does not believe history is following a defined path to a specific, inevitable conclusion. Rather, the evolution of human society is constant and eternal. Its entirety is unknowable, the idea that it has an ultimate destination a complete misconception, but history's next phase can be discerned by some better than others.

By virtue of being highly educated, eminent scholars can see farther over the horizon than their countrymen and mediate the transition from where we are to where we are going. The most important progressive, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University and of the American Political Science Association before he became president of the United States, said that if a statesman is to be a leader, he must assess "the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics." It's counterproductive for the statesman to lecture or hector, but the superiority of his insight into the direction of historical development is not in doubt: "The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend them sight; they may blunder: he must set them right."

Progressives and their liberal progeny have found it increasingly difficult to maintain a respectful attitude toward the citizens who need to be led to a better future, despite Wilson's own insistence on such respect for fellow citizens. "No reform may succeed for which the major thought of the nation is not prepared," he wrote. "The instructed few may not be safe leaders, except in so far as they have communicated their instruction to the many, except in so far as they have transmuted their thought into a common, a popular thought."

At one level, the problem is simply pedagogical. The professor cannot impart to the students lessons they are not equipped to absorb. The calculus lecture will fail, no matter how well it has been prepared, if it is delivered to students who can't multiply. The political leader, like the actor or teacher, must know his audience—know its needs and its limitations.

The harder part about following Wilson's advice is political. The professor who tries to teach students lessons they are not prepared to learn runs the risk of being tuned out. In a democracy, the leader who tries to direct the many where they are not prepared to go runs the risk of being voted out. The leader needs to "test and calculate" the nation's readiness to move to its next stage of development, but he must do so "very circumspectly." The perfectly circumspect statesman will lead the people without their even realizing they have been led—persuading them not only to go to history's next destination, but also that it is exactly where they had been intending to travel all along.

The statesmanship Wilson called for is rare for two reasons. First, the circumspection he sought is hard to render. It requires penetrating discernment of the people's undefined aspirations, and then enormous subtlety in addressing the people so that they embrace, as their own idea, the leader's perception of "the direction of the nation's permanent forces."

Second, it is hard to want to render. Ronald Reagan used to say, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." Not many people indifferent to getting the credit wind up in politics, however. The statesmanship Wilson described becomes more effective as the statesman becomes more self-effacing. The sort of leader happy to accept being forgotten by history and taken for granted by his contemporaries if it means making a big difference is rare, at best. Wilson himself found it hard to follow his own advice when it mattered. Georges Clemenceau's famous complaint that Wilson's Fourteen Points were four more than God handed down does not suggest that Wilson's peers found him diffident or circumspect.

The desire for distinction is not simply a problem for democracy, however, but a problem of democracy. People who have social ambitions, but not necessarily political ones, will find it gratifying to regard themselves and be regarded by others as among Wilson's "instructed few," and appalling to be lumped together with the uninstructed many. "Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," said Samuel Johnson. In our age of widespread affluence, when people can be dangerously well-fed without being rich, the desire to be numbered among the wise when smiles are shared becomes especially urgent. As Leon Wieseltier wrote about the controversial New Yorker cover depicting Michelle and Barack Obama as violent radicals, "The image was the creation of people for whom there is almost nothing more mortifying than not being in on the joke. That is the bridge and tunnel of the soul."

Aristocracy hasn't shown signs of staging a comeback since Tocqueville wrote "Democracy in America" 175 years ago. We should feel safer than he did, then, in taking note of its virtues. Rigid hierarchies often got things horribly wrong, conferring power and prestige on fools, thugs and slobs, while consigning people who had much to offer to marginalized, precarious lives. There must have been something restful, however, about life in a society where people weren't constantly trying to prove themselves.

The only sort of aristocracy tolerable to a democratic age is a natural aristocracy, where earning eminence, an opportunity closed to none, is the sole path to it. The social aristocrat could take his position for granted; he lived in a society where everybody knew his place. The natural aristocrat, living in a society where everyone must secure and defend a place, can't take anything for granted. His need to evince the talent, taste and intelligence to justify a place with the instructed few is as exacting, and exhausting, as the Calvinist's need to evince in this life the signs of grace that reveal a soul predestined to dwell with God in the next.

Joseph Epstein has written two books about the problem of eminence in a nation of equals. "Ambition" (1980) examines the tricky business of establishing a claim to be one of nature's aristocrats. "Snobbery" (2002) concerns the equally tricky business of asserting such a claim.

Ambition is hard because it's inherently difficult to make an impression on the world. Beyond that, ambition is tricky because we expect the natural aristocrat to resemble the social aristocrat, to show a winning effortlessness and an unruffled indifference to the opinions of the many. With the striver, however, we always see the wheels turning and sense the hunger.

In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt said, "Those words 'freedom' and 'opportunity' do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down." It turned out, contrary to the belief of many New Dealers, that America was not a "mature economy," where the nation's wealth, having already increased as far as it ever would, had to be administratively allocated lest it be fought over, viciously and destructively. Prosperity need not be a zero-sum game, but status can never be anything else. Part of our disapproval of ambition is defensive; the striver's success in climbing upwards may not push us down, exactly, but leaves us further from the top nonetheless.

As a consequence, writes Epstein, "ambition is increasingly associated in the public mind chiefly with human characteristics held to be despicable." In addition to being aggressive, the ambitious person is "generally thought to be single-minded, narrowly concentrated in purpose, bereft of such distracting qualities as charm, sympathy, imagination, or introspection of the kind that leads to self-doubt." Consequently,

Perhaps the one novel that no serious writer in America would care to write today is one about a man who sets out to succeed in life and does so through work, decisive action, and discretion, without stepping on anyone's neck, without causing his family suffering, without himself becoming stupid or inhumane. . . . It is a novel unlikely to get written so long as that other, more familiar novel—which has the ambitious man or woman confront society and either go under or win out only at the cost of his or her decency—provides, as it evidently does, so much comfort.

Harvey Mansfield observes that in America, "the general rule for business and culture has been the one stated by Madison for politics: let ambition counteract ambition." The reliance on ambition to check ambition, however, cannot easily accommodate the disdain for ambition and the ambitious that Epstein describes. The basis of that disdain is Rousseau's anathematization of the bourgeois, an idea that seems not to have crossed the Atlantic and cleared customs by the time the Constitution was written. According to Allan Bloom:

The word [bourgeois] has a strong negative charge, and practically no one wants to be merely a bourgeois. The artists and the intellectuals have almost universally despised him and in large measure defined themselves against him. The bourgeois is unpoetic, unerotic, unheroic. . . . [All] sorts of reforms are perennially proposed to correct his motives or counterbalance them.

For people who want to be rich, famous, or powerful, ambition will be required. For people who disdain these ambitions as bourgeois—vulgar, hollow, invidious—the reliance on ambition to curb ambition provides no reassurance whatsoever. Doing so only intensifies a competition that the Rousseauian critic of the bourgeois believes is fundamentally destructive, both to social harmony and individuals' psychological health. To counteract others' ambitions with one's own, for such a critic, is self-negating: even if you win, you lose, just by having been dragged into that contest.

Thus, if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major. The striver may wind up with the bigger house, better car and nicer vacations, but the very meretriciousness of these aspirations confirms the liberal arts major's belief in the striver's inferior taste and barren inner life. Conspicuous consumption advertises not the wealth but the cluelessness of the consumer who acquires to flaunt. It has been supplanted by conspicuous disdain for conspicuous consumption. The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver's virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has cancelled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6.

In some ways, the liberal arts major's path has grown less steep. As David Brooks showed in "Bobos in Paradise" (2000), the new bourgeois bohemians have figured out a way to have their pesto and eat it, too. They can have nice homes, cars, clothes and vacations—as long as all those consumption items are ones that the Babbitts wouldn't buy, wouldn't like, and whose appeal they'd find mystifying. The Bobo can pay for his socially correct lifestyle by working in a socially correct career—in Silicon Valley, a public-interest law firm, a startup involved with the internet or renewable energy; anything where work "becomes a vocation, a calling, a métier," according to Mr. Brooks.

In other ways, however, the rise of the Bobo has only made life harder for the liberal arts major. Everything signifies. The wrong address, career, alma mater, car, accent or attitude could undermine his claim to be among the instructed few. It's harrowing, and it's exhausting.

In "Nation of Rebels" (2004), Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that taste is a "positional good." By "reproducing status hierarchies," good taste "confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor." Furthermore, they argue, good taste is mostly a matter of good distaste: the positional value of denigrating the wrong things is more important, and more reliable, than appreciating the right things. The only status advantage to be gained by liking Disney World and Nascar comes from liking them ironically, conveying that you're in on the joke. As the author Tad Friend has argued, this desperate business of showing the world you have the aesthetically correct vantage point on popular culture "is rare among those who genuinely respect high art," since they find the alternatives to what they care about uninteresting, but also unthreatening.

Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces. . . . The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them." Reagan did attend college, but not the kind that would have given him some exposure to the world outside the soul-murdering towns where he grew up, and to moral ideas calling into question his parents' religion. Instead, wrote Mr. Doctorow, a "third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."

We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.

Political parties have traditionally been coalitions held together by beliefs and interests. The modern Democratic Party may be the first in which the mortar is a shared sensibility. The cool kids disdain the dorks, and find it infuriating and baffling that they ever lose a class election to them.

This disdain is not only inefficacious, however, but unsatisfying. The problem with the superior attitude—either you get the joke, or you are the joke—is that the people being condescended to probably aren't smart enough to realize that they are being mocked. The novelist Jane Smiley calls this "the unteachable ignorance of the red states." When the instructed few can't lead the uninstructed many by means of Wilsonian circumspection, or cow them into submission using condescension, the fallback tactic is épater la bourgeoisie.

Intellectuals are the point of the spear. Richard Hofstadter devoted a book in 1963 to examining "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." He was a war correspondent who confined his reporting to the shots fired in just one direction, however, saying nothing about anti-Americanism in intellectual life. Part of that anti-Americanism is to equate intellectual seriousness with the European disdain for America as a society more barbaric than civilized. A film producer, interviewed on the Upper West Side by the New York Times the day after the 2004 election, subscribed to this view. "New York is an island off the coast of Europe," she said, explaining how John Kerry could lose a national election while winning 83% of the votes in Manhattan. Her remark echoed the famous comment by Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic, to the Modern Language Association a few weeks after the 1972 election: "I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they [Nixon's supporters] are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

Another part of the program is to confound the complacent assumptions of American patriotism. Not only has America's past been bloody and shameful in ways the uninstructed few must be made to realize, but the supposed depredations of America's "enemies" are, upon examination, understandable and even admirable. Mark Lilla's book, "The Reckless Mind" (2001), examines such "philotyrannical intellectuals."

The late Susan Sontag was forbiddingly erudite—an essayist, novelist, playwright and critic. There's not a community college dropout in America, however, gullible enough to have traveled to Hanoi and reported back, as she did in 1968, "The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, 'because they're bigger than we are,' as a Vietnamese army officer told me, 'and they're used to more meat than we are.' "

Three additional decades of reading, writing and reflecting did not enhance Sontag's judgment. Her famous reaction to 9/11 was:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? . . . In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

Stipulated, then: Slitting the throats of airline crew members to carry out a suicide bombing is an act of bravery.

By the same token, whatever the correct assessment of Sarah Palin's abilities and limitations, it's impossible to imagine that it would have taken her 20 years of close contact with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to notice that he sincerely believes a number of toxic, lunatic ideas. The thread connecting all of these—that 9/11 was a minor incident compared to the terrorism undertaken by the U.S., that AIDS was inflicted on Americans through deliberate government policies, that Louis Farrakhan is one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century—is that America is a wicked, contemptible place, and there is no such thing as an excessive criticism of it. Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense. For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.

Mr. Voegeli is a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center and a contributing editor to the Claremont Review of Books.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Sep-10, p.A23, by Norman Podhoretz:

Why Are Jews Liberals?
I'm hoping buyer's remorse on Obama will finally cause a Jewish shift to the right.

One of the most extraordinary features of Barack Obama's victory over John McCain was his capture of 78% of the Jewish vote. To be sure, there was nothing extraordinary about the number itself. Since 1928, the average Jewish vote for the Democrat in presidential elections has been an amazing 75%—far higher than that of any other ethno-religious group.

Yet there were reasons to think that it would be different in 2008. The main one was Israel. Despite some slippage in concern for Israel among American Jews, most of them were still telling pollsters that their votes would be strongly influenced by the positions of the two candidates on the Jewish state. This being the case, Mr. McCain's long history of sympathy with Israel should have given him a distinct advantage over Mr. Obama, whose own history consisted of associating with outright enemies of the Jewish state like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the historian Rashid Khalidi.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain among Jewish voters by a staggering 57 points. Except for African Americans, who gave him 95% of their vote, Mr. Obama did far better with Jews than with any other ethnic or religious group. Thus the Jewish vote for him was 25 points higher than the 53% he scored with the electorate as a whole; 35 points higher than the 43% he scored with whites; 11 points higher than the 67% he scored with Hispanics; 33 points higher than the 45% he scored with Protestants; and 24 points higher than the 54% he scored with Catholics.

These numbers remind us of the extent to which the continued Jewish commitment to the Democratic Party has become an anomaly. All the other ethno-religious groups that, like the Jews, formed part of the coalition forged by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s have followed the rule that increasing prosperity generally leads to an increasing identification with the Republican Party. But not the Jews. As the late Jewish scholar Milton Himmelfarb said in the 1950s: "Jews earn like Episcopalians"—then the most prosperous minority group in America—"and vote like Puerto Ricans," who were then the poorest.

Jews also remain far more heavily committed to the liberal agenda than any of their old ethno-religious New Deal partners. As the eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer has put it, "whatever the promptings of their economic interests," Jews have consistently supported "increased government spending, expanded benefits to the poor and lower classes, greater regulations on business, and the power of organized labor."

As with these old political and economic questions, so with the newer issues being fought out in the culture wars today. On abortion, gay rights, school prayer, gun control and assisted suicide, the survey data show that Jews are by far the most liberal of any group in America.

Most American Jews sincerely believe that their liberalism, together with their commitment to the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle, stems from the teachings of Judaism and reflects the heritage of "Jewish values." But if this theory were valid, the Orthodox would be the most liberal sector of the Jewish community. After all, it is they who are most familiar with the Jewish religious tradition and who shape their lives around its commandments.

Yet the Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where Republican candidates get any votes to speak of. Even more telling is that on every single cultural issue, the Orthodox oppose the politically correct liberal positions taken by most other American Jews precisely because these positions conflict with Jewish law. To cite just a few examples: Jewish law permits abortion only to protect the life of the mother; it forbids sex between men; and it prohibits suicide (except when the only alternatives are forced conversion or incest).

The upshot is that in virtually every instance of a clash between Jewish law and contemporary liberalism, it is the liberal creed that prevails for most American Jews. Which is to say that for them, liberalism has become more than a political outlook. It has for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right. And to the dogmas and commandments of this religion they give the kind of steadfast devotion their forefathers gave to the religion of the Hebrew Bible. For many, moving to the right is invested with much the same horror their forefathers felt about conversion to Christianity.

All this applies most fully to Jews who are Jewish only in an ethnic sense. Indeed, many such secular Jews, when asked how they would define "a good Jew," reply that it is equivalent to being a good liberal.

But avowed secularists are not the only Jews who confuse Judaism with liberalism; so do many non-Orthodox Jews who practice this or that traditional observance. It is not for nothing that a cruel wag has described the Reform movement—the largest of the religious denominations within the American Jewish community—as "the Democratic Party with holidays thrown in," and the services in a Reform temple as "the Democratic Party at prayer."

As a Jew who moved from left to right more than four decades ago, I have been hoping for many years that my fellow Jews would come to see that in contrast to what was the case in the past, our true friends are now located not among liberals, but among conservatives.

Of course in speaking of the difference between left and right, or between liberals and conservatives, I have in mind a divide wider than the conflict between Democrats and Republicans and deeper than electoral politics. The great issue between the two political communities is how they feel about the nature of American society. With all exceptions duly noted, I think it fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at this country is injustice and oppression of every kind—economic, social and political. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a nation shaped by a complex of traditions, principles and institutions that has afforded more freedom and, even factoring in periodic economic downturns, more prosperity to more of its citizens than in any society in human history. It follows that what liberals believe needs to be changed or discarded—and apologized for to other nations—is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating and proudly defending against attack.

In this realm, too, American Jewry surely belongs with the conservatives rather than the liberals. For the social, political and moral system that liberals wish to transform is the very system in and through which Jews found a home such as they had never discovered in all their forced wanderings throughout the centuries over the face of the earth.

The Jewish immigrants who began coming here from Eastern Europe in the 1880s were right to call America "the golden land." They soon learned that there was no gold in the streets, as some of them may have imagined, which meant that they had to struggle, and struggle hard. But there was another, more precious kind of gold in America. There was freedom and there was opportunity. Blessed with these conditions, we children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these immigrants flourished—and not just in material terms—to an extent unmatched in the history of our people.

What I am saying is that if anything bears eloquent testimony to the infinitely precious virtues of the traditional American system, it is the Jewish experience in this country. Surely, then, we Jews ought to be joining with its defenders against those who are blind or indifferent or antagonistic to the philosophical principles, the moral values, and the socioeconomic institutions on whose health and vitality the traditional American system depends.

In 2008, we were faced with a candidate who ran to an unprecedented degree on the premise that the American system was seriously flawed and in desperate need of radical change—not to mention a record powerfully indicating that he would pursue policies dangerous to the security of Israel. Because of all this, I hoped that my fellow Jews would finally break free of the liberalism to which they have remained in thrall long past the point where it has served either their interests or their ideals.

That possibility having been resoundingly dashed, I now grasp for some encouragement from the signs that buyer's remorse is beginning to set in among Jews, as it also seems to be doing among independents. Which is why I am hoping against hope that the exposure of Mr. Obama as a false messiah will at last open the eyes of my fellow Jews to the correlative falsity of the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal.

Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995. His latest book, "Why Are Jews Liberals?" is just out from Doubleday.

from the Works and Days blog, 2009-May-21, by Victor Davis Hanson:

Euroamericans?

European thoughts…

I am on my first week of an annual tour I co-lead to Europe. Some random thoughts. I hope that urban density, apartment living, Smart cars, and motorbikes are not the envisioned future of the United States. For all our perceived sins, the American with his suburban house and yard, and pickup and boat, enjoys a freedom of choice and ease unmatched anywhere-and unappreciated in most surveys of comparable standards of living. That autonomy in private life translates into a freewheeling, unpredictable electorate, about all we have left of the modern equivalent of the homestead farmer of the nineteenth century.

Me First?

If socialist health care is so preferable, with the power of the state to mandate preventative health care, why do Europeans smoke far more than Americans? On cultural issues, such as politely forming lines, or not defacing monuments with graffiti, or yielding to pedestrians, or driving with concern for others, I think supposedly selfish Americans are light years ahead. But how so, when our capitalist system breeds `me first'? And what exactly once created the European genius that we see expressed in the beauty of Italian architecture and the zest for excellence throughout the art and literature of old Europe?

World Beneath Their Feet

But more seriously, it is ironic to travel through Italy and see nearly all of its artistic treasures, whether classical or ecclesiastical, as a dividend of a religious, confident culture, and almost nothing comparable offered by the new Europe of socialism, statism, and agnosticism. If heaven is retiring at 55, leaving the apartment each mid-morning to sit in the local coffee shop, and then protesting on weekends about my lower than anticipated pension cost of living increase, then I would prefer hell.

The great unspoken truth? Somewhere right now, a US ship, an American soldier, a circling F-16 keep the Russians honest, the fear in al Qaeda, the Straits of Hormuz open, the commerce of the Mediterranean safe–unknown, unappreciated to the mass of European utopian citizenry—whose cultural ancestry made us Americans what we are.

You Can't Possibly Take Care of Yourself

What worries me about Obama is not the specifics of the nationalization of GM and Chrysler, the government rescue of the United Auto Workers, the effort to take over college financing, proposed universal health care, massive deficits and tax increases, although they are worrisome and only the beginning, but the attendant culture of `inflate your tires' and `wash your hands' paternalism. I think we are entering an age in which the federal government will increasingly guide our thoughts into what is deemed correct-the sort of car we must drive, the type of salary we should make, the sort of job we should have, even the type of thoughts we are to express, and all in the name of collective brotherhood. The slavish manner in which the media lock stepped into Bush the near fascist for tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, Patriot Act, Iraq, and Guantanamo, followed by choruses of Obama the sensitive, anguished overseer of tribunals, wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, Patriot Act, Iraq, and Guantanamo was one of the most frightening things I `ve seen in a free society in 50 years.

The Wages of Statism

In Europe the collective effort to diminish religion, to do away with national identity and exceptionalism, to embrace pacifism and a forced equality of result slowly erode human aspiration. I accept all this is the reaction to the horrors of the 20^th century, but we too went through the horrors, although to a lesser extent, and socialism need not be the only corrective to nationalist fascism or communism. How odd that the caricatures of Americans as grasping workaholics who sacrifice the good life in an illusory search for material wealth more likely fit the materialist European, who predicates his existence on a guaranteed job, pension, apartment, and more or less same existence as everyone around him-at the repression of notions of religion, or national aspirations, or dreams of seeking to be different, and, yes, more successful than others.

The Euromerican?

The very notion that the government in the United States would emulate Europe, hoping to nationalize or regulate as much as possible, to be overseen by a professional technocratic class on top, aided by legions of government clerks, is also frightening. How odd to see Europeans aspire to inherit an elegant villa, or a stately ancestral estate, appreciate the beauty of past individual genius or the fruits of ancient overweening ambition, and yet in the here and now ensure that few such expressions of individualism are any more likely. I understand the logic, and perhaps the necessity of, the state-subsidized box-like apartment complex, and the hundreds who are jammed into it with access to good water, sewer, and power hookups, but there is no beauty, no mark of the individual to be found there.

Human Nature Trumps All Else

The natural human response to forced multiculturalism, socialism, and equality of result is cynicism. One senses that in Europe the public persona is a mere veneer. Privately most scheme to avoid taxes, to moonlight, to barter-if they are not among the government elite with high-paying, hyper-perked tenures at a ministry-while avoiding the legions of new unassimilated Muslims from North Africa, and especially the Americanized troika of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage. Let us avoid such institutionalized cynicism in the US.

Not Obamaized yet

Like most skeptics of the new Obama frontier, I'd simply trust in the ancient wisdom that one cannot get something for nothing-so creating $9 trillion in new debt either ruins the currency or burdens those not born to pay for it. One cannot tax a productive class into oblivion and not kill the proverbial goose. One cannot mandate equality by result without extreme coercion and endemic cynicism. The experimentation and utopian tinkering by a paternalistic overseeing class, Ivy-League trained but without experience in private enterprise or the underbelly of American life, can never prove successful. These are age-old truths that transcend Obama, but apparently must be rediscovered to our great pain each new generation.

Capitalists, farmers, eccentrics, and individualists created the American Constitution; clerks, bureaucrats, ministers, and appointees wrote the Constitution of the European Union. Are we then surprised at the comparative results?

More on European perceptions on the next posting—and the beauty and majesty of ancient Italy and Greece.

from the New York Herald Tribune, 1939-May-16, as excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-13, by Walter Lippman:

Notable & Quotable

Walter Lippman on the warfare between the Roosevelt administration and the business community, and why attempts at peace always broke down, in the New York Herald Tribune, May 16, 1939:

The reason is that there are in fact two main tendencies inside the New Deal, and . . . the President is never able finally to make his choice for the one or the other. Between the conciliatory and irreconcilable New Dealers the crucial difference is . . . that the one group is interested primarily in social reform and the other is interested primarily in the control of the economic system.

Thus the reformers wish to provide relief, to practice conservation, to establish social security, and by law to impose social standards upon business and finance. But in order to do these things, they know that there must be money available, and so . . . they would like to promote recovery, not only for its own sake, but in order to finance the reforms. When they are convinced that a certain tax is "deterrent" to enterprise and investment, they would like to modify it.

The radicals, on the other hand, are . . . primarily interested in reducing the power of corporate business men, and the heart of their program is . . . precisely those deterrent taxes and those restrictive regulations which limit private initiative. . . . they would rather not have recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business.

Among the radical New Dealers the essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side. Thus they cling to taxes which do not come anywhere near to yielding enough revenue to balance the budget because those particular taxes paralyze the financial power of the rich and well-to-do. . . .

This is the issue between the reformers and the radicals. Both believe in spending. . . . [But] [t]he reformers regard the spending as an instrument of recovery and a means for improving the condition of the people. The radicals regard the spending as a substitute for recovery and as a means of altering the balance of social policy.

from the Washington Examiner via RasmussenReports.com, 2009-Aug-27, by Michael Barone:

Obama's Lyrical Left Struggles With Liberalism

As it becomes clear that a large percentage of Americans are rebelling against the prospect of a larger, more intrusive government, including many whom Democratic politicians assume would see themselves as beneficiaries of government spending and activity, debate among supporters of the Democratic agenda has focused on tactics.

Should the Democrats have depicted their health care program as providing security rather than cutting costs? Should Barack Obama insist that the "government option" is essential, or should he let that provision drop by the wayside? Was it a mistake to whip the cap-and-trade bill through the House in June rather than focus on health care? Should the president have crafted a smaller stimulus bill that pumped money into the economy more rapidly?

Those are all good questions, but they do not go to the heart of the matter. The problem the Democrats face is not just a question of this administration's tactics or those of the Clinton administration in 1993-94. It is, I think, more deep-seated -- a basic contradiction in what the party and the liberal movement stand for.

"War," wrote the liberal intellectual Randolph Bourne in 1918, "is the health of the state." Bourne, a writer for The New Republic and the Atlantic who died in the influenza epidemic later that year at 32, is mostly forgotten today. But in the second decade of the last century, he was a leading member of what author Edward Abrahams dubbed "the lyrical left," a group of intellectuals whose attitudes are not unfamiliar today.

Bourne celebrated the diversity of immigrants in America and opposed their assimilation into a single national culture. He opposed the racial segregation of the South ("the least defensible thing in the world"). He hoped that industrial workers would produce bottom-up reform of economic institutions through something like community organizing.

And unlike most New Republic writers of the time, he vehemently opposed U.S. entry into World War I -- not out of pacifism, but for fear of what it would do to the country. "All the activities of society are linked together as fast as possible to this central purpose of making a military offense or a military defense," he wrote in 1918, "and the State becomes what in peacetimes it has vainly struggled to become -- the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions."

This was a perceptive description of the dominant trend of the unlyrical warlike left of the first two-thirds of the 20th century. In World War I, the Wilson administration nationalized the railroads and shipyards; in World War II, the Roosevelt administration mobilized 16 million into the military (the proportionate equivalent today would be 35 million) and commandeered much of the private-sector economy.

The Woodrow Wilson war policies provided a blueprint for much of the New Deal. The Franklin D. Roosevelt war policies were a template for the makeshift welfare state of the postwar years. Lyndon Johnson declared a "war" on poverty. It was even clearer that war was the health of the state in Britain, where voters rejected the welfare state in the 1930s depression and embraced it after the experience of wartime mobilization and controls.

But in the late 1960s, the American left started going Bourne's way. They rejected Lyndon Johnson's "guns and better" and renounced the Vietnam War. They cheered rather than objected when Richard Nixon abolished the military draft. They supported civil rights and tolerance of diverse lifestyles and multiculturalist responses to immigration. They opposed military action in Grenada, in the Gulf War and in Iraq, and oppose it today in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama is very much part of this lyrical left. He seems to have absorbed its tenets somewhere between Punahou Academy and Columbia University. He never considered military service despite the large presence of the military in his native Hawaii. He left the business world and big law firms for community organizing.

The problem for Obama and America's lyrical left is that dovishness abroad and statism at home don't readily go together. Mobilization in a war effort, as Randolph Bourne taught, tends to create a frame of mind that welcomes regimentation under big government at home. Denigration of military discipline and tolerance of cultural diversity tend to create a frame of mind that resists government ukase and standardization.

A big government president, Obama is learning, needs to be a war president first.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.

from Commentary Magazine, 2009-April, by John Steele Gordon:

The Economic Contradictions of Obama-ism

On February 9th, President Obama visited Elkhart, Indiana, the American community with the country's highest unemployment rate, 15.3 percent. (It had been only 4.7 percent the year before.) He was there to sell his stimulus bill, then moving through Congress and since signed. He noted that the bill would provide help for the workers who had lost their jobs and, more important, help them get their jobs back by reviving the economy.

The jobs that have vanished in Elkhart are predominantly in the recreational-vehicle industry, which is concentrated in the city of 52,000. With the severe recession the country is now experiencing, it is hardly surprising that this industry has been devastated. After all, an RV is expensive both to purchase and to operate and is hardly a necessity. But when the economy recovers, will those jobs come back as demand for RV's returns? Or, in the meantime, will new environmental regulations championed by Obama work to impede the sales of vehicles that get only a few miles to the gallon and thereby make job growth in Elkhart an impossibility?

The latter seems to be the case. In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2010, the Obama administration has also said it would inaugurate a “cap-and-trade” program to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This program would require all companies to buy at auction the right to emit the gas, which all fossil fuels—oil, gasoline, coal, natural gas, etc.—do, in varying amounts. The total amount of emissions allowed would be strictly limited.

While billed as a program to reduce greenhouse gases, cap-and-trade is, inescapably, a tax on virtually all economic activity, as fossil fuels are an input in nearly all economic outputs. Even a lawyer, after all, has to use electricity to have the lights on in his office and power his computer. And electricity is mostly generated by fossil fuels, especially coal, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide.

This will be no small tax. The Obama budget estimates that the carbon tax will bring in revenues of $78.7 billion in 2012. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it might net as much as $300 billion. The administration says that in 2019 this carbon tax will be the sixth-largest source of federal revenue, after personal and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and excise taxes.

Cap-and-trade will have a profound impact on the recreational-vehicle industry in Elkhart, whose pain Obama professed to feel. The cost of manufacturing the vehicle will rise because of the new tax, which will in turn increase the retail price of RV's and thus inevitably decrease sales. The cost of operating them will also rise substantially as the tax raises the price of gasoline, further limiting demand. Nor will the tax's effect on Elkhart and its environs be limited to RV's. The entire mid-section of the country, where Elkhart is located, will be especially hard hit, because the region is far more dependent on manufacturing and coal-fired electric generating plants than the continent's two coasts.

Limiting carbon-dioxide emissions may (or may not) be a worthy goal, but a cap-and-trade system to further that goal will take a disproportionate toll on the sort of people who are now out of work in Elkhart, Indiana and not the bicoastal elite, whose members can more easily afford the tax.

The Obama budget envisions an explosion of economic growth as the country recovers from the current recession—more than four percent a year from 2011 through 2013. This will supposedly be sufficient to halve the $1.75 trillion deficit it projects for 2009. But there is something off here. Many of the policies Obama and his team are pursuing, cap-and-trade being the most obvious, are likely to interfere with growth in exactly the sectors in which the United States will need it. If the goal is growth, as it should be, the role of government should be to determine ways in which its conduct can fuel that growth. And that is precisely what Obama is not doing.

The cap-and-trade tax will inescapably and adversely impact the economic recovery and future growth rates. If passed, it will act on the economy as a whole exactly the way a governor acts on a steam engine, increasingly resisting any increase in revolutions per minute. With the supply of licenses to emit carbon dioxide fixed, the price of the permits will inevitably rise as economic activity picks up. That means that any increase in overall demand will increase the price of energy, and thus, in a feedback loop, nearly everything else. That will damp down demand. The more the economy tries to speed up, the more the carbon tax will work to prevent it from doing so.

The same is true of many of the other policies embedded in Obama's budget. He will raise taxes on high earners rather than lowering them to give those earners an incentive to put their money into the private markets. He intends to increase the number of federal regulations on private business and industry, rather than reduce the number of those regulations for the purpose of eliminating barriers to growth. Taken together, these counterproductive actions will make job creation in the private sector difficult, because they will make it more expensive to hire new workers. The Obama plan will, in general, make it more expensive to do business at a time when one would think he and the nation as a whole have every reason to make it as inexpensive as possible to do business.

There is, it appears, a contradiction between the economic growth Obama says he wants and has promised to produce, and the goals his policies actually indicate he wants to achieve. Those policies suggest there are financial goals he values more highly than economic growth. But can he succeed without growth? And what, at this moment, could be more important?

_____________

The modern Democratic Party was founded by Andrew Jackson, the dominant American political figure from the 1820's until the 1840' s. Jackson was the classic self-made man who fought the “money men” and the old Eastern aristocracy to prevent them, in Jackson's view, from establishing a plutocracy that would prevent the rise of strivers like him. Jackson believed that government's job was to restrain the power of the rich so that those at the bottom would not be prevented from moving upward by their own efforts. He was a liberal in the classic definition, a laissez-faire man.

Seventy years later, the leading turn-of-the-century Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, also wanted to restrain the rich to enable the poor to rise. Creditors in his day liked the gold standard—the basis of the world financial system at the time—because it prevented inflation. But most farmers were debtors and Bryan advocated policies (particularly the free coinage of silver) that would, inevitably, cause inflation. This would allow farmers to pay off their debts with cheaper money and thus more easily rise to prosperity by their own efforts.

By the time of Bryan's ascension, the antagonist of the “little guy” had changed somewhat from the individual entrepreneur to the corporation, a newly powerful and soon-to-be central player in the economy. The corporate form of organization allowed the concentration of unprecedented amounts of capital that could be controlled by the dominant stockholder. Thus the so-called robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan, became extraordinarily powerful and, to many, threatening. Even the Wall Street Journal wondered if things were getting out of hand when J.P. Morgan announced the formation of United States Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901. That year the entire federal government spent only $524 million.

Like Jackson, Bryan was motivated by a populist hostility based in a classic free-market view. He feared the free market was being overtaken, and those who were determined to manipulate it had to be made to behave like responsible economic players. Something had to be done to ensure that the power of the industrial corporation was used for the good of the whole, not just the benefit of its stockholders. Initially, this was done in the name of market efficiency—to promote competition, for example—and not because markets themselves were considered unfair or immoral.

But in the 1910's and 1920's, the idea that government should not just police the marketplace and prevent a plutocracy from developing, but should also use the power of government to benefit the people directly, had begun to take hold, especially among intellectuals. At its core was the belief that the ordinary worker could not rise through his own efforts because “the system” was stacked against him. This concept was very different from the ideas of Jackson and Bryan. Indeed, it had arisen not in America, populated by people who had crossed an ocean to seek a better life for themselves and their descendants, but in the Europe they had left, where the class structure was far more rigid and privilege more entrenched.

Indeed, while Germany and other countries began implementing government-run social programs in the late 19th century, there was little chance of such a program being developed in the United States, and certainly at the federal level, until the advent of the Great Depression. But that calamity changed everything.

_____________

The first iteration of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal included the National Recovery Administration (NRA), essentially a government-run cartel to fix prices and divide markets. This was the most radical shift in the relation between government and the private economy in American history, and the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the NRA as a violation of the Constitution's Commerce clause in 1935.

After that, a “second New Deal” was developed. It dealt less with the immediate emergency that Roosevelt had faced in 1933 and more with transforming American society by government programs to help individuals. What emerged was an ever-growing number of farm programs to help raise crop prices; the Wagner Act, which radically altered the balance of power between capital and labor to labor's benefit; and most especially Social Security, which came into being in 1937. These efforts were more modest ideologically than the NRA, but their effect was transformative. The Second New Deal and policies that followed in its line over time had the effect of transforming the ordinary worker's standard of living and his opportunities to improve that standard further for his children.

We have spent three-quarters of a century living under the auspices of the Second New Deal; Democratic and Republican presidents alike, not to mention mainstream conservatives and liberals, have accepted the general philosophical concept of the social safety net and a federal government that is supposed to keep an eye on capitalists and offer protections for the little guy.

Over that time, we have become overwhelmingly a country not of haves and have-nots but, one might say, of haves and have-yachts (including the land-yachts called RV's). Over 3.5 million families today have net worths in excess of $1 million. Three-fifths of American families own financial securities in their own name. Millions more count on pension fund investments to make their old age comfortable. Only about 10 percent of non-farm families owned their own homes in 1936. Today more than 60 percent of American families do. This gives them the substantial financial assets that only the “rich” possessed in the 1930's. The sort of desperate, grinding poverty seen in the FDR-era photographs of Walker Evans has simply disappeared. Today, even people of modest means enjoy a level of comfort, security, and even luxury undreamed of when Roosevelt was president. It is not the bicoastal elite that buys RV's. RV's are the vacation homes of the lower middle class. Plumbers talk about their 401-K's and factory workers send their children to medical school.

But while the second New Deal had transformed the country immensely for the better, many liberals thought it had not gone far enough. What might be called the “Third New Deal” was attempted in the 1960's, under the name of the Great Society. It sought both to eliminate poverty and to end the racial discrimination that prevented millions of Americans from pursuing the vast opportunities that had become available to their fellow countrymen.

In the latter case, the Great Society was an unalloyed success. Indeed, less than fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a black man is President of the United States and a black man is chairman of the Republican National Committee. The civil-rights movement of the mid-20th century was one of the true triumphs of American democracy. It was widely supported by both parties at the time (only six Republican senators voted against it, as did 21 Democrats) and is now supported by all but the lunatic fringe.

The same cannot be said of many of the other Great Society programs. Medicare and Medicaid have proven to be ravenous consumers of the public fisc, riddled with waste and fraud, and seemingly impervious to reform. Other programs in education and transportation greatly enlarged the scope of the federal government to a degree that would have horrified Jackson and Bryan. While federal outlays in 1930 were about 3 percent of GDP, mostly for the military and debt service, they were nearly 7 percent by 1940. By 1970 they were over 19 percent. Today federal outlays are over 20 percent and are estimated to top 27 percent in 2009, thanks to the economic crisis.

That is far and away the highest peacetime percentage in American history. If President Obama's plans are fully implemented, outlays will never return to the modern norm. A whole new norm will be set. And the purpose of the new norm will be to fix in cement government policies—relating to the environment, health care, education, and energy use—designed to interpose themselves between the citizenry and the marketplace.

_____________

Mark Twain once said that “history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.” That goes double for economic history, especially in the industrial era when the economy has evolved so quickly from generation to generation. But certain patterns are clear. In modern times, the more that government has controlled the economy, the more bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals get to choose winners and losers instead of the marketplace, the less economic growth and innovation there is, the more persistent unemployment is, the slower the improvement in the standard of living.

If you want a vivid example, just compare post-war Britain, which both moved in a socialist direction and became the sick man of the Great Powers, with Margaret Thatcher's Britain, in which the welfare state was pared back, socialism was reversed, and the forces that had made Britain great were unleashed once again.

It is worrisome in the extreme to realize that Obama's policies have much more in common with those of Clement Attlee, the prime minister who took over from Winston Churchill when the Second World War ended and put it on the socialist track, than with those of Thatcher, who took charge in England at a time of desperate economic straits. At a time when the United States needs dynamism more than ever, the nation's voters have chosen to be led by a president whose animating philosophy has led him to adopt policies that will make that dynamism impossible to achieve. If the contradiction proves costly to the American economy, as history suggests, it will exact a profound tribute of its own from Obama's political future as well.

John Steele Gordon is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, among other books. His articles for COMMENTARY include “Look Who's Afraid of Free Trade” (February 2008) and “Speculators, Politicians, and Financial Disasters” (November 2008).

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-26, by Daniel Henninger:

Democrats Bid Business Adieu

Barack Obama meets with a flock of nervous bankers at the White House tomorrow to reassure them he understands their interests. Good luck. There has always been tension between the Democratic Party and the private sector. That tension is over. With its vote in the House of Representatives to punish corporate bonus payments, the national Democratic Party has disconnected itself entirely from the private sector.

The public bear-baiting of AIG's Ed Liddy, and then passage of the bonus bill, gave the nation a good look at the modern Democratic Party freed of constraints.

The current version of the party has largely broken free of any understanding whatsoever of the private sector -- how it works or what it needs to function.

True socialists at least think about markets so they can criticize them. The Democratic Party's leadership doesn't stir to even that level of engagement. In the House, Senate and some corners of the Obama White House, the party is acting as if the marketplace was the world of an alien tribe, which it has to control through intimidation or demands for protective tribute (read: campaign contributions).

This is not true of the entire 90% of self-identified Democrats who voted for Barack Obama. But Democrats who work in real jobs rather than work for the mothership in Washington must recognize that the party's obsessions are becoming ever less hospitable to a functioning economy, or Mr. Geithner's labors to that goal.

This decoupling has occurred mainly in the Northeast (New England lost its last House Republican in 2008) and in California. Invulnerable seats have allowed politicians from these regions to control key committee chairs affecting the economy: Barney Frank (finance), Henry Waxman (regulation) Pete Stark (the health subcommittee of Ways and Means), Chris Dodd (Senate banking), Ted Kennedy (health), Barbara Boxer (environment).

Put it this way: Imagine any of this generation's Democratic establishment taking a job at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as a middle-manager responsible for a division of employees and its annual profit and loss. It is wholly inconceivable. Or helping an owner of an auto-parts company manage through a real crisis. They wouldn't have a clue.

That anti-bonus bill was not unique. It is routine.

Spending in the president's budget, skyrocketing to 28.5% of GDP this fiscal year, is a harbinger. No matter. This week two of the party's "progressive" (the left) Web-based activist groups -- the force that kept the Obama candidacy afloat -- announced an effort to harass some 50 moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House for expressing doubts about Mr. Obama's reforms, such as "health care for all." They name 20 "conservative" senators, including such notable right-wingers as Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Robert Byrd and Blanche Lincoln. This is not your father's Democratic Party.

Wall Street's collapsed businesses and layoffs have devastated New York's tax revenues. So what? Attorney General Andrew Cuomo flogged Bank of America into giving up the names of Merrill Lynch bonus recipients. Imagine the coincidence this week when two of Merrill's most respected hands, analyst David Rosenberg and strategist Richard Bernstein, quit. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the legislature are also mau-mauing AIG over bonuses.

Nor can it be said that these Democrats are merely scapegoating the private sector to deflect blame for the politicians' share of the mortgage debacle. Using the private sector as the party's punching bag is also now routine. Al Gore and John Kerry ran at Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Insurance. With mercurial suppleness, so did the current president. These "big" industries are proxies for the whole world of owners and managers, who somehow now always find themselves beyond acceptable politics as enemies of the people's interests. A Democratic Party that was always anti-Wall Street is becoming anti- Main Street.

Meanwhile, plaintiffs lawyers assault the private sector, dig cash out of it, and transfer a percentage back to Democratic re-election campaigns. Democrats in Congress then try to legislate provisions to make the private sector vulnerable to more such lawsuits. Congress has passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, with the Paycheck Fairness Act on tap.

If the private sector is now largely an abstraction to Democrats in Congress, they will continue to make mistakes, explicit like the bonus bill or just thoughtless errors that constantly disrupt operations for private companies.

This will have a dampening effect on the U.S. growth rate and its ability to create jobs, especially for new, younger entrants.

Some of Mr. Obama's supporters need to reboot their vision. They did not sign on just to him, but to him and his party. That party is creating a world of its own, a world being drained of oxygen for the kind of people who build the nation's economy.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Apr-11:

Forget About Merit
Congress moves to squash pay for performance.

We're starting to understand what labor El Supremo Andy Stern meant when he called the Obama Administration a "once in a lifetime opportunity" to press the union agenda. Last month the Pentagon announced it would "review" a pay-for-performance system that now covers some 200,000 of its civilian employees, delaying any new entrants to the system. In short, merit pay for work well done.

Fugettaboutit. House Democrats are now pushing to freeze pay for performance across the entire federal government.

That's the upshot of a letter sent by eight House Democratic barons to White House budget chief Peter Orszag asking for a halt on expansion of merit pay. "A well-designed performance management system can recognize and reward high performance without a linkage to compensation," they wrote. Gosh, why didn't the private sector think of that?

As the biggest merit plan in the government, the National Security Personnel System has been a prime target of federal employee unions since it was launched in 2006. Originally intended to cover three times as many employees, the merit system was whittled down to exclude blue-collar bargaining-unit workers. For the remaining segment, a nine-union coalition took the issue to court in 2007 arguing that the plan illegally limited collective bargaining. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals gave them no support.

According to figures released by the Pentagon in February, almost all of the employees in the merit system got raises or bonuses in 2009, with the average total reward of 8.35%. That dwarfs the 2.9% to 4.8% hike that most of the federal government's General Schedule employees got for the same time period. Unions prefer a return to a universal General Schedule system, which compensates employees based on time served. This expands the union's power base but also explains why they call them bureaucrats.

For Congressional Democrats, dispatching the program is an easy opportunity to demonstrate friend-of-labor bonafides to their union piggy-banks. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, unions were among the top contributors to last year's re-election campaign of House Armed Services Chairman Ike Skelton. He led the charge against the Pentagon's performance-pay system in a February letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and he is among those now urging that merit pay be frozen. Also among the signers is Edolphus Towns, currently effusing on a regular basis about pay for nonperformance on Wall Street.

Unions have an interest in keeping workers out of a system where their own efforts can affect their compensation and advancement. That makes them less dependent on the union to negotiate for them. During the campaign, Barack Obama said he would consider an overhaul or "complete repeal" of the merit pay system. If he follows through, the government's new CEO will soon learn that you get what you pay for.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-12, by Daniel Henninger:

The Obama Rosetta Stone

Barack Obama has written two famous, widely read books of autobiography -- "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope." Let me introduce his third, a book that will touch everyone's life: "A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America's Promise. The President's Budget and Fiscal Preview" (Government Printing Office, 141 pages, $26; free on the Web). This is the U.S. budget for laymen, and it's a must read.

Turn immediately to page 11. There sits a chart called Figure 9. This is the Rosetta Stone to the presidential mind of Barack Obama. Memorize Figure 9, and you will never be confused. Not happy, perhaps, but not confused.

One finds many charts in a federal budget, most attributed to such deep mines of data as the Census Bureau or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The one on page 11 is attributed to "Piketty and Saez."

Either you know instantly what "Piketty and Saez" means, or you don't. If you do, you spent the past two years working to get Barack Obama into the White House. If you don't, their posse has a six-week head start on you.

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, French economists, are rock stars of the intellectual left. Their specialty is "earnings inequality" and "wealth concentration."

Messrs. Piketty and Saez have produced the most politically potent squiggle along an axis since Arthur Laffer drew his famous curve on a napkin in the mid-1970s. Laffer's was an economic argument for lowering tax rates for everyone. Piketty-Saez is a moral argument for raising taxes on the rich.

As described in Mr. Obama's budget, these two economists have shown that by the end of 2004, the top 1% of taxpayers "took home" more than 22% of total national income. This trend, Fig. 9 notes, began during the Reagan presidency, skyrocketed through the Clinton years, dipped after George Bush beat Al Gore, then marched upward. Widening its own definition of money-grubbers, the budget says the top 10% of households "held" 70% of total wealth.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute criticized the Piketty-Saez study on these pages in October 2007. Whatever its merits, their "Top 1%" chart has become a totemic obsession in progressive policy circles.

Turn to page five of Mr. Obama's federal budget, and one may read these commentaries on the top 1% datum:

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it."

Mr. Obama made clear in the campaign his intention to raise taxes on this income class by letting the Bush tax cuts expire. What is becoming clearer as his presidency unfolds is that something deeper is underway here than merely using higher taxes to fund his policy goals in health, education and energy.

The "top 1%" isn't just going to pay for these policies. Many of them would assent to that. The rancorous language used to describe these taxpayers makes it clear that as a matter of public policy they will be made to "pay for" the fact of their wealth -- no matter how many of them worked honestly and honorably to produce it. No Democratic president in 60 years has been this explicit.

Complaints have emerged recently, on the right and left, that the $787 billion stimulus bill will produce less growth and jobs than planned because too much of it goes to social programs and transfer payments, or "weak" Keynesian stimulus. The administration's Romer-Bernstein study on the stimulus estimated by the end of next year it would increase jobs by 3.6 million and GDP by 3.7%.

One of the first technical examinations of the Romer-Bernstein projections has been released by Hoover Institution economists John Cogan and John Taylor, and German economists Tobias Cwik and Volker Wieland. They conclude that the growth and jobs stimulus will be only one-sixth what the administration predicts. In part, this is because people anticipate that the spending burst will have to be financed by higher taxes and so will spend less than anticipated.

New York's Mike Bloomberg, mayor of an economically damaged city, has noted the pointlessness of raising taxes on the rich when their wealth is plummeting, or of eliminating the charitable deduction for people who have less to give anyway.

True but irrelevant. Mayor Bloomberg should read the Obama budget chapter, "Inheriting a Legacy of Misplaced Priorities." The economy as most people understand it was a second-order concern of the stimulus strategy. The primary goal is a massive re-flowing of "wealth" from the top toward the bottom, to stop the moral failure they see in the budget's "Top One Percent of Earners" chart.

The White House says its goal is simple "fairness." That may be, as they understand fairness. But Figure 9 makes it clear that for the top earners, there will be blood. This presidency is going to be an act of retribution. In the words of the third book from Mr. Obama, "it is our duty to change it."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-27:

Notable & Quotable

Friedrich A. Hayek in "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960), on the myth that progressive tax rates are necessary to fund large increases in government spending, lest an intolerable burden be placed on the poor:

Not only is the revenue derived from the high rates levied on large incomes, particularly in the highest brackets, so small compared with the total revenue as to make hardly any difference to the burden borne by the rest; but for a long time . . . it was not the poorest who benefited from it but entirely the better-off working class and the lower strata of the middle class who provided the largest number of voters.

It would probably be true, on the other hand, to say that the illusion that by means of progressive taxation the burden can be shifted substantially onto the shoulders of the wealthy has been the chief reason why taxation has increased as fast as it has done and that, under the influence of this illusion, the masses have come to accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise. The only major result of the policy has been the severe limitation of the incomes that could be earned by the most successful and thereby gratification of the envy of the less-well-off.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Mar-17, by Bret Stephens:

Afghanistan and the Left

It was probably inevitable that the American left would turn sharply against the war in Afghanistan the moment it was politically opportune. Still, the speed with which it has done so has been breathtaking.

Time was when the received bipartisan and trans-Atlantic wisdom about Afghanistan was that it was the necessary war, the good war, the no-choice-but-to-fight and can't-afford-to-lose war, and that not least of everything that made the invasion and occupation of Iraq such arrant folly was that it distracted us from "finishing the job" in the place where the attacks of 9/11 were conceived and planned.

This was the wisdom candidate Barack Obama was merely regurgitating when, in an August 2007 speech, he promised that his priority as president would be "getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." True to his word, he has now ordered the deployment of 17,000 additional soldiers to that battlefield.

So why are the people who cheered Mr. Obama then (or offered no objection) now running for the exit signs? Why, for example, is New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, the paper's reliably liberal tribune, calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" -- after denouncing the Bush administration in 2006 for "taking its eye off the real enemy in Afghanistan"?

Call it another instance of that old logic, reductio ad Vietnam. That's the view that every U.S. military action lasting more than the flight time of a cruise missile is likely to descend into a bloody, stalemated, morally and politically intolerable Sartrean nightmare.

Tellingly, the phrase "another Vietnam" seems to have first appeared under the byline of New York Times reporter C.L. Sulzberger, who opined on August 31, 1969, that "chances are" that the only kind of war in which the U.S. could become involved in the future "is another Vietnam." Times change, but not at the Times.

Since then, "another Vietnam" has served as the left's ideological totem for military interventions in Lebanon, the Falklands (for Britain), Nicaragua and Central America generally, the first Iraq war, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan right after 9/11, the second Iraq war, and now Afghanistan again. Maybe Grenada and Panama, too.

Of course, none of these interventions was "another Vietnam." Some turned out well, some badly, some had mixed results and for some the verdict isn't yet in. Each was its own circumstance. At the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the U.S. was losing soldiers at a rate of 1,300 a month. At the height of the Iraq war in 2007, losses averaged 75 a month. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is currently losing about 15 a month. A body count should never be the decisive metric of failure, but if this is what now constitutes "quagmire" then the U.S. may as well declare itself a neutral power, vote the Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich ticket in 2012 and never fight another foreign war for any reason.

What are the circumstances that define Afghanistan today? Yes, the Taliban is "resurgent," but mainly in the sense that militarily it is marginally more effective now than four years ago. Yes, much of the countryside is unsafe, but the cities, for the most part, are not unsafe.

Corruption is rampant and President Hamid Karzai is feckless, but he is legitimate and Afghanistan has seen far worse. The system of electing representatives and appointing governors is dysfunctional, but at least there's a system. NATO was much too slow in training and equipping the Afghan army and police, but now they are being trained and equipped. The poppy trade is flourishing and provides the Taliban leadership with considerable income, but they are as unpopular as ever.

And so on. The real heart of our Afghan problem lies in our expectations of what this primitive and riven country is ever likely to become. The achievement of the past seven years lies mainly in what Afghanistan has not become: To wit, a safe haven for some of the worst people on earth.

That's no small thing, though selling Americans on what amounts to a negative achievement will not be easy. (Just ask George Bush about all the credit he gets for no new 9/11s.) Nor will it be easy for Mr. Obama to sell his rank and file on an Afghan surge after he did such a terrific job as a candidate of trashing the Iraq surge. Congratulations, Mr. President: You've got a war to sell.

Which brings us back to the left. Much will never go right in Afghanistan, but that doesn't mean things couldn't be a lot worse. For instance, Joe Biden can continue to trash Hamid Karzai, as Jack Kennedy trashed Ngo Dinh Diem. Or we could pursue a talk-and-fight approach to the Taliban, as Lyndon Johnson did with North Vietnam. Or the antiwar movement of the present could give encouragement to our enemies in the Middle East that they can bleed America into withdrawal, as a previous generation of peace activists encouraged Ho Chi Minh.

In that case, Afghanistan really will turn out to be another Vietnam and the prophesies of the left will be (self-) fulfilled. The sequel to this movie, by the way, is called "The Killing Fields."

The essay that follows is answered by the many items that follow it, and by my book on Edenism. The reputation of the author should serve as a reminder of the awesome threat that socialism presents to mankind. Albert receives my opprobrium elsewhere on this site, and he is richly deserving, however marvelous his contributions to physics and the development of the nuclear bomb. What he does here is give us an example of a superficially (and only superficially) persuasive case that socialism is necessary. In fact, of course, the prosperity and survival of mankind is deeply contingent on the avoidance of socialism (or rather, of utopian socialism, but nearly all socialists embrace utopianism on some level). Albert's prescription, “the establishment of a socialist economy [... in which] the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.”, would be simply silly in its foolishness, if not for the tens of millions of souls murdered by those who have attempted to implement it, and the millions who because of continuing attempts cling tenuously to life in the balance today. Albert's wails for the existential plight of the individual are like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's: neither has any intention of making the individual the solution to the individual's plight, rather both intend to obsolete the individual. But each and every person is an individual.

from Monthly Review, 1949-May, by Albert Einstein:

Why Socialism?

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

from the Telegraph of London, 2009-Jan-27, by Tom Leonard:

Nancy Pelosi says birth control will help the US economy

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has angered conservatives by claiming that birth control will help the ailing American economy.

The Democratic leader defended plans in the government's $825 billion (£600 billion) economic stimulus package to reimburse states for contraceptives and other family planning services given out as part of the Medicaid programme for people who cannot afford health insurance.

Mrs Pelosi said that "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government".

Mrs Pelosi, the mother of five children and grandmother to six, did not spell out exactly how fewer babies would help the economy.

But she told ABC television: "The family planning services reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs.

"One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government," she said in an interview on Sunday on ABC's This Week.

John Boehner, the House Republican leader, told Fox News: "Regardless of where anyone stands on taxpayer funding for contraceptives and the abortion industry, there is no doubt that this once little-known provision in the congressional Democrats' spending plan has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and creating more American jobs."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Jan-27:

Speaker Nancy Malthus
Pelosi should abstain from social engineering.

One of the more curious items in the $825 billion House "stimulus" is $87 billion to help states with Medicaid, specifically including an expansion of family-planning services. The implication is that more people mean less economic growth.

Following a White House meeting with President Obama on Friday, Republican John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, asked how spending millions of dollars on birth control will help stimulate the economy. On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos of ABC's "This Week" repeated the question to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who responded that "family planning services reduce costs."

She added: "The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now, and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help states meet their financial needs. One of those -- one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception -- will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

The notion that a larger population will produce a lower standard of living can be traced to the 18th-century economist Thomas Malthus. But during Malthus's own lifetime, his prediction was proved false, as he later acknowledged. Population and living standards rose simultaneously, and have continued to do so.

Ms. Pelosi's remarks ignore the importance of human capital, which is the ultimate resource. Fewer babies would move the U.S. in the demographic direction of Europe and Asia. On the Continent, birth rates already are effectively zero, and economists are predicting labor shortages in the years ahead. In Japan, where the population is aging very fast, workers are now encouraged to go home early to procreate. Japan is projected to lose 21% of its population by 2050.

The age and growth rate of a nation help determine its economic prosperity. A smaller workforce can result in less overall economic output. Without enough younger workers to replace retirees, health and pension costs can become debilitating. And when domestic markets shrink, so does capital investment. Whatever one's views on taxpayer subsidies for contraception, as economic stimulus the idea is loopy.

from the Los Angeles Times, 2009-Feb-11, by Kimi Yoshino and Jessica Garrison:

Octuplets could be costly for taxpayers

As a single parent with no income, Nadya Suleman could receive thousands of dollars a month in government assistance. And the Medi-Cal bill for her newborns is mounting.

Nadya Suleman has 14 children, including newborn octuplets. She has no job, no income and owes $50,000 in student loans.

Still, the 33-year-old Whittier woman said she's confident that she can afford to raise her huge family, insisting she can do it without welfare. In an interview Tuesday with NBC, she said she could use student loans to make ends meet until she finishes graduate school and gets a job.

But Suleman faces what are likely to be millions of dollars in medical bills alone, and it's increasingly likely that taxpayers will foot many of those bills.

Her family is eligible for large sums of public assistance money. Even before she gave birth to the octuplets Jan. 26, Suleman was receiving $490 in monthly food stamps, and three of her children were receiving federal supplemental security income because they are disabled.

Lowell Kepke, a spokesman for the San Francisco office of the Social Security Administration, said that a single parent with no income qualifies for up to $793 a month for each child with a physical or mental condition that results in "marked or severe functional limitations." That money is used for support and maintenance of the family, and Suleman would not be required to specifically account for how it is spent.

If Suleman's disabled children received the maximum payment, she would get nearly $2,900 a month in state and federal assistance, including the food stamps.

Suleman's octuplets qualify for Medi-Cal, California's healthcare program for the poor. Three sources told The Times that Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower had requested reimbursement for care of the eight premature infants.

Reimbursement rates for the octuplets were not immediately available. However, 2007 records show that Southern California hospitals received an average of $1,198 per day, per patient.

Tony Cava, a spokesman for the California Department of Health Care Services, said that for a baby in a hospital's neonatal intensive care unit, that amount would probably increase.

Using the 2007 average as a low estimate, Kaiser would be eligible for a combined $9,584 per day in Medi-Cal reimbursement. The babies, who are 16 days old, have already racked up a conservative $153,344 in Medi-Cal costs, not including their delivery. Kaiser doctors have said they will remain hospitalized for seven to 12 weeks. If they stay for seven weeks, the cost would be $469,616. If they stay 12 weeks, the cost would be $805,056.

Kaiser gathered 46 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals together to perform the delivery. It's unclear how much that cost and who will pay.

Suleman told NBC that she planned to go back to Cal State Fullerton, where she is earning a master's degree in counseling. Once she receives the degree, she said, she will get a job and be able to financially support the children.

Suleman used to work as a psychiatric technician at Metropolitan State Hospital, where she suffered an injury in 1999. During a riot involving 20 people, a patient overturned a heavy wooden desk on her back. After the incident, Suleman only briefly returned to work and she continued to experience ongoing back problems from a herniated disc.

Between 2000 and 2008, she received $169,353 in temporary disability payments, a workers' compensation spokeswoman said.

Her workers' compensation file, obtained by The Times, indicates that a doctor hired by the state to evaluate her believes she is now eligible for permanent disability. The state stopped making temporary disability payments Aug. 28. But the records show that she would receive payment for permanent disability. State officials said no determination has been made yet about the amount or duration of her payments.

Suleman insisted to NBC's Ann Curry in an interview taped Tuesday that she's not seeking a public handout.

"I'm not living off any taxpayer money," she said. "If I am, if it's food stamps, it's a temporary resource. And I was so reluctant. I very much so look forward to the day when I am not getting any kind of help with food stamps, which I believe will end when I graduate in about a year or year and a half."

Suleman also said she hopes that two of her children will soon no longer be disabled.

She said she has $50,000 in student loans that she will eventually have to repay.

Suleman also bristled at suggestions made by some commentators that she was being irresponsible for having so many children with no income or partner to help raise them.

"No. I am not being selfish. . . . If I were just sitting down watching TV and not being as determined as I am to succeed and provide a better future for my children, I believe that would be considered to a certain degree selfish," she said.

Suleman said she was married once. But the relationship ended when she realized "that I wasn't in love at all with him. I was in love with having children."

Suleman's ex-husband, Marcos Gutierrez, a produce manager at a salad company, declined to comment extensively about his ex-wife but said she's a good person.

"Nadya, she is a person with a great heart. . . . She's a nice person, with great love for her kids. That's all I have to say," he said.

Meanwhile, medical experts continued to question Dr. Michael Kamrava, the fertility specialist believed to have treated Suleman. Although she did not mention him directly, she named his West Coast IVF Clinic in Beverly Hills as the place where she sought treatment.

Dr. R. Dale McClure, president of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said the association has contacted both Suleman and Kamrava to learn more about the circumstances leading to her pregnancy.

"Only when we obtain and evaluate such information will we be able to determine an appropriate course of action," McClure said.

As for Suleman, she told NBC that she doesn't plan any more children. "100%. 200, 300 400%. Yes, done," she said.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2009-Feb-20, by Matthew Kaminski:

How California Became France
Unable to afford a welfare state and unable to reform it.

Sacramento, Calif.

As California goes, says an old cliché, so goes the nation. Oh my.

These days, the Golden State leads the nation on economic and fiscal dysfunction, from the empty homes spread across the Central Valley to the highest state budget shortfall in the nation's history. Meanwhile, its political class pioneers denial in the face of catastrophe.

The spark for the immediate political crisis was a familiar Californian discovery, a fiscal hole of $41 billion. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an "emergency" in November and took legislative leaders behind closed doors to hammer out a compromise. The budget adopted in a marathon session this week splits the baby, closing the deficit with spending cuts (hated by the left) and tax hikes (ditto the right), all the while largely failing to tackle the state's built-in structural defects.

Some parts of the deal, such as borrowing from future lottery receipts, may yet collapse at the ballot in May, and California could soon be back in line to mark another first -- state bankruptcy. In anticipation, Standard & Poor's this month downgraded its bond rating a notch below Louisiana's.

Even discounting for the impact of global recession, the most populous state's ills are unique and self-inflicted -- and avoidable. In the last three decades, California expanded the public sector and regulation to Europe-like dimensions. Schools, state employees, health care, even dog kennels, benefited from largesse in flush times. Government workers got 16 official holidays, everyone else six. The state dabbled with universal health care and adopted strict environmental standards. In short, California went where our new president and Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco want America to go.

Now there's much to recommend the Old World. California brings to mind my last home, France -- God's country blessed with fertile soil for wines, sun-blanched beaches, and a well-educated populace. Amusingly, both states are led by bling-bling immigrants married to glamorous women and elected to shake up the status quo. In both departments, the governator got a head start on Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris.

The parallels are also disquieting. The French have long experienced the unintended consequences of a large public sector. Ask them about it. As the number of people who get money from government grows, so does the power of constituencies dedicated to keep this honey dripping. Even when voters recognize the model carries drawbacks, such as subpar growth, high taxes, an uncompetitive business climate and above-average unemployment, their elected leaders find it near impossible to tweak the system. This has been the story of France for decades, and lately of California.

Six years ago, Mr. Schwarzenegger arrived in Sacramento to "cut up the credit card" and give the girlie men at the State Capitol a testosterone shot. California languished then in a fiscal crisis whose causes were pretty much the same as today. The hapless Gray Davis had been recalled, and the Austrian-born actor made a promising start to break the pattern.

In 2005, banking on his popularity, the governor pushed an ambitious ballot initiative to impose a hard state spending cap, limit the unions' political buying power, tighten requirements for teacher tenure, and overhaul a gerrymandered state political map. Arnold lost.

After that setback, Mr. Schwarzenegger shifted his attention to green jobs and energy, winning fans in Europe and among Democrats. "He's recognized that California's a pretty moderate place," says Darrell Steinberg, the Democratic president pro tem of the Senate. "You've got to govern from the middle."

People closer to the governor offer a different take. "Once he got beat, he reverted back to, 'I want to be liked,'" says a former Schwarzenegger aide. "It's classic narcissism." (The governor declined requests for an interview, but I did walk away with three custom-made Daniel Marshall cigars from his office.)

In the Arnold era, the overall cost base has stayed the same as in the Davis era. That isn't entirely his fault. California's constitution locks in higher spending in good years, paving the way for huge deficits in the down. A dependence on a highly progressive tax code leaves it particularly vulnerable to boom and bust cycles. Democrats run the legislature. Across the street from the Capitol, the offices of unions and lobbyists are arguably the real locus of power in Sacramento.

In this budget debacle, Mr. Schwarzenegger found himself back where his remarkable political journey began in 2003. Only now with him in the Davis role. The pill is bitterer still since the budget he signed yesterday will raise the vehicle tax -- the same Davis tax increase he campaigned against and terminated in his first act in office.

Neither side won with this deal, to which the one good alternative would be a time machine to take Sacramento's political class back five years and do it right then. In the event, Republicans split, and signed off on $14.5 billion in new taxes and a less than airtight spending cap. State personnel reductions are minimal, as well, further infuriating their base. The Democrats swallowed $15 billion in spending cuts, which unions vow to fight.

California is in a French-like bind: unable to afford a welfare-type state, and unable to overhaul it. "The people say they want all these programs, then there's nothing they want to pay for," says Hector De La Torre, a Democratic assemblyman. "The schizophrenia in the legislature reflects the peoples'."

This week's deal likely won't keep the state in balance beyond 18 months, perhaps even fewer. "This budget will take us through 2010," says Karen Bass, the Assembly speaker, a Democrat from Los Angeles. "I don't know if it will hold."

Some Democrats and Republicans privately say the best option may be failure. The rough scenario is fiscal insolvency, followed perhaps by federal receivership. No precedent or legal avenue exists for a state to reorganize its affairs under a form of Chapter 11 protection, but that striking suggestion sounds better by the day.

The expectations for Mr. Schwarzenegger's two remaining years in office are low, leaving many of his supporters to ponder the might-have-been. "No one has the political incentives to cut government," says a Republican strategist. "It takes tremendous political capital, which Arnold had. It's a tragedy to have this rare moment when you can try to change and waste it."

For the nation, California is the what-might-be.

Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

from City Journal, 2008-Autumn, by Steven Malanga:

Not Kosher
The Jewish Conservative movement embraces labor and “social justice.”

Over the last decade, union activists have made impressive strides in reviving old alliances, which had waned in the 1960s, between the labor movement and left-leaning clergy. Joint labor-religious groups have become muscular forces advocating union-friendly issues at the municipal, state, and federal levels (see “The Religious Left, Reborn,” Autumn 2007). Now, in the latest major victory for the unions, an activist rabbi has persuaded the highest legal body of the Jewish Conservative movement to recommend that Jewish business owners pay their workers a “living wage” and welcome unions into their workplaces. The religious ruling, or teshuvah, of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards—a body within the Rabbinical Assembly, the worldwide congregation of Conservative rabbis—assumes a pro-labor position in virtually every controversy surrounding wage laws. It also offers evidence of an emerging pro-labor drift within the Conservative movement, as rabbis push their congregations to embrace “social-justice” initiatives.

The teshuvah is largely the work of Rabbi Jill Jacobs, director of education for Jewish Funds for Justice, a social-justice group that steers money from philanthropists to programs that combat, in the group’s words, “the root causes of domestic social and economic injustice.” Jacobs, like many clergy who have signed on to labor’s agenda, wants to use religious law and institutions to help reform what she sees as an inequitable economic system. Writing earlier this year in Shofar, a Jewish-studies journal, Jacobs described herself as “an American disturbed by the systematic injustices of this country” and proclaimed that American Jews, who as a group are “wealthy and more educated than the norm,” have “an obligation to care for the members of society who are most in need of protection.”

In her teshuvah, Jacobs notes that Jewish religious law holds that employers must treat workers with dignity and respect, which she interprets to mean a “living wage” in twenty-first-century America. Though her sources on workers’ dignity are largely ancient, her definition of a living wage is based on a model endorsed by the modern labor movement. The teshuvah tells employers that a living wage is “three times the fair market rent on a two-bedroom apartment” in the county where the business is located, or 130 percent of the poverty line, or 80 percent of an area’s median income. In New York City, a living wage based on so-called fair market rent amounts to about $23 an hour for a 40-hour workweek, or more than three times the state’s minimum wage. In Chicago, it is $16 an hour, or double the Illinois minimum wage.

The ruling also urges Jewish employers to “allow employees the space to make their own decisions about unionizations without threats or interference on the part of the employer” and to “hire unionized employees when possible.” To that end, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards explicitly tells employers to give workers the right to unionize by card-check—a method by which a company forgoes a secret ballot and authorizes union representation when half of its workers sign their names to cards.

The teshuvah has aroused concern—and opposition—among Conservative Jewish business leaders. Marc Gary, general counsel of Fidelity Investments in Boston and a non-voting, non-rabbinical member of the committee, argued that by wandering into areas of social justice, the committee risked “relegating the CJLS to the role of the Movement’s nanny instead of its authoritative provider of legal guidance.” Gary pointed out that the teshuvah considered labor issues almost entirely from union leaders’ point of view—failing to acknowledge, for instance, that many employees oppose the non-secret card-check process because it exposes them to pressure to join a union. “It is conceivable that employees choose not to join unions because unions have been associated in the past with corruption, racism, sexism, and xenophobia,” Gary told the committee. He also noted that much of the economic research that the teshuvah cites in favor of a living wage was one-sided, and that other, nonpartisan research by economists like David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine had concluded that the living wage often hurts low-income workers by forcing firms to eliminate jobs.

The committee issued its ruling despite Gary’s dissent, and other institutions within the Conservative Jewish movement have also proceeded with labor-friendly initiatives. The most significant is a joint effort by the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which represents congregations throughout North America, to create a new level of kosher certification for companies producing food for observant Jewish communities—based on the way these companies treat their workers.

Unlike traditional kosher designations, which certify that food has been produced in accordance with Jewish dietary laws, the new rules, known as hekhsher tzedek, require employers to follow a lengthy list of wage and benefit guidelines. They “favor” certifying firms that pay above industry standards and offer “affordable health insurance,” retirement plans, paid vacations, sick leave, and maternity leave. The new kosher-certification effort will also rate firms on whether their employee turnover rate is lower than industry averages; whether they have good relations with unions; whether they have efforts in place to diversify their workforces to include minorities, women, and the disabled; and whether they have good environmental track records. The new certification is set to go into effect in January 2009.

Says one businessman who has watched the Conservative movement drift into pro-labor issues: “Personally, I think this is just the beginning. It’s not impossible that the Conservative rabbis will, over the next few years, come out with anti-Wal-Mart resolutions,” as well as other rulings, in pursuit of “social justice.”

Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left, a collection of his City Journal essays.

from the Wall Street Journal Asia, 2009-Feb-3:

Neo-Socialism Down Under
Kevin Rudd reinvents a philosophy to justify bigger government.

From Washington to Tokyo to London, politicians the world over are using the global financial crisis as cover to extend their powers. In Australia, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is taking that tack a step further -- he's manufacturing a philosophy to justify his actions.

In an essay published in the February issue of the Monthly magazine, Mr. Rudd lays out his vision for "social capitalism"; a kind of halfway house between what he calls "extreme capitalism" and "an all-providing state." "Whatever the nomenclature," he writes, "the concept is clear: a system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate."

This is a vision for a greatly expanded state cloaked under the rubric of "free markets," one in which Canberra would decide what inequalities were worth smoothing out and which ones weren't. Australia had that model once; it was called the Gough Whitlam government. In the 1970s, Mr. Whitlam nationalized health and higher education, hiked public-sector wages, increased government spending and pandered to labor unions, a key Labor Party constituency. The result was one of the worst recessions in Australia's modern history.

That's why the Labor Party -- the same Labor Party that Mr. Rudd belongs to -- embraced truly free markets, trade liberalization and deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. Those reforms underpinned 17 consecutive years of economic expansion. Mr. Rudd makes only a passing reference to this record, acknowledging the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating Labor governments' "ambitious and unapologetic program of economic modernization." He goes further: "Neo-liberalism, and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced, has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy," he writes. This is a far cry from the economic conservatism for which Mr. Rudd was elected in 2007.

In his essay, Mr. Rudd uses the global financial crisis as a cover to attack his political opponents and talk up his own recent record. The opposition Liberal Party, Mr. Rudd writes, is "the political home of neo-liberalism in Australia" and bears blame for the current financial crisis, while Labor "has acted decisively through state action to maintain the stability of the Australian financial system."

The irony is that Australia was better prepared to deal with the financial crisis because of its long record of liberalization and sound regulatory oversight. Australia wasn't hit by a slew of subprime mortgage defaults or bank runs. Its problems came courtesy of muddled government interventions on foreign shores. Mr. Rudd's Labor government reacted by guaranteeing bank deposits at taxpayer expense, banning short selling and proposing huge public spending programs.

Milton Friedman once wrote: "What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will." It's not necessary to read between the lines of Mr. Rudd's essay to understand that that's what's going on here.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-11, by Daniel Henninger:

U.S. Says It Will Bail Out Christmas
Easter and even Valentine's Day might be next.

With the government on the brink of rescuing the U.S. auto industry, we have learned that the Treasury Department is drawing up plans to bail out Christmas. "We have reason to believe," said a person close to the matter, "that without an immediate capital injection, Santa Claus will fail before December 24." Mr. Claus could not be reached for comment.

Government officials are said to be concerned at the risk that the collapse of Santa Claus could pose to the nation's intricately related system of holiday happiness. Though a failure by Santa Claus poses the largest systemic risk, the government is also prepared to step in to bail out Christmas trees, caroling parties and mistletoe producers.

President-elect Barack Obama has been briefed on the initiative, and through a spokesman was quoted as saying, "I'm OK with bailing out Christmas."

Inside Treasury, some officials privately worry that such a precedent could result in the nationalization of Santa Claus, leading to similar calls for help next year from the Easter Bunny and even Valentine's Day. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson personally concluded, however, that "Santa Claus is too big to fail."

Indeed, the situation was considered sufficiently dire that Mr. Paulson agreed to travel to the North Pole to speak to Mr. Claus. A Treasury official with knowledge of the situation agreed to provide this reporter with an account of the meeting. "Secretary Paulson," this person said, "has had a lifetime belief in Santa Claus and firmly supports what he represents."

Last Saturday morning, Mr. Paulson flew by government plane to meet with Santa, though a spokesman would not disclose the exact location of the famed toymaker's North Pole workshop. Mr. Paulson's plane landed on the polar ice cap, and then the Secretary was taken the final 300 miles in a sleigh pulled by Santa's fleet of reindeer. In deference to Mr. Paulson's unfamiliarity with sleigh-riding at altitude, Mr. Claus ordered his assistants to bring the Treasury department party overland.

The picture of Christmas painted for Mr. Paulson by his rosy-cheeked host was bleak.

Apparently Santa's difficulties in "producing product," as Mr. Paulson described it, originated in a poorly understood aspect of the jolly elf's current operations known as "Christmas list swaps," or CLIPS.

Mr. Claus said that going back as far as anyone can remember, Christmas lists had been handled in the traditional manner. Children would draw up lists, which were left out in the evening with a glass of milk for collection by Santa's elves; other lists would be exchanged with siblings, cousins and loved ones.

Several years ago, according to a participant who requested anonymity, some of Santa's elves were contacted by representatives from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, who persuaded the elves of the benefits of an elaborate scheme of Christmas-list securitization.

As outlined to the elves, the idea worked like this. Brokers would break each item on the Christmas lists into separate pieces and repackage the requests as securities, using a formula known as a "benevolence diffusion algorithm." This would guarantee happiness for everybody in the world on Christmas morning. No one would lose.

At first Santa was doubtful of the plan. Mrs. Claus was especially skeptical, pointing out that in her experience with baking Christmas cookies, a seemingly foolproof enterprise, a failure rate of 5% was not uncommon. "There is simply no historical data to suggest the whole world can be long Christmas," Mrs. Claus said. "No scheme will ever rid the world of bad little girls and boys."

According to a person with knowledge of the North Pole couple's affairs, Santa received a call from a Franklin Raines, who identified himself as the president of a "government sponsored enterprise" known as Happie Mac. Santa apparently became convinced that Happie Mac sounded similar to his own business of free giving, and so agreed to the proposed system of Christmas list swaps.

Difficulties emerged when a CLIPS salesman from AIG called a senior elf to say that a large number of the Christmas list swaps had ended up in the hands of Russian billionaires with links to former Russian president Vladimir Putin. "These plutocrats don't even believe in me," Santa was heard to say as Mr. Paulson's sleigh rode out of sight.

On returning to Washington, Mr. Paulson's plan to bail out Christmas immediately ran into problems. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose great-great uncle is rumored to have been an elf, pointed out that Santa Claus might not qualify for a TARP loan. According the Fed's analysis: "Santa Claus belongs to the people. Any bailout must pass through the appropriate committees of the House."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, notwithstanding that she is the mother of five children, has reportedly told Mr. Paulson that Congress will bail out Christmas only in return for a promise from Santa Claus to "go green." Speaker Pelosi said the Environmental Defense Fund has long complained about Santa's eight tiny reindeer and that Mr. Claus would be asked to appear this Tuesday before Rep. Barney Frank's committee with a plan to reduce the sleigh's carbon footprint.

With only 13 days remaining for a Santa rescue, Mr. Paulson and Speaker Pelosi are said to be discussing the appointment of a Christmas czar. The leading candidate is Oprah Winfrey.

Write to henninger@wsj.com.
(Or better yet, write to Santa who needs the support.)

from National Review Online, 2008-Oct-25, by Mark R. Levin:

The Obama Temptation

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.

Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.

But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.

Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.

The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-30, by Fouad Ajami:

Obama and the Politics of Crowds
The masses greeting the candidate on the trail are a sign of great unease.

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, "Crowds and Power" (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when "distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd." These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.

On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama's vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.

A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure, and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political programs: redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and "modernity" for the upper end of the scale.

It was no accident that the white working class was the last segment of the population to sign up for the Obama journey. Their hesitancy was not about race. They were men and women of practicality; they distrusted oratory, they could see through the falseness of the solidarity offered by this campaign. They did not have much, but believed in the legitimacy of what little they had acquired. They valued work and its rewards. They knew and heard of staggering wealth made by the Masters of the Universe, but held onto their faith in the outcomes that economic life decreed. The economic hurricane that struck America some weeks ago shook them to the core. They now seek protection, the shelter of the state, and the promise of social repair. The bonuses of the wizards who ran the great corporate entities had not bothered them. It was the spectacle of the work of the wizards melting before our eyes that unsettled them.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, once set the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the American faith in liberty began to crack. The preachers of America's decline in the global pecking order had added to the panic. Our best days were behind us, the declinists prophesied. The sun was setting on our imperium, and rising in other lands.

A younger man, "cool" and collected, carrying within his own biography the strands of the world beyond America's shores, was put forth as a herald of the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with. Akin to the passions that have shaped and driven highly polarized societies, this election has at its core a desire to settle the unfinished account of the presidential election eight years ago. George W. Bush's presidency remained, for his countless critics and detractors, a tale of usurpation. He had gotten what was not his due; more galling still, he had been bold and unabashed, and taken his time at the helm as an opportunity to assert an ambitious doctrine of American power abroad. He had waged a war of choice in Iraq.

This election is the rematch that John Kerry had not delivered on. In the fashion of the crowd that seeks and sees the justice of retribution, Mr. Obama's supporters have been willing to overlook his means. So a candidate pledged to good government and to ending the role of money in our political life opts out of public financing of presidential campaigns. What of it? The end justifies the means.

Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance. To be sure, there was a measure of willfulness in this national vision, for politics and wars guided the destiny of this republic. But that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner.

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination.

From Elias Canetti again: "But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens."

The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.

Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Dec-12, by Eric Banks:

The Legacy of Jonestown
Thirty years after the murder-suicides in Guyana, the country struggles with memories of the event

We expect our killing fields to be marked a certain way, and with at least a certain rhetoric of rectitude. At Jonestown, in Guyana, there are no markers, no memorials noting what took place, no manicured clearings to mark how the site looked 30 years ago, when more than 900 Americans died there in a still hard-to-imagine moment of mass suicide and outright murder. It is an open field bifurcated by a red dirt road, with knee-high bush to the north and, to the south, thick jungle. You don't even realize you have entered the site until you are already there.

The wooden billboard that used to hang over the entry, proclaiming "Welcome to Jonestown / Peoples Temple Agricultural Project," vanished long ago, along with virtually all other signs of Jim Jones and his followers, who died by the lethal ingestion of cyanide-spiked grape Fla-Vor-Aid, forced injection and gunfire. It is as though the memory of the massive loss of life -- following the brazen murder of a U.S. congressman who had come to investigate complaints about the compound, three members of the media accompanying him and a commune defector at a nearby airstrip -- is still too extreme to be remembered.

The event remains the most famous moment in the history of Guyana, which is roughly the size of Kansas and is the lone English-speaking country on the South American continent. The memory of the massacre is spooked with dark ironies about the country's 42-year history of independence from the British Commonwealth. The Guyanese government had tried to develop a new and proud independent identity for the country that would serve as a model for postcolonial development -- and initially welcomed Jim Jones as a blow to the American forces of imperialism. After the massacre, the country's leaders opted to absolve themselves of the events, pointing to the Americans as if they had landed from Mars. Today, it isn't much easier to mourn and memorialize the victims when doing so is an admission of the country's failed hopes. Marking the tragedy has been no less acute in the U.S. It was only last month, during the 30th anniversary of the deaths, that a marker was erected at a cemetery in Oakland, Calif., to memorialize the 410 Jonestown victims buried there, 60 of them unclaimed.

The Jonestown site lies far in the bush, an hour's flight by charter plane from the sleepy coastal capital of Georgetown and another half-hour drive down a bumpy road. "Do you know the bush?" asked my guide there, a slightly built, soft-spoken man from the nearby town of Port Kaituma named Carlton Daniels, as we entered the site of the former compound on the back of his son-in-law's pick-up. The question wasn't meant as a conversation starter: A vine he called a "let-me-go" dangled overhead. "It will grab on to you," he warned.

Mr. Daniels, a semi-retired contractor, is the unlikely Virgil of Jonestown; he has lived in the area all his life and had been postmaster in the 1970s, when he first met the handful of Californian pioneers from the People's Temple. They began to show up around 1974 after the organization leased 25,000 acres from the Guyanese government. (The bulk of the congregants, an unlikely cohort of African-American seniors, youthful white progressives and a small army of school-age children, would arrive two years later as unflattering reports of financial irregularities and church beatings began to appear in the San Francisco media.) Wading through the knee-high growth, he pointed out what was once a grove of cashew and lime trees, which marked the area around Mr. Jones's cabin and now struggled to survive against flora more suited to the blazing, nearly equatorial sun.

Mr. Daniels recalled being let in the compound by the Guyanese Defense Forces three days after the massacre to retrieve some fuel containers he had lent to the People's Temple. "I didn't want to come back here for a long time after that," he whispered, as if he were worried he might be overheard.

Trailing his son, who was armed with a cutlass against the jungle and the notoriously deadly bushmaster snake, we searched in vain for the remains of Mr. Jones's piano, its rotting keyboard having been turned up by a party including the minister of tourism a year earlier. We had no more luck in finding any traces of the cage that once held Mr. Muggs, the pet chimpanzee Mr. Jones adopted, who perished alongside the 913 humans.

"They should have done something to keep the area the way it was," Mr. Daniels said as his son emerged from a path-clearing reconnaissance job, his upper torso pock-marked with fresh bee stings. Mr. Daniels didn't elaborate on the thought, but he didn't need to. He admired the achievement of establishing a commune in such an inhospitable environment and recounted the lovely grove of well-tended fruit trees that once lined the entry. We followed his son about 40 yards into the bush and located the pits where recalcitrant children were kept as punishment (almost a third of the Jonestown victims were kids). Further along, we found what was left of Jonestown: a couple of vehicles turned on their sides; a flatbed truck with a skinny sapling growing through its chassis; and a long metal container that looked like it was once a refrigerator.

Over time there have been intermittent schemes to clear and memorialize the site. Last year, the Guyanese minister of tourism, industry and commerce, Manniram Prashad, visited it to promote his vision of "dark tourism." A reporter from the Guyana Chronicle cheekily commented that Mr. Prashad "remarked that Jonestown, if reconstructed, can be a major tourist attraction in Guyana." Rather than getting involved in the "blame game," Mr. Prashad stated, "we should work to educate our people and allow others who suffered as a result of the loss of loved ones and friends to visit the site if they so wish."

The minister's desire to equate memorialization and tourism is linked not just to the desperate economic position of Guyana. It also represents the difficult relation between the Guyanese, who live overwhelmingly along a little stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, and the interior, which is home to virtually all of the country's natural but hard-to-mine wealth in the form of bauxite, timber, gold, diamonds and eco-tourism. The hinterland remains the undeveloped great hope for the coastal Guyanese, whose capital, Georgetown, lies several feet below sea level and grows increasingly threatened by seasonal flooding and rising ocean levels. Roughly 25 miles across the flat plains along the coast, where sugar-cane fields but little else flourish, the jungle begins.

The bush covers 60% of the country, yet it's home to only 10% of Guyana's 780,000 residents, most of them descendants of African slaves or South Asian indentured servants. More than 300,000 live in Georgetown. The idea of colonizing the interior, whether it be for its mineral promise or for imagining a new social reality and set of possibilities for future generations, has long enchanted -- and frustrated -- post-independence Guyanese politicians.

No political leader was more adept at exploiting the idea or realizing its failure than Forbes Burnham, who led the country from independence in 1966 until his death in 1985. His aspirations to create a unique Guyanese path to socialism -- through a top-heavy program of massively nationalized industry and agriculture in the interior -- aggressively chased off foreign investment.

Mr. Burnham welcomed not only Jim Jones but other soi-disant radical movements into Guyana, turning the country into an ideological Disneyworld for the charismatic and the disaffected in the late '70s. After the Jonestown massacre, he hatched a clandestine scheme with a Christian evangelical group associated with Billy Graham's son Franklin to repopulate the site with anti-Communist Hmong tribesmen exiled from Laos. Like most of Mr. Burnham's pipe dreams of developing the bush, it failed.

In 1978, Mr. Burnham's unpopularity was growing and his overconfident austerity economy was failing. Guyanese-style socialist development meant not only nationalization of foreign companies but strict laws against exports, which led to crippling food shortages. The local Georgetown newspapers at the time had many more headlines on garlic and onion smuggling than the murder-suicides at Jonestown.

The disastrous economic effects of Mr. Burnham's plans long outlasted his political leadership as the country faced energy shortages, racial violence against the South Asians who make up almost half of Guyanese population, crime and political corruption. The 2006 national elections were the first carried out largely without accompanying political violence, and the victorious candidate, President Bharrat Jagdeo, has promoted free-market investment. Still, by 2008, the sole economic category in which Guyana ranked among the highest is outward migration -- it has the sixth highest rate per capita of citizens leaving the country world-wide.

Large parts of the interior remain virtually inaccessible, particularly in the northern regions, where Jonestown is located. Though a Chinese timber company has begun operations around Port Kaituma, the tin-shack mining town located about 10 miles from the Jonestown site, the town itself shrank by nearly half with the closing of the Barama Logging Company a decade ago and comprises a more transient population of "pork knockers," individuals panning for gold. The lack of infrastructure has at least been a boon to the small river port -- it's the only real source of basic supplies imported for the entire region.

For all these reasons, not to mention the public's stomach for constructing a Potemkin death village, the Jonestown tourism idea is a bit of a tough sale, and there hasn't been much follow-up to Mr. Prashad's trial balloon. "That didn't get very far, did it?" laughed Rupert Roopnaraine, the program director in Georgetown of the Guyana Citizens' Initiative and former prime minister candidate of the small Working People Alliance party. "The Guyanese, they are superstitious people. They're not stepping foot back there."

"When it happened, a lot of us wanted to preserve the site," Georgetown mayor Hamilton Green says, "but it was impossible." Mr. Green had been a ranking government official when Mr. Burnham ran the country. "Burnham just said no." Mr. Green's wife, Shirley Field-Ridley, who died in 1982, was minister of information in the Burnham cabinet, and as the evening of Nov. 18 unfolded, the country was overwhelmed by what had taken place. "We heard the death toll go from 10, to 100, to 300. What could we do? We only had 30 body bags in the whole country," Mr. Green says. Like others in Georgetown, he darkly hinted of CIA involvement in Jonestown. There were rumors.

Mr. Roopnaraine says the country suffered from never having a full accounting -- not only of what took place at Jonestown in the days after the massacre, when the Guyanese Defense Forces shut down outside access to the site, but also of the Guyanese authorities' complicity in establishing a state-within-a-state in the hinterlands. He says revisiting the Jonestown massacre would mean revisiting the darkest failures of the country in the years following independence. The scandal helped fuel the popular anger against Mr. Burnham, who used election rigging, harassment and detention of political opponents, and state and paramilitary violence to maintain his autocracy. The insurgency led by Mr. Roopnaraine's WPA party was effectively silenced by the assassination of its leader, historian Walter Rodney, on a Georgetown street in 1980.

Most of the Guyanese officials who were in power in the 1970s are dead, and questions as to how Mr. Jones' sect flourished mostly unhindered in the jungle are simply impossible to answer. Mr. Burnham died in 1985; his agriculture minister Dr. Ptolemy Reid, whose portfolio brought him into the most direct contact with Mr. Jones, died four years ago. Neville Annibourne, the ministry of information agent who flew with Rep. Leo Ryan's entourage to Jonestown and survived the shootings, lives in a suburb near the seawall in Georgetown. After promising information, he immediately requested $200 to start talking.

The point of departure from Port Kaituma to Georgetown is the same little-used dirt airstrip where Rep. Ryan and his entourage came under the fatal fire of the Jonestown killer who pursued them in a small flatbed trailer. There, one signs in with a Guyanese Defense Force official on arrival and departure (drug smuggling into and out across the nearby Venezuelan border remains a fear). In anticipation of a tiny charter plane's landing, cows were shooed from the runway. A man named Troy came over to sit next to the Guyanese army officer, and began to cite scripture to explain why the spirits of Jonestown remained behind to haunt the land. Mr. Jones, he said, had attempted to make himself God over his kingdom. He quoted Colossians 2: "and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it."

From the plane above it's nearly impossible to make out the Jonestown site from the sky. All that is visible is a ruffled ground of green interrupted occasionally by smoke and, here and there, by a lonely homestead. It remains that way for most of the hour-long flight, until the jungle abruptly comes to an end and the neatly ordered checkerboard squares of the coastal cane fields comes into view.

Eric Banks is a New York-based writer and former editor in chief of Bookforum.

from the Washington Post, 2008-Nov-19, p.C1, by Charles A. Krause:

Town Without Pity
30 Years Later, Memories of Jonestown Evoke Guilt, Anger and Mistrust

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 18

Jackie Speier now represents California's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The last time I saw her, 30 years ago, her bloody, bullet-riddled body lay in tall grass at the side of a jungle airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana.

She had been gunned down by four assassins sent by the Rev. Jim Jones to kill congressman Leo J. Ryan -- and the rest of us who had accompanied him to investigate reports of violence, torture and sexual abuse in a place called Jonestown.

For 15 hours, Speier and the others who miraculously survived the airport massacre waited to be rescued, bleeding and fearful the gunmen would return. Meanwhile, five miles away, Jones was ordering more than 900 of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking fruit-flavored punch laced with poison.

Jones's exhortation to his followers, to "die with dignity," and a survivor's account of Jonestown's final hour -- "they started with the babies" -- became headlines sent around the world. Overnight, Jonestown would become more than a name or geographic location; it became shorthand for troubling questions about cults, the social and sexual revolution then underway in the United States, and the mixture of politics and religion that Jim Jones used so effectively to lure thousands of followers into his church and to hoodwink much of San Francisco's political establishment.

On Tuesday, 30 years to the day after the horrific events that resulted in Ryan's assassination, the deaths of three journalists and the mass suicide-murder, some 200 Jonestown survivors, relatives of those who died, television crews and journalists gathered at a mass grave in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery, where 406 unidentified bodies from Jonestown, mostly children, are buried.

The Rev. Jynona Norwood, a black evangelical preacher from Los Angeles who lost her mother and 26 other members of her immediate family in Jonestown, asked the mourners to "reflect on the lives of our loved ones who trusted in a man who was the most evil man who walked the face of the Earth."

The memorial service was just one of a number of events, in the San Francisco area and nationally, commemorating Jonestown's 30th anniversary. Renewed interest has been fanned by two new television documentaries and a play, "The People's Temple," now touring regional theaters. For those too young to remember Jonestown, the mass suicide-murder has become a part of pop culture. Brian Jonestown Massacre is the name of a rock group. And "drink the Kool-Aid" has entered the popular lexicon for a toxic kind of malleability, a reference to my first reports from Jonestown for The Washington Post quoting Odell Rhodes, a Jonestown survivor, saying that the potion drunk or injected into those who died was a mixture of cyanide and Kool-Aid.

Many of the Jonestown survivors and their families find the Kool-Aid references and jokes insensitive and deeply hurtful -- reminders of the tragedy they suffered and, worse still, the widely held perception that the men, women and children in Jonestown were a bunch of crazies who willingly committed suicide out of blind devotion to their leader.

"The whole world looked at us as a bunch of kooks, that we were borderline people, uneducated and unstable," Debbie Layton, whose escape from Jonestown in May 1978 set in motion the tragedy that followed, recalled Sunday. "People think that all the people just drank the Kool-Aid," she said. "They have no idea of what that means or what happened. They just laugh about it."

Much more is known today about the inner workings of the Peoples Temple than was known in the immediate aftermath of Jonestown. For example, many of those who died that day were highly educated. And at least some did, in fact, commit suicide. But there is clear evidence that armed guards loyal to Jones forced mothers to poison their children and gave adults a choice: Drink the deadly potion or be shot. And it later turned out that Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, was mixed with the cyanide, a minor footnote to the larger tragedy that transfixed the nation, indeed the world, in 1978.

As Norwood and others who spoke at the memorial service said Tuesday, there is still much healing left to do and many questions unanswered. Was Jonestown a cult, a religious commune or a legitimate experiment in racial harmony and social justice gone bad? Should Ryan have insisted on going to personally investigate Jonestown, taking journalists with him, after having been warned that Jonestown was an armed camp and Jones himself increasingly unstable?

Was Jones a sadistic egomaniac who cynically abused his followers? Or was he a decent man who fell victim to the drugs, power and paranoia that finally devoured him and the 913 other men, women and children who died in Jonestown? Why didn't more people resist when they were ordered to die?

The raw emotion that still surrounds these questions flared into the open on the eve of Tuesday's commemoration when one group of survivors unveiled a plaque with the names of those who died, including Jones. Lela Howard, whose aunt died in Jonestown and who arranged for the plaque to be made and displayed at San Francisco's African American Historical and Cultural Society (80 percent of those who died were black), said she included Jones's name because "he, too, was a victim." Many Jonestown survivors seem to agree.

But Norwood, who has raised $30,000 for a memorial to be located at the mass grave site in Oakland, said she and many other relatives and survivors are outraged. Their families, she said, have spent the past 30 years trying to erase the stigma and guilt of having been "deceived" by Jones's appeal to racial equality, free health care and social welfare.

"Jones was not a victim," she said, fire in her eyes, vowing never to succumb to pressure from Jones's family and some others to include his name on the graveside monument that was partially unveiled Tuesday and will be completed next year. "To me, that's like putting Hitler's name on a memorial to the Holocaust."

A Tragedy That Resonates

For millions of Americans older than 40, the graphic images of hundreds of bloated bodies, piled two and three deep, rotting in the hot Guyanese sun 30 years ago and the unprecedented death of a congressman on a jungle airstrip made Jonestown the kind of tragic, gruesome event that even today is instantly recognizable.

But for those members of the Peoples Temple who survived Jonestown's bitter end, as well as for hundreds of relatives of those who died that day, for Ryan's family and those of us who were wounded in the airstrip attack, Jonestown is an indelible part of our lives that we have spent 30 years trying to recover from, hide from, understand or explain.

Thirty years ago, Jackie Speier was Rep. Leo J. Ryan's legislative assistant.

Today, she holds a congressional seat that encompasses much of Ryan's former district. When I interviewed her last week, it was the first time we had spoken since we were both nearly killed on the airstrip.

I was shot in the hip and survived by playing dead. She was shot five times by the Jonestown gunmen and barely pulled through. At one point, she said, her doctors thought an arm and a leg would have to be amputated. Later, they told her she might not be able to have children. She later had two. Even now, she has two bullets lodged in her body.

Yet, for all the nightmares and physical trauma she has suffered, she said she does not hold the Jonestown survivors responsible for what happened 30 years ago. They were, for the most part, "broken" people, she said, "intimidated and fearful of being exiled" by their leader.

On a personal level, she said, her near-death in Guyana had been "freeing" and made her "a little bit fearless." It was a sentiment I could understand. After being wounded in Jonestown, I spent the next 20 years as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

As a Democratic member of the California state legislature for 18 years and now as a member of Congress, she said she has been willing to take on controversial issues and special interests that other politicians hesitate to tackle. She also remains fiercely loyal to her mentor, Ryan. She freely admits she told him she thought the Jonestown trip was "premature" and was so concerned about the danger that she prepared new wills for both of them. She even insisted on putting a "null and void" clause in the contract for a condominium unit she was buying in Arlington if she didn't return from the trip alive. But she says Ryan was convinced he had a congressional "shield," that no one would dare kill a U.S. congressman. She went along despite her misgivings because she believed Ryan was right to go: People in Jonestown were being held against their will.

Today, Speier views Ryan as a hero who gave his life for his constituents and "shaped how I view public service. What I've learned from the experience is that when you see something that's wrong, you have to act on it."

But she knows that some Jonestown survivors blame Ryan for triggering the mass murder-suicide. Others say that Ryan's insistence on bringing journalists is evidence that he was more interested in publicity and a future run for the Senate than in saving lives.

Ryan's daughter, Patricia, says the publicity-seeking charge is a "cheap shot. He didn't need the publicity. He had just won reelection. He was tired, and he really didn't want to go. But he felt very obligated to his constituents," especially one good friend whose son had joined the Temple in San Francisco, then defected, only to die in a suspicious accident several months later.

There's no question in her mind, Pat Ryan says, that Jonestown was a cult -- not the progressive church or revolutionary movement Jones painted it as. The testimonies detailing manipulation, sexual and physical abuse of those who disagreed with Jones, and the threats against those who tried to leave are all evidence of that, she says.

Over the years, her anger toward the Temple survivors and their families has tempered. She has attended memorials and other meetings with former Temple members, though she remains a bit resentful that most of the attention has been directed toward them -- not the man who tried to save them.

With Speier's move to Congress in a special election in April, Pat Ryan says her father's sacrifice is finally beginning to be recognized. To mark the 30th anniversary of his death, Speier introduced legislation in Washington to rename the historic post office building in San Mateo, where Ryan had his office, in his honor. On Monday, Speier, Pat Ryan and other members of the Ryan family attended the naming ceremony.

Former representative Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), who served with Ryan on the old House International Relations Committee, and who declined Ryan's invitation to accompany him on the Jonestown trip, says the recognition is well deserved. "I think it was a tribute to Leo that he was willing to go," Solarz said recently. "Jonestown was a source of legitimate concern, and I'm sure he was going there to protect the interests of his constituents."

Casting a Long Shadow

Fielding McGehee III and his wife, Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters died in Jonestown, are Jonestown's unofficial archivist-historians. They publish a yearly newsletter and maintain a Web site that has vast quantities of information about the Peoples Temple before and after its catastrophic end.

McGehee says there were seven known survivors of Jonestown itself, 15 who left Jonestown with Ryan and survived the airport massacre, and approximately 50 more who were at the Peoples Temple headquarters in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, who did not commit suicide on Nov. 18, 1978, as they were instructed to do. Several hundred other active members of the Temple were in the United States.

There were also hundreds of former Temple members who had defected, before or after Jones moved himself and many of his most loyal followers to Guyana in 1977. A number of them had organized a group called the Concerned Relatives, which was instrumental in convincing Ryan that Jones was increasingly psychotic and erratic, and was threatening to kill everyone in Jonestown if the Relatives, the media, the CIA and Jones's other perceived enemies did not leave him alone.

Jones had even gone so far as to hire Mark Lane, the largely discredited Kennedy conspiracy theorist, to mount a legal and public relations counteroffensive, detailed in a memo found in Jonestown by the FBI after Ryan's assassination. The document, dated Sept. 28, 1978, obtained this week by The Post, sets out Lane's proposal for "the filing of a multi-million dollar action in the appropriate federal court against each of the individuals, organizations and agencies of government which have participated in the campaign against the People's Temple."

Ironically, Lane accompanied Ryan, Speier and the rest of us to Jonestown. By his own account, he managed to escape just in time, after Ryan had been killed and the carnage in Jonestown had begun. A few days after the killings, Lane asked me if I had eaten the cheese sandwiches served to us that day before we left for the airstrip where I was wounded and Ryan was murdered. When I said yes, I had eaten the sandwiches, Lane said he had not -- because he'd been told they were poisoned. Why hadn't he told Ryan and the rest of us, I asked. There was no response.

In the aftermath of the carnage on Nov. 18, 1978, there was tremendous fear among those who survived, especially among the defectors, that a hit squad of Jones loyalists would try to kill those they blamed for Jonestown's end. Debbie Layton, a top Jones lieutenant who escaped from Jonestown and wrote a detailed affidavit of conditions inside the commune that helped persuade Ryan to go Jonestown, vividly remembers the minute she heard he had been killed.

She was living in San Francisco with her boyfriend, another Temple defector. "We jumped in the car and went immediately to a friend of my sister's," she recalls. "We were terrified we would be next."

Fear, distrust, guilt and shame have marked the lives of virtually everyone connected to the Peoples Temple. Many of the survivors hid their identities or changed their names. Garrett Lambrev, who joined the Peoples Temple in 1966 after dropping out of a doctoral program at Stanford, defected 10 years later after hearing credible reports of Temple members being tortured. He says he believes some prominent defectors in San Francisco were followed by surviving Temple loyalists after the mass suicide-murder and recalls attending the first memorial service, in 1979, "with fear and trembling."

Many Jonestown survivors and their families believe that the lessons of Jonestown are to remember and guard against demagogues who use religion as a cover for fraud, deception and imposing their own sometimes dangerous social and political beliefs on their naive and unsuspecting followers.

Speier says Jones's rise to power and legitimacy in San Francisco was largely due to his clever deception of George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Willie Brown and other San Francisco political leaders, who courted Jones in the years before the massacre because he provided them with campaign workers and critical support.

"From my perspective," Speier says, "the Peoples Temple got out of hand because the political leadership in San Francisco was indebted to Jim Jones."

It was that theme that dominated Tuesday's memorial service at the mass grave in Oakland. In an emotional and highly charged address, the Rev. Amos Brown, bishop at San Francisco's Third Baptist Church and president of the San Francisco NAACP, warned the mourners to beware of religious leaders who claim to have all the answers and insinuate themselves into politics, as Jones did so effectively in San Francisco.

"Good religion elevates folk, it teaches people to think for themselves. Good religion isn't authoritarian. Good religion isn't bigoted," he said. "Open up your eyes, America. America isn't a theocracy, it's a democracy. . . . And that is the lesson we must learn from Jonestown."

from syndication via the Orange County Register, by Mark Steyn, 2008-Nov-1:

Mark Steyn: Obama's a better symbol than president
On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea.

In Tokyo last week, over 1,000 people signed a new petition asking the Japanese government to permit marriages between human beings and cartoon characters. "I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," explained Taichi Takashita. "Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Get back to me on that Tuesday night. We'll know by then whether an entire constitutional republic has decided to contract marriage with a two-dimensional character and to attempt to take up residence in the two-dimensional world. For many of his supporters, Barack Obama is an idea. He offers "hope, not fear." "Hope" of what? "Hope" of "change." OK, but "change" to what? Ah, well, there you go again, getting all hung up on three-dimensional reality, when we've moved way beyond that. I don't know which cartoon character Taichi Takashita is eyeing as his betrothed, but up in the sky Obamaman is flying high, fighting for Hope, Change and a kind of Post-Modern American Way.

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America's original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush – his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I'm not saying he's Muslim. It's worse than that: He's a pasty-faced European – at least in his view of state power, welfare and taxation.

But, in a sense, he's not anything in particular, so much as everything in general. The media dispatched legions of reporters to hoot and jeer at Sarah Palin's Wasilla without ever wondering: Where would we go to do this to Obama? Where's his "hometown"? Bill Clinton was famously (if not entirely accurately) from "a place called Hope." Barack Obama is from an idea called hope. What's the area code? 1-800-HOPE4CHANGE. The 1-800 candidate offers the hope of electing a younger Morgan Freeman, the cool, reserved, dignified black man who, when he's not literally God walking among us (as in "Bruce Almighty"), is always the conscience of the movie.

You can understand the appeal of such an idea. Even if you're not hung up on white liberal guilt or Bush loathing, there's an urge to get it over with, to say, well, America should have a black president, and the sooner the better – i.e., the sooner we do it, the better it speaks of us. They have a point. I look at the roll call of the dead on 9/11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Scandinavian, Balkan, Arab, Asian – in a word, American. The presidential pantheon has a narrower ring: Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson. Obama has a tedious shtick about how his name sounds odd and he doesn't look like "all those other presidents on the dollar bills". He's not just picking out the drapes for the Oval Office, he's ordering up the new currency and booking the sculptors for Mount Rushmore.

And why not? Obama in the White House, Obama on the dollar bill, Obama on Rushmore would symbolize the possibilities of America more than that narrow list of white-bread protestant presidents to date.

The problem is we're not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that's where the problem lies.

The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he's not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around" was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of "social justice". Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be "accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten."

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not "sharing." In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It's the government confiscating your Elmo to "share" it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf 'n' turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama's world view, that's not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber's wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama's writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday night infomercial, Obama declared that his "fundamental belief" was that "I am my brother's keeper." Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother's keeper, why couldn't he send him a $10 bill and nearly double the guy's income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother's keeper, and his aunt's keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama's life, friends and votes. The Obamacons – that's to say, conservatives hot for Barack – justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by "hoping" that he doesn't mean it, by "hoping" that he'll "change" in office. "I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible," declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, "than his liberal record indicates."

He's "hoping" that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that. The "change" we'll get isn't hard to discern: An expansion of government, an increase in taxes, a greater annexation of the dynamic part of the economy by the sclerotic bureaucracy, a reduction in economic liberty …oh, and a lot more Chicago machine politics.

On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea, the "hope." But it will be the three-dimensional Obama – the real man with the real record – that America will have to live with.

from the Christian Science Monitor, 2008-Oct-30, by Donald J. Boudreaux:

Is Barack Obama really a socialist?
Not exactly, but his 'socialist-lite' policies should still be cause for concern.

Fairfax, Va. - Since telling Joe the Plumber of his wish to "spread the wealth around," Barack Obama is being called a socialist. Is he one?

No. At least not in the classic sense of the term. "Socialism" originally meant government ownership of the major means of production and finance, such as land, coal mines, steel mills, automobile factories, and banks.

A principal promise of socialism was to replace the alleged uncertainty of markets with the comforting certainty of a central economic plan. No more guessing what consumers will buy next year and how suppliers and rival firms will behave: everyone will be led by government's visible hand to play his and her role in an all-encompassing central plan. The "wastes" of competition, cycles of booms and busts, and the "unfairness" of unequal incomes would be tossed into history's dustbin.

Of course, socialism utterly failed. But it wasn't just a failure of organization or efficiency. By making the state the arbiter of economic value and social justice, as well as the source of rights, it deprived individuals of their liberty – and tragically, often their lives.

The late Robert Heilbroner – a socialist for most of his life – admitted after the collapse of the Iron Curtain that socialism "was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty."

This failure was unavoidable. It was predicted from the start by wise economists, such as F.A. Hayek, who understood that no government agency can gather and process all the knowledge necessary to plan the productive allocation of millions of different resources.

Likewise, socialism's requirement that each person behave in ways prescribed by government planners is a recipe for tyranny. A central plan, by its nature, denies to individuals the right to choose and to innovate. It replaces a multitude of individual plans – each of which can be relatively easily adjusted in light of competitive market feedback – with one gigantic, monopolistic, and politically favored plan.

A happy difference separating today from the 1930s is that, unlike back then, no serious thinkers or groups in America now push for this kind of full-throttle socialism.

But what about a milder form of socialism? If reckoned as an attitude rather than a set of guidelines for running an economy, socialism might well describe Senator Obama's economics. Anyone who speaks glibly of "spreading the wealth around" sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social forces beyond any private producer's control. If, say, the low cost of Dell computers comes mostly from government policies (such as government schooling for an educated workforce) and from culture (such as Americans' work ethic) then Michael Dell's wealth is due less to his own efforts and more to the features of the society that he luckily inhabits.

Wealth, in this view, is produced principally by society. So society's claim on it is at least as strong as that of any of the individuals in whose bank accounts it appears. More important, because wealth is produced mostly by society (rather than by individuals), taxing high-income earners more heavily will do little to reduce total wealth production.

This notion of wealth certainly warrants the name "socialism," for it gives the abstraction "society" pride of place over flesh-and-blood individuals. If taxes are reduced on Joe the Plumber's income, the rationale must be that Joe deserves a larger share of society's collectively baked pie and not that Joe earned his income or that lower taxes will inspire Joe to work harder.

This "socialism-lite," however, is as specious as is classic socialism. And its insidious nature makes it even more dangerous. Across Europe, this "mild" form of socialism acts as a parasitic ideology that has slowly drained entrepreneurial energy – and freedoms – from its free-market host.

Could it happen in America? Consider the words of longtime Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." In addition to Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, the gathering political momentum toward single-payer healthcare – which Obama has proclaimed is his ultimate goal – shows the prescience of Thomas's words.

The fact that each of us depends upon the efforts of millions of others does not mean that some "society" transcending individuals produces our prosperity. Rather, it means that the vast system of voluntary market exchange coordinates remarkably well the efforts of millions of individuals into a productive whole. For Obama to suggest that government interfere in this process more than it already does – to "spread" wealth from Joe to Bill, or vice versa – overlooks not only the voluntary and individual origins of wealth, but the dampening of the incentives for people to contribute energetically to wealth's continued production.

• Donald J. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of "Globalization."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-22, by Adam Lerrick:

Obama and the Tax Tipping Point
How long before taxpayers are pushed too far?

What happens when the voter in the exact middle of the earnings spectrum receives more in benefits from Washington than he pays in taxes? Economists Allan Meltzer and Scott Richard posed this question 27 years ago. We may soon enough know the answer.

Barack Obama is offering voters strong incentives to support higher taxes and bigger government. This could be the magic income-redistribution formula Democrats have long sought.

Sen. Obama is promising $500 and $1,000 gift-wrapped packets of money in the form of refundable tax credits. These will shift the tax demographics to the tipping point where half of all voters will receive a cash windfall from Washington and an overwhelming majority will gain from tax hikes and more government spending.

In 2006, the latest year for which we have Census data, 220 million Americans were eligible to vote and 89 million -- 40% -- paid no income taxes. According to the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute), this will jump to 49% when Mr. Obama's cash credits remove 18 million more voters from the tax rolls. What's more, there are an additional 24 million taxpayers (11% of the electorate) who will pay a minimal amount of income taxes -- less than 5% of their income and less than $1,000 annually.

In all, three out of every five voters will pay little or nothing in income taxes under Mr. Obama's plans and gain when taxes rise on the 40% that already pays 95% of income tax revenues.

The plunder that the Democrats plan to extract from the "very rich" -- the 5% that earn more than $250,000 and who already pay 60% of the federal income tax bill -- will never stretch to cover the expansive programs Mr. Obama promises.

What next? A core group of Obama enthusiasts -- those educated professionals who applaud the "fairness" of their candidate's tax plans -- will soon see their $100,000-$150,000 incomes targeted. As entitlements expand and a self-interested majority votes, the higher tax brackets will kick in at lower levels down the ladder, all the way to households with a $75,000 income.

Calculating how far society's top earners can be pushed before they stop (or cut back on) producing is difficult. But the incentives are easy to see. Voters who benefit from government programs will push for higher tax rates on higher earners -- at least until those who power the economy and create jobs and wealth stop working, stop investing, or move out of the country.

Other nations have tried the ideology of fairness in the place of incentives and found that reward without work is a recipe for decline. In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took on the unions and slashed taxes to restore growth and jobs in Great Britain. In Germany a few years ago, Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder defied his party's dogma and loosened labor's grip on the economy to end stagnation. And more recently in France, Nicolas Sarkozy was swept to power on a platform of restoring flexibility to the economy.

The sequence is always the same. High-tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.

The economic tides will not stand still while Washington experiments with European-type social democracy, even though the dollar's role as the global reserve currency will buy some time. Our trademark competitive advantage will be lost, and once lost, it will be hard to regain. There are too many emerging economies focused on prosperity and not redistribution for the U.S. to easily recapture its role of global economic leader.

Tomorrow's children may come to question why their parents sold their birthright for a mess of "fairness" -- whatever that will signify when jobs are scarce and American opportunity is no longer the envy of the world.

Mr. Lerrick is a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

from RealClearPolitics.com, 2008-Oct-21, by Thomas Sowell:

Believers in Obama

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend.

It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don't want to be confused by the facts, they resent being told the facts.

An e-mail from a reader mentioned trying to tell his sister why he was voting against Obama but, when he tried to argue some facts, she cut him short: "You don't like him and I do!" she said. End of discussion.

When one thinks of all the men who have put their lives on the line in battle to defend and preserve this country, it is especially painful to think that there are people living in the safety and comfort of civilian life who cannot be bothered to find out the facts about candidates before voting to put the fate of this nation, and of generations yet to come, in the hands of someone chosen because they like his words or style.

Of the four people running for President and Vice President on the Republican and Democratic tickets, the one we know the least about is the one leading in the polls-- Barack Obama.

Some of Senator Obama's most fervent supporters could not tell you what he has actually done on such issues as crime, education, or financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, much less what he plans to do to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear nation supplying nuclear weapons to the international terrorist networks that it has supplied with other weapons.

The magic word "change" makes specifics unnecessary. If things are going bad, some think that what is needed is blank-check "change."

But history shows any number of countries in crises worse than ours, where "change" turned problems into catastrophes.

In czarist Russia, for example, the economy was worse than ours is today and the First World War was going far worse for the Russians than anything we have faced in Iraq. Moreover, Russians had nothing like the rights of Americans today. So they went for "change."

That "change" brought on a totalitarian regime that made the czars' despotism look like child's play. The Communists killed more people in one year than the czars killed in more than 90 years, not counting the millions who died in a government-created famine in the 1930s.

Other despotic regimes in China, Cuba, and Iran were similarly replaced by people who promised "change" that turned out to be even worse than what went before.

Yet many today seem to assume that if things are bad, "change" will make them better. Specifics don't interest them nearly as much as inspiring rhetoric and a confident style. But many 20th century leaders with inspiring rhetoric and great self-confidence led their followers or their countries into utter disasters.

These ranged from Jim Jones who led hundreds to their deaths in Jonestown to Hitler and Mao who led millions to their deaths.

What specifics do we know about Barack Obama's track record that might give us some clue as to what kinds of "changes" to expect if he is elected?

We know that he opposed the practice of putting violent young felons on trial as adults. We know that he was against a law forbidding physicians to kill a baby that was born alive despite an attempt to abort it.

We know that Obama opposed attempts to put stricter regulations on Fannie Mae-- and that he was the second largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. We know that this very year his campaign sought the advice of disgraced former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines.

Fannie Mae and Raines were at the heart of "the mess in Washington" that Barack Obama claims he is going to clean up under the banner of "change."

The public has been told very little about what this man with the wonderful rhetoric has actually done. What we know is enough to make us wonder about what we don't know. Or it ought to. For the true believers-- which includes many in the media-- it is just a question of whether you like him or not.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-28, by Mark Mix:

Labor Unions Prolonged the Depression
Obama wants a new Wagner Act.

By the mid-1930s, the U.S. economy appeared to be climbing out of the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which had bottomed out at 41 in 1932, was advancing. It increased 73% from the beginning of 1935 through the end of 1936, when it hit 180. The number of unemployed, 13 million in 1933, dropped to 9.5 million in 1935 and 7.6 million in 1936.

Then, in 1937, the DJIA plunged 33% in what is often called "a depression within a depression." Joblessness skyrocketed.

A principal factor in the meltdown that year was the U.S. Supreme Court's surprise 5-4 decision in early April to uphold the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, which had passed two years earlier. This measure, which is still the basis of our labor relations regime, authorized union officials to seek and obtain the power to act as the "exclusive" (that is, the monopoly) bargaining agent over all the front-line employees, including union nonmembers as well as members, in a unionized workplace.

As Amity Shlaes observed in her recent history of the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man," within a few months after the Wagner Act was upheld, industrial production began to plummet and "the jobs started to disappear, with unemployment moving back to 1931 levels," even as the number of workers under union control was "growing astoundingly."

Given the reality of unions in the workplace, the law meant that efficiency and profitability were compromised, by forcing employers to equally reward their most productive and least productive employees. Therefore subsequent wage increases for some workers led to widespread job losses.

Pre-Depression-era growth and prosperity did not return to the private sector until the early 1950s, when the spread of state right-to-work laws prohibiting forced union membership and dues greatly reduced the detrimental effects of the Wagner Act.

The U.S. has just experienced another stock market crash, and Barack Obama, the candidate now favored to be the next president, is in favor of what amounts to a new Wagner Act.

If the mislabeled "Employee Free Choice Act," becomes law, it will likely have a similar effect on the economy as the original Wagner Act, transforming what could have been a recovery into a lengthy, deep recession, or worse.

The bill would greatly facilitate organization in workplaces by effectively eliminating secret ballot elections, allowing unions to become exclusive bargaining agents when a majority of the workers sign a card indicating they want a union -- before they've heard a word from their employer about the potential downside of unionization.

The cards themselves may be signed under duress. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) czar Andy Stern predicts that its enactment would cause unions to "grow by 1.5 million members a year, not just for five years but for 10 to 15 straight years."

Sen. Obama voted for one version of the card-check bill in June 2007 and pledged to Big Labor that he will push for enactment as president. With a handful of pickups he will have a filibuster-proof majority in the next Senate, and can make good his pledge.

"I owe those unions," Mr. Obama explained in his 2006 political memoir, "The Audacity of Hope." "When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don't consider this corrupting in any way . . ."

John McCain voted against card-check legislation in 2007, and has pledged to veto such legislation as president. He also supports a national right-to-work law that would repeal all current federal labor law provisions authorizing forced union dues and fees. Unfortunately, his campaign has done little to alert the nation to the dangers of the card-check bill.

Before they cast their votes, the American people ought to be aware of Mr. Obama's commitment to the passage of a new Wagner Act, and of what the economic consequences of such a law are almost certain to be.

Mr. Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.

from American Thinker, 2008-Oct-15, by Kyle-Anne Shiver:

Obama's Radical Revolution: Its Alinsky Root and Global Vision

"Radicalism is a cause whose utopian agendas result in an ethic where the ends outweigh and ultimately justify any means.  Like the Salvationist agendas of jihad, the Left's apocalyptic goal of ‘social justice' is the equivalent of an earthly redemption.  A planet saved, a world without poverty, racism, inequality, or war - what means would not be justified to achieve such millennial ends?"
  - David Horowitz, former 60s Radical -- Unholy Alliance; p. 127

Saul Alinsky was the father of community organizing.  Before Alinsky devised his diabolical plan to bring the international socialist revolution to America -- working within the very liberal and free system upon which the U.S. was founded -- he was an older fellow traveler and advisor to student radicals of the 1960s. 

Alinsky was a sort of father figure, to whom many radicals turned in the aftermath of the infamous DNC Convention of 1968 in Chicago.  His advice?

"Do one of three things.  One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves.  Two, go psycho and start bombing -- but this will only swing people to the right.  Three, learn a lesson.  Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates." (emphasis in original)
  - Saul Alinsky; Rules for Radicals; p. xxiii

Calm down.  Forget "burning the system down."  Organize.  Organize.  Organize.  Work within the system.   Become the delegates. 

To further empower his advice to the young militants, Alinsky quoted the radicals' hero, Lenin:

"Power comes out of the barrel of a gun! is an absurd rallying cry when the other side has all the guns.  Lenin was a pragmatist; when he returned to what was then Petrograd from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns.  Militant mouthings?  Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?"
  - Saul Alinsky; Rules for Radicals; p. xxi

At the time, however, some of the young radicals were still too filled with rage to stop burning and bombing.  These fiery revolutionaries continued to wreak havoc on college campuses and in American cities.  But the end of the Vietnam War brought a welcome sigh of relief to greater America. 

It was time for the radicals to change tactics, and follow Alinsky's advice.  They remained convinced of their destiny to be the ones to bring the U.S.A. into the fold of the international socialist collective.  They began to organize, go to law school, run for public office, whittle away at traditional American institutions, and in all ways prepare for "The One," their closer.

Enter Barack Obama

Obama was raised on the mother's milk of socialism.  Both his parents were fellow travelers, who met at the height of the Cold War in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii.  Obama's grandfather was a close friend of Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, sending young Barry (as he was then known) to him for mentoring, despite (or in ignorance of ) Davis being a pedophile.  From the time he returned from 4 years in Indonesia and rejoined his grandparents in Hawaii at the age of 10, he was taken often to be with Frank Marshall Davis. 

In Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, there is a strange revelation, perhaps intended as a signal of Davis' stamp on Obama's socialist creds.  Obama makes this odd observation:

"The visits to his (Davis') house always left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, though, as if I were witnessing some complicated, unspoken transaction between the two men, a transaction I couldn't fully understand."

Dedicating the young Obama to the elder socialist mentor for the collective cause, perhaps? One hopes there were conditions protecting the ten year old from worse than indoctrination, in this "transaction."

Obama did everything Alinsky prescribed.  He went to Chicago, home of Alinsky and the place where Davis had worked for the communist revolution.  Obama trained at the Industrial Areas Foundation, an Alinsky training institute.  He organized in Chicago and did voter registration and training for ACORN.   He went to law school.  He built political alliances.  He kept a tight lock on his records and his past.

As for Judeo/Christian morals.  Forget it.  Alinsky trained his radicals in the spirit of no-holds-barred methods.  In Alinsky's mind, the American power structure was evil to its core and justified any means necessary to change the "world as it is" into the "world as it should be."  Both Barack and Michelle Obama include these Alinsky code words in their speeches, and we should not mistake their meaning.  No means are out of bounds.

Many of these radical revolutionaries have already bombed and burned.  Lying, cheating and stealing are just more par for their revolutionary course.

Alinsky's tenth rule of the ethics of means:  "You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments."

The Same Beast Clad in Moral Garments

As Peter Collier and David Horowitz so clearly described in their book, Destructive Generation, the international collective hasn't changed its objectives.  It merely changes tactics to adapt to changing times and national mood. 

"Like the slowly metamorphosing monster of a horror film, the Left has actually been recreating itself during its apparent dormancy since the end of the Sixties, succeeding so well that now it has reappeared stronger than ever.  If there is a cyclical dynamic at work in this rebirth, it has less to do with the laws of history than with the laws of Leftism, which since 1917 has alternated between styles of militant extremism and ‘popular front' moderation.  The current revival will not bring a revolutionary army into the streets, as in the Sixties.  It will involve an offensive of ‘progressivism' whose targets are the Democratic Party, the church, the universities, and various liberal institutions."
  - Destructive Generation; p. 218

This strategy is straight from the Alinsky handbook:  "Tactics, like organization, like life, require that you move with the action."  Adapt.  Adapt.  Adapt.  And "let nothing get you off your target."

When one of the surviving inner circle of 60s radicals, Tom Hayden, endorsed the Obama movement last year on the Huffington Post, he signaled to the vast array of socialist political activists, not only in America, but around the world, that Barack Obama is that "One."

"Many ordinary Americans will take a transformative step down the long road to the Rainbow Covenant if Obama wins. For at least a brief moment, people around the world -- from the shantytowns to the sweatshops, even to the restless rich of the Sixties generation -- will look up from the treadmills of their shrunken lives to the possibilities of what life still might be. Environmental justice and global economic hope would dawn as possibilities."

When Barack Obama made his world tour this summer, he introduced himself in Berlin as a "fellow citizen of the world."  Americans should make no mistake; he wasn't kidding. As Pope Benedict (writing then as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) also warned in his 2003 book, Truth and Tolerance, the international Marxist dream did not die with the fall of the USSR:

"The collapse of realist socialism in the East European states has not quite laid aside all such hopes, and here and there they still subsist, silently awaiting some new form." 

Even though the Soviet system fell and its Marxist "utopia" was clearly revealed as the antithesis of the promise to bring liberation and light to the world, the hope lives on and thrives within the heart of Obama and his followers, and the plan is a global one.

The Informal Alliance between Socialists and Islamic Radicals

In his 2004 book, Unholy Alliance, former 60s radical David Horowitz defines the reasons underlying the left's rationale in dealing with the radical Islamic terrorists and their national sponsors.  Leftists in the Western world, explains Horowitz, are not bothered by the religious dimension of the Islamic fundamentalists.  Secular leftists rationalize this religious pathology, "believing that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible."

According to Horowitz, leftists maintain an unwavering faith in universal rationality that tells them "even people who blow themselves and little children up in the expectation of a place in heaven, and seventy-two virgins besides, must ultimately be inspired by real-world grievances."

Horowitz goes even further and defines the over-arching connection between Islamic fundamentalists and their secular socialist enablers, striking the heart of the matter for both:  faith.  Underlying both the goal of a worldwide Islamic caliphate and the international socialists' dream are their "common utopian expectations."

Horowitz explains the commonality thusly:

"The Greek scientist Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world.'  This is an archetype of the radical outlook, both secular and religious, which believes it has identified an institution and an agency that will move the world.  The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting Sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist's faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millennium."

Obama's one piece of signature legislation in the Senate is the Global Poverty Act, aimed at curing what socialists deem as the root cause of all violence and war -- poverty.

In this belief, Obama has high-powered company.  He is joined by a cabal of international socialists, especially his biggest-moneyed backer, George Soros.  Soros himself backs a global tax on wealthy countries, especially the United States.  And Soros, like Obama, believes that the Global War on Terror is ill-intentioned and based on the desire of conservatives to build lasting American hegemony.

The current economic meltdown, coupled with the well-laid foundation of socialist radicals throughout this Country, now threaten to bring America closer than we've ever been to joining the international collective.  And Barack Obama has demonstrated that he will do anything -- anything -- it takes to be The One to close their long-envisioned revolutionary deal.

The only remaining question is whether we voters will let him.

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  She blogs at kyleanneshiver.com.

from the Washington Post, 2007-Mar-25, p.A1, by Peter Slevin:

For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone

CHICAGO -- The job offer to "Miss Hillary Rodham, Wellesley College" was dated Oct. 25, 1968, and signed by Saul D. Alinsky, the charismatic community organizer who believed that the urban poor could become their own best advocates in a world that largely ignored them.

Alinsky thought highly of 21-year-old Rodham, a student government president who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. She was in the midst of a year-long analysis of Alinsky's aggressive mobilizing tactics, and he was searching for "competent political literates" to move to Chicago to build grass-roots organizations.

Seventeen years later, another young honor student was offered a job as an organizer in Chicago. By then, Alinsky had died, but a group of his disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate, to organize black residents on the South Side, while learning and applying Alinsky's philosophy of street-level democracy. The recruiter called the $13,000-a-year job "very romantic, until you do it."

Today, as Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton face off for the Democratic presidential nomination, their common connection to Alinsky is one of the striking aspects of their biographies. Obama embraced many of Alinsky's tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life. Clinton's interest was more intellectual -- she turned down the job offer -- and she has said little about Alinsky since their association became a favorite subject of conservative critics during her husband's presidency.

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. His approach to social justice relied on generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed. Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

Both Obama and Clinton admired Alinsky's appeal for small-d democracy but came to believe that social progress is best achieved by working within the political system, and on a national scale.

Both went to law school, turned to a mix of courthouse and community remedies, and eventually moved into electoral politics.

Associates describe the candidates as combining streaks of idealism with a realistic appreciation of the politically possible, a mix the goal-oriented Alinsky would have recognized in himself. Like Alinsky, they fashioned political strategies defined more by coalitions and compromise than by the flashy but often hollow rhetorical pyrotechnics that Clinton, in her Wellesley honors thesis, called "the luxury of symbolic suicide."

Neither candidate would agree to be interviewed about Alinsky. But Marian Wright Edelman, the Children's Defense Fund leader, who knows Obama, worked closely with Clinton and spoke at Alinsky's funeral, said the organizer's allure was formidable, particularly in the energized 1960s.

"He was brilliant. He was working for underdogs. He was trying to empower communities, which we still need to do. He spoke plainly. He had his outrageous side, but he also had his pragmatic side," Edelman said. "Both Hillary and Barack reflect that understanding of community-organizing strategy. Both just know how to leverage power."

A Colorful Thesis Subject

Born in 1909 and bred in the politicized precincts of Chicago, Alinsky was a lifelong student of the dynamics of power who concluded that the city's famed Democratic machine remained unmoved unless pushed.

Alinsky took action with an organizing campaign in 1939 in Back of the Yards, the desperate Chicago meatpacking district depicted in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Fashioning an unlikely alliance of unions, the Catholic church and others to win concessions from industry and government, he said organizers must listen to people's desires, then find leaders to carry the fight.

An organizer must "fan the latent hostilities," he wrote in his 1946 handbook "Reveille for Radicals," and "he must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them."

A master of the attention-getting rhetorical flourish, Alinsky once pressed Eastman Kodak to hire more black workers, saying the only thing the company had done about race was introduce color film. Yet he practiced "a method that sounds more radical than it actually was," said Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who called Alinsky "a tactician more than he was an ideologist."

Alinsky, unimpressed by dogma, believed in coalitions linked by clear-eyed calculations of self-interest. He focused on concrete local issues: bus routes, public housing, jobs. To him, the fashionable cry of the 1960s that power comes from the barrel of a gun was "absurd." To mark his differences with the bomb-throwers, he subtitled his second book "A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals."

The calamitous events of that decade turned Clinton away from the GOP of her Park Ridge, Ill., youth. Arriving at Wellesley, she became president of the Young Republicans, but she soon drifted left. She said that 1968, the year she met Alinsky in Chicago, was a watershed in her "personal and political evolution," marked by the escalation of the Vietnam War and the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

When she returned for her senior year that September, Clinton decided to write a thesis on the war on poverty. Her adviser suggested Alinsky. She called her 92-page work, after a line in a T.S. Eliot poem, " 'There Is Only the Fight . . . ': An Analysis of the Alinsky Model."

Much of Alinsky's agenda, she wrote after interviewing him three times, "does not sound 'radical.' " Even his tactics, she concluded, were often "non-radical, even 'anti-radical.' His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."

Among examples of Alinsky's methods, Clinton cited the 1961 decision to send 2,000 black Woodlawn community residents downtown en masse to register to vote. She mentioned activists picketing the suburban homes of slumlords and a mission to dump garbage outside the sanitation commission.

"In many cases," Clinton wrote, "the abrasive tactics paid off with the cancellation of double shifts in the schools, the increased hiring of Negroes by city businesses, growing responsiveness from the machine politicians, even some property repair."

Clinton believed that new federal poverty programs in the 1960s were a step backward because their architects neglected to listen to individual citizens -- the crux of the Alinsky model. The policies, she said, invited the poor "into the mainstream not through their participatory planning, but through their acquiescent participation."

The lesson was still on her mind years later. She told an interviewer shortly after Bill Clinton became president that government programs were too often administered from on high, with too little effect.

"I basically argued that [Alinsky] was right," Clinton told The Washington Post in 1993. "Even at that early stage, I was against all these people who came up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people. You know, I've been on this kick for 25 years."

In the end, Clinton gave Alinsky mixed reviews, admiring his charisma and his goal of democratic equality while questioning the usefulness and staying power of a small-bore approach based on stirring up conflict in the inner city. She noted that Alinsky was crafting a fresh appeal to the potentially powerful middle class.

All four thesis reviewers thought the paper was "wonderful," said Wellesley emeritus professor Alan Schechter, who described it as a pragmatic assessment of approaches to public policy problems. Schechter, a friend and political supporter of Clinton's, said her work revealed "an underlying idealism, but it's not a naive idealism."

For reasons Clinton and her staff will not discuss, the White House asked Wellesley to seal its copy of her thesis during her husband's presidency. By the mid-1990s, Republican foes regularly derided Clinton's thesis choice as evidence that she is a closet leftist. This month, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Fox News that Clinton treated Alinsky "almost like an icon," adding, "That's like holding up some of the people from Germany in the 1930s and '40s."

As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.

IAF organizer Michael Gecan, who has met with Clinton several times, said her Wellesley work was often an icebreaker: "She would always say, 'I did my senior thesis on Alinsky.' "

As Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt put it: "Hillary is clearly aware of Alinsky's successors and the work they do. I think it's all to the good."

Clinton's 2003 memoir, "Living History," devotes a single paragraph to Alinsky, whom she describes as "a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone." She wrote that she agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas, "particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves," but that she rejected his job offer because of a "fundamental disagreement."

"Alinsky said I would be wasting my time," Clinton recalled, "but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within."

Organizing in Chicago

Community organizing, for Clinton principally an academic exercise, was more complex for Obama when he arrived in Chicago in 1985 to work with the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Alinsky network. His experience became an emotional and visceral exploration of the roots of urban African American decay and his own identity.

Times had changed. The '60s were over. Chicago had a black mayor, and Alinsky was gone, dead of a heart attack in 1972. But his work and the fundamentals of his philosophy survived on the far South Side.

Obama stepped into the Alinsky tradition after deciding "mainly on impulse," he has said, at age 21 to become a community organizer. His passion ran to romantic visions of the civil rights struggle.

"He wanted to make that kind of contribution and didn't know how to do it," said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama. "There's that side of him that's strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer, and this kind of work attracts that kind of person. It isn't just that we're going to change things, but we're going to change things from the grass roots."

Obama spent three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters.

"It was poverty on top of poverty. There were so many people who had given up. They just didn't care," said Loretta Augustine-Herron, who signed up to work with Obama. "I don't think he knew how bad it was until he came to our area. He had to have the tenacity and the patience to train us, and sometimes he had to be frustrated."

The Alinsky method, which Obama taught long afterward, is centered on one-on-one conversations. The organizer's task is to draw out people's stories, listening for their goals and ambitions -- "the stuff that makes them tick," one of his teachers told him. There he would find the self-interest that would spark activism.

Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote.

"He says things like, 'Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?' " said Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. "Everybody else just puts out an e-mail and says, 'Y'all come.' Barack doesn't do that."

In time, Obama helped build and guide a small network of grass-roots groups that agitated for better playgrounds, improvements in trash pickup and the removal of asbestos from public housing. The city opened a jobs office in the tumbledown community as the lights were going out in nearby factories.

It was in those neighborhoods, Obama said in announcing for president, "that I received the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith." But by the time Obama moved on, Kellman said, he had seen "the limits of what could be achieved."

Obama spent three years at Harvard Law School, then returned to Chicago, where he taught constitutional law, handled civil rights cases and worked with community groups. He continued to teach the Alinsky philosophy, although he told the New Republic recently that "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a friend of Obama's, sees another difference. "If you read Alinsky's teachings, there are times he's confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack. He's always looking for ways to connect."

But when Obama first ran for office in 1995, he echoed Alinsky's credo -- and Clinton's thesis -- in arguing that politicians should not see voters "as mere recipients or beneficiaries."

"It's time for politicians and other leaders to take the next step and to see voters, residents or citizens as producers of this change," Obama told Hank De Zutter of the Chicago Reporter. "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?"

What Obama and Clinton both learned, said Edelman, of the Children's Defense Fund, is that "community organizing is crucial but not enough."

Chicago organizer Gregory Galluzzo, Obama's former supervisor, who likes to describe himself as Alinsky's St. Paul, believes that Obama's exposure to the organizer's liturgy taught him that wisdom can emerge from the grass roots. "Hillary," he said, "leans toward the elites."

But Galluzzo believes that both candidates were influenced by their encounters with Alinsky and his methods. "By either one of them being in office," he said, "we're going to have a government that's more responsive to the ordinary people."

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Oct-3, by Russell Roberts:

How Government Stoked the Mania
Housing prices would never have risen so high without multiple Washington mistakes.

Many believe that wild greed and market failure led us into this sorry mess. According to that narrative, investors in search of higher yields bought novel securities that bundled loans made to high-risk borrowers. Banks issued these loans because they could sell them to hungry investors. It was a giant Ponzi scheme that only worked as long as housing prices were on the rise. But housing prices were the result of a speculative mania. Once the bubble burst, too many borrowers had negative equity, and the system collapsed.

Part of this story is true. The fall in housing prices did lead to a sudden increase in defaults that reduced the value of mortgage-backed securities. What's missing is the role politicians and policy makers played in creating artificially high housing prices, and artificially reducing the danger of extremely risky assets.

Beginning in 1992, Congress pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase their purchases of mortgages going to low and moderate income borrowers. For 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave Fannie and Freddie an explicit target -- 42% of their mortgage financing had to go to borrowers with income below the median in their area. The target increased to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005.

For 1996, HUD required that 12% of all mortgage purchases by Fannie and Freddie be "special affordable" loans, typically to borrowers with income less than 60% of their area's median income. That number was increased to 20% in 2000 and 22% in 2005. The 2008 goal was to be 28%. Between 2000 and 2005, Fannie and Freddie met those goals every year, funding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of loans, many of them subprime and adjustable-rate loans, and made to borrowers who bought houses with less than 10% down. Hear No Evil

What some Congresspeople said about Fannie and Freddie.

Fannie and Freddie also purchased hundreds of billions of subprime securities for their own portfolios to make money and to help satisfy HUD affordable housing goals. Fannie and Freddie were important contributors to the demand for subprime securities.

Congress designed Fannie and Freddie to serve both their investors and the political class. Demanding that Fannie and Freddie do more to increase home ownership among poor people allowed Congress and the White House to subsidize low-income housing outside of the budget, at least in the short run. It was a political free lunch.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) did the same thing with traditional banks. It encouraged banks to serve two masters -- their bottom line and the so-called common good. First passed in 1977, the CRA was "strengthened" in 1995, causing an increase of 80% in the number of bank loans going to low- and moderate-income families.

Fannie and Freddie were part of the CRA story, too. In 1997, Bear Stearns did the first securitization of CRA loans, a $384 million offering guaranteed by Freddie Mac. Over the next 10 months, Bear Stearns issued $1.9 billion of CRA mortgages backed by Fannie or Freddie. Between 2000 and 2002 Fannie Mae securitized $394 billion in CRA loans with $20 billion going to securitized mortgages.

By pressuring banks to serve poor borrowers and poor regions of the country, politicians could push for increases in home ownership and urban development without having to commit budgetary dollars. Another political free lunch.

Fannie and Freddie and the banks opposed these policy changes at first through both lobbying and intransigence. But when they found out that following these policies could be profitable -- which they were as long as rising housing prices kept default rates unusually low -- their complaints disappeared. Maybe they could serve two masters. They turned out to be wrong. And when Fannie and Freddie went into conservatorship, politicians found out that budgetary dollars were on the line after all.

While Fannie and Freddie and the CRA were pushing up the demand for relatively low-priced property, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 increased the demand for higher valued property by expanding the availability and size of the capital-gains exclusion to $500,000 from $125,000. It also made it easier to exclude capital gains from rental property, further pushing up the demand for housing.

The Fed did its part, too. In 2003, the federal-funds rate hit 40-year lows of 1.25%. That pushed the rates on adjustable loans to historic lows as well, helping to fuel the housing boom.

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 and low interest rates -- along with the regulatory push for more low-income homeowners -- dramatically increased the demand for housing. Between 1997 and 2005, the average price of a house in the U.S. more than doubled. It wasn't simply a speculative bubble. Much of the rise in housing prices was the result of public policies that increased the demand for housing. Without the surge in housing prices, the subprime market would have never taken off.

Fannie and Freddie played a significant role in the explosion of subprime mortgages and subprime mortgage-backed securities. Without Fannie and Freddie's implicit guarantee of government support (which turned out to be all too real), would the mortgage-backed securities market and the subprime part of it have expanded the way they did?

Perhaps. But before we conclude that markets failed, we need a careful analysis of public policy's role in creating this mess. Greedy investors obviously played a part, but investors have always been greedy, and some inevitably overreach and destroy themselves. Why did they take so many down with them this time?

Part of the answer is a political class greedy to push home-ownership rates to historic highs -- from 64% in 1994 to 69% in 2004. This was mostly the result of loans to low-income, higher-risk borrowers. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, abetted by Congress, trumpeted that rise as it occurred. The consequence? On top of putting the entire financial system at risk, the hidden cost has been hundreds of billions of dollars funneled into the housing market instead of more productive assets.

Beware of trying to do good with other people's money. Unfortunately, that strategy remains at the heart of the political process, and of proposed solutions to this crisis.

Mr. Roberts is a professor of economics at George Mason University and a scholar at the Mercatus Center. His latest book is a novel on how markets work, "The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity" (Princeton University Press, 2008).

from Commentary, 2008-Oct, previewed online 2008-Sep-27, by Joshua Muravchik:

Obama's Leftism

Introducing himself to the nation at the 2004 Democratic national convention, Barack Obama spoke not only of his black father, “born and raised in a small village in Kenya,” but of his white mother, “born in a town . . . in Kansas” to a father who “worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression” before enlisting in military service “the day after Pearl Harbor.” What brought them together was “a magical place, America,” he said, adding, “I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage . . . knowing that . . . in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

Not only was Obama the real, living embodiment of America’s racial diversity. He was a dazzling presence, outshining the party’s nominee with his look, stage presence, oratorical mastery, and the brilliance of his rhetoric. Nor was that all. This avatar of reconciliation talked of transcending divisions not just racial but political and ideological. He spoke lovingly of country and movingly of God and family in a way that had eluded the Democrats since their sharp turn to the Left when the party nominated George McGovern in 1972.

In the speech’s highlight, Obama said:

[T]here is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. . . . We worship an “awesome God” in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Four years later, Obama is the Democratic nominee, and even his occasional shrill attacks on his opponent seem to have chipped away little of the cornerstone of his own candidacy: the promise to bring us, all of us, together. Can he do that? Is he well-suited to raise the curtain on a new post-partisan, post-ideological era?

From his record in office, it would hardly seem so. Non-partisanship does not just mean Democrats coaching Little League, lovely as that is, but cooperating with members of the other party in developing compromise solutions to national problems. The Senate has a particularly rich tradition of such bipartisanship, but Obama appears never to have participated in it. On the contrary: according to Congressional Quarterly, which measures how often each member votes in accordance with or at variance from the majority of his own party, Obama has compiled one of the most partisan of all voting records.

Last year, for example, the average Senator voted with his own party 84 percent of the time; Obama voted with his party 96 percent of the time. In the prior two years, his number was 95 percent, making him the fourth most partisan member of the Senate. And not just partisan, but also highly ideological. In 2007, according to the National Journal, Obama’s voting record made him “the most liberal Senator.” Throughout his Senate career, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the dean of liberal advocacy groups, Obama voted “right” 90 percent of the time. Actually this is misleading, since ADA counts an absence as if it were a vote on the “wrong” side. If we discount his absences, Obama voted to ADA’s approval more than 98 percent of the time.

This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope, and change, Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.

_____________

 

Abandoned by his father when he was still too young to remember him and then sent at age ten by his mother to live in Hawaii with her parents, who enrolled him in a prestigious prep school, Obama spent much of his teen years searching for his black identity. Late in his high-school career he found a mentor of sorts in Frank Marshall Davis, an older black poet. According to Herbert Romerstein, former minority chief investigator of the House Committee on Internal Security, FBI files reveal Davis to have been a member of the Communist party not only in its public phase but also when it officially dissolved and went underground in the 1950’s.

According to Obama, Davis told him that a white person “can’t know” a black person, and that the “real price of admission” to college was “leaving your race at the door.” Perhaps influenced by this, he reports that at college,

[t]o avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

Despite Obama’s tone of self-mockery, the passage discloses the milieu in which he immersed himself. In this light, it is not surprising that, upon graduation, he decided on a career as a “community organizer,” even if it was none too clear to him what exactly that meant. As he confesses in his early memoir Dreams from My Father (1995):

When classmates . . . asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House . . . . Change in the Congress . . . . Change in the mood of the country . . . . Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots. . . . I’ll organize black folks.

Thanks to a grant from a left-wing foundation, he was hired by a small group of white protégés of Saul Alinsky, the original apostle of “community organizing.” Alinsky’s institutional base was the Industrial Areas Foundation, which he called a “school for professional radicals” and whose goal he announced to be “revolution, not revelation.” As Obama himself would put it, there were “two roles that an organizer was supposed to play . . . getting the Stop sign [and] the educative function. At some point you have to link up winning that Stop sign . . . with the larger trends, larger movements.” In other words, “community organizer,” to Obama and his colleagues and mentors, was a euphemism for professional radical.

It was in the course of trying to mobilize churches for political protest that Obama met Jeremiah Wright. When the controversy surrounding the pastor arose this year, Obama denied being present when Rev. Wright delivered his most incendiary sermons, commenting that he was like “an old uncle who sometimes will say things that I don’t agree with.” But this was evasive. By Obama’s own testimony, the reason other ministers directed him to Wright was that Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ was steeped in politics.

Thus, Obama writes that Wright had “dabbl[ed] with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism” before returning to Christianity and studying, among other things, “the black liberation theologians.” Whoever and however many these theologians may have been, Wright invoked only one on the church’s website. “The vision statement of Trinity United Church of Christ,” in Wright’s words, was “based upon the systematized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of Dr. James Cone’s book, Black Power and Black Theology.”

What was that theology? Here are two tiny snippets of Cone’s thought: “Christianity and whiteness are opposites,” and “there will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness.”* In addition to a cross superimposed on a map of Africa, the website declares: “We are an African people, and remain ‘true to our native land,’ the mother continent, the cradle of civilization.” It defines Trinity as, among other things, “a congregation committed to the historical education of African people in diaspora, a congregation committed to liberation.” When Obama joined the church in the 1980’s, it did not yet have a website, but he tells of a brochure that, while condoning the pursuit of income, warned congregants against the “psychological entrapment of black ‘middleclassness.’” The liberationist music was playing back then, too.

At Trinity, Obama attempted to enlist Rev. Wright in his protest campaign, and the pastor sought to recruit Obama to the church. Evidently both succeeded, though at the time Obama says he was so far from religion that he “could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly.” But when he began to participate in Trinity’s services he discovered he was not unique in his ambivalence. Of the other congregants, he would observe:

Not all of what these people sought was strictly religious. . . . It occurred to me that Trinity, with its African themes, its emphasis on black history, [was] a redistributor of values and circulator of ideas. Only now the redistribution didn’t run in just a single direction from the schoolteacher or the physician . . . to . . . the sharecropper or the young man fresh from the South. . . . The flow of culture now ran in reverse as well, the former gang-banger, the teenage mother, had their own forms of validation—claims of greater deprivation, and hence authenticity.

The first time Obama attended services at Trinity, Wright delivered a sermon (it was titled “the audacity of hope”) whose theme was: “white folks’ greed runs a world in need.” Twenty years later, when it was revealed that Wright’s church had honored Louis Farrakhan, that Wright had traveled with Farrakhan to visit the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, and that in his sermons Wright had beseeched God to “damn America,” charged the U.S. government with inventing the AIDS virus in order to kill black people, and claimed that Israel and South Africa had colluded to invent an “ethnic bomb” to kill blacks and Arabs while leaving whites unharmed—when all this was revealed, Obama, under pressure from the Hillary Clinton campaign, declared himself “shocked” at Wright’s vitriol. But in truth not only was he aware of Wright’s views, they were what had drawn him to Trinity church in the first place.

_____________

Obama left Chicago after three years to attend Harvard Law School. As he would explain, “I had things to learn . . . , things that would help me bring about real change.” After graduating with honors in 1991, he returned to the Windy City to join the small law firm of Judson Miner, an activist who had been attorney to Mayor Harold Washington.

Within three years of his return, he also became deeply involved with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the so-called Weather Underground. This leftist terrorist group, akin to the German Baader-Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, specialized in bombing government buildings. Ayers later wrote boastfully that he had personally carried out an attack on the Pentagon. Ayers’s wife and closest collaborator was Bernardine Dohrn, whose views were so extreme that they seemed to cross a line from ultra-leftism to Satanism. At a meeting of the Weather Underground, she hailed the murders then recently committed by Charles Manson’s demented followers. “Dig it, first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!” she exulted, giving a three-fingered salute to signify a fork.

After the pair emerged from hiding in 1980, a court dismissed the main charges against Ayers on the grounds that the government had used an illegal wiretap. He pled guilty to possessing explosives, but served no time. The net outcome inspired him to gloat that he was “guilty as hell and free as a bird.” Dohrn served seven months. Then they both went respectable, but without changing their views. Ayers posed for a picture stomping on an American flag, and in 2001 he told the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

The details of Obama’s association with Ayers remain somewhat shrouded because both Ayers and Dohrn have refused to discuss it, while Obama and his spokesmen have prevaricated about it. When, during one of the televised primary debates, George Stephanopoulos asked about his connection to Ayers, Obama replied:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense.

Later, Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, added: “Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school.” If this is true, Ayers’s children must be slow learners, since they are thirty-one and twenty-eight while Obama’s are nine and six. But Obama’s own reply, though less bald-faced than Axelrod’s, was thoroughly disingenuous. Thanks to the meticulous investigations of the Left-leaning blogger Steven Diamond (globallabor.blogspot.com), the story of Obama and Ayers’s collaboration has been seeping into the public record despite extraordinary efforts to seal it.

After escaping punishment for his crimes, Ayers received degrees in education and became an advocate of school reform in Chicago. In particular, he propounded a “radical” project in the late 1980’s that was inspired by New York City’s disastrous experiment decades earlier in “community control.” Ayers’s project was championed by a coalition called the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABC’s); according to Diamond, one member of the “alliance” was the Developing Communities Project (DCP), the group for which Obama worked as an organizer. If so, then it is likely that the two met back then, since the DCP was a tiny organization and Obama was most likely its representative.

In any event, in 1994, when the philanthropist Walter Annenberg put up $500 million to help the nation’s public schools, Ayers submitted a grant proposal that secured $50 million for an entity called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The word “challenge” signified that the recipients were required to find double the amount in matching funds; this they did, disposing altogether of some $160 million.

The ostensible purpose of the project was to reinvigorate Chicago’s flagging decentralization project. Ayers devised a structure made up of three connected elements, of which the main two were the Collaborative, or operational center, and the Board, with overall financial control. Ayers named himself to head the Collaborative; Barack Obama, apparently by Ayers’s choice, became chairman of the Board.

So it is conceivable that the two met as late as 1994, but this hardly seems likely. Would anyone yield control of the purse to someone he did not already know well and trust thoroughly? And what exactly were Obama’s credentials in the field of school reform, unless he had been active in the ABC’s with Ayers in the 1980’s? At the very latest, the two must have met sometime after Obama returned from Harvard in late 1991 or early 1992, well before he was chosen to chair the board in 1995.

For the next four to five years, the two worked together to raise the matching funds and disburse small grants to local organizations pushing the reform program. It could only have been an intimate partnership. When Obama decided to run for the state senate, his first fund-raising event was held in the home of Ayers and Dohrn. In 1997, Ayers published a book about juvenile justice, A Kind and Just Parent, which Obama blurbed as “a searing and timely account.” The two also served together on the board of the leftist Woods Fund from 1998 until 2001.

This is what is now public about the relations between Obama and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. There may be much more, so far successfully hidden by all concerned; but even these facts suggest that Ayers was among Obama’s closest collaborators.

_____________

 

Obama’s turn to electoral politics signified no change in his basic ideological orientation. As his wife Michelle put it: “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” (“I take that observation as a compliment,” Obama said as late as 2005.)

Obama’s target was a legislative seat held by Alice Palmer, who had decided to make a run for the U.S. Congress. She introduced Obama in Democratic-party circles as her anointed successor. (After a later falling-out, the two would dispute whether her support had amounted to a formal endorsement or merely, as she claimed, “an informal nod.”) Like others among his mentors or patrons, Palmer, too, was a radical, a member of the executive body of the U.S. Peace Council, the least disguised of Soviet front organizations. She had made multiple pilgrimages to the Soviet Union, and in 1986 attended the 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, telling the party paper on her return that the Soviets “plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas.” According to a later story in the same paper, Palmer visited Moscow again the following year to attend the World Congress of Women sponsored by another Soviet front organization.

In his campaign for the Illinois senate, Obama was endorsed by the New Party (NP), a coalition of socialists, Communists, and other leftists. According to the newsletter of the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, whose members were said to constitute 15 percent of the Chicago New Party, “Once approved, candidates must sign a contract with the NP [which] mandates that they must have a visible and active relationship with the NP.” Apparently, Obama signed such a pledge. After winning the primary (unopposed because his lawyers had succeeded in knocking all three opponents off the ballot), he appeared at a New Party membership meeting to voice his thanks.

Entering the national political scene eight years later, Obama did not, to be sure, appear as a radical, but he still bore the earmarks of the world in which he had been immersed for twenty years. He called himself “progressive,” a term of art favored by veterans of the hard New Left, like Tom Hayden, as well as by old-time Communists. Early this year his wife Michelle, lacking his tact, would kindle controversy by saying that his success in the presidential primaries made her feel proud of her country for the first time. The comment, a faux pas that she was soon at pains to explain away, flowed logically from her view, expressed in her standard stump speech, that our country is a “downright mean” place, “guided by fear,” where the “life . . . that most people are living has gotten progressively worse.”

This year, Obama appeared before Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (whose official slogan is “no justice, no peace”) to seek its support. The candidate praised Sharpton as “a voice for the voiceless and . . . dispossessed. What National Action Network has done is so important to change America, and it must be changed from the bottom up.” Given Sharpton’s long career of reckless racial demagogy, it might seem shocking that a mainstream candidate should be seeking his blessing, but in this, at least, Obama was not unique: all of the 2008 Democratic aspirants did so. He did, though, strive to separate himself from the pack:

If there is somebody who has been more on the forefront on behalf of the issues that you care about and has more concrete accomplishment on behalf of the things you’re concerned about, then I am happy to see you endorse them. I am happy to see you support them. . . . But I am absolutely confident that you will not find that, because there is nobody who has stood fast on these issues more consistently each and every day, than I have. That is something that I know.

As it happened, Sharpton, a consummate wheeler-dealer, kept his options open for a while. But other radicals, soft and hard, rushed to embrace Obama, often waxing rapturous in their support. Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel enthused in the Nation that Obama’s was “a historic candidacy,” from which “new possibilities will be born.” Michael Lerner wrote in Tikkun that the “energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests [sic] in Obama’s campaign” was reminiscent of “the civil-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation.” Most remarkably, Tom Hayden himself joined the chorus by breaking a New Left taboo against “red-baiting” and laying bare some of Hillary Clinton’s own far-Left history—this, in retaliation for the Clinton campaign’s revelations about Obama’s radical background.

 

_____________

 

Even after declaring his candidacy, and despite a certain inevitable sidling rightward, Obama still reflected the presuppositions of a radical worldview. In one notable remark, he said of voters in economic distress that in their desperation they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Chastised for his condescension, he responded: “I said something that everybody knows is true.” This was elitism of a very specific kind—the mentality of the community organizer, according to which people in the grip of “false consciousness” need to be enlightened as to the true nature of their class interests, and to the nature of their true class enemies.

The same suppositions are again evident in Obama’s stances on international issues. Iraq, as he sees it, is only a symptom. “I don’t want to just end the war . . . I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” And what would that mindset be? In a 2002 speech that he frequently cites, he said the war resulted from

the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors . . . to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne . . . the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income . . . the arms merchants in our own country . . . feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

In this litany of global perfidy, the issues of Saddam Hussein’s murderous dictatorship, of American security, of the future of freedom, shrink to inconsequentiality next to the struggle of the oppressed against their American capitalist overlords.

When it comes to Iran, Obama has acknowledged that the regime presents a problem. But his actions—he opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization—as well as his rhetoric imply that the greater danger emanates from George W. Bush (who is allegedly seeking “any justification to extend the Iraq war or to attack Iran”). Likewise on defeating terrorism, where he rejects the America-centric focus that Bush has given to the issue; instead, in the words of his aides, Obama’s main goal is to “restore . . . our moral standing”—that is, to put an end to our aggressive ways.

Even the events of 9/11 could not shake Obama from the mindset that the enemy is always ourselves. The bombings, he wrote, reflected

the underlying struggle—between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together; and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

In this reading, the lessons to be learned from the actions of Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta are that we must accept multiculturalism at home and share our wealth abroad.

 

 

_____________

 

In sum, Obama comes to us from a background farther to the Left than any presidential nominee since George McGovern, or perhaps ever. This makes him an extremely unlikely leader to bridge the divides of party, ideology, or, for that matter, race. If he loses, it will be for that reason (though many will no doubt adduce different explanations, including of course white racism, to which every GOP victory since Nixon’s election in 1968 has been attributed).

And if he wins? Without a doubt, it will be a thrilling moment. But the enduring importance of that landmark event will depend on the subsequent effectiveness of his presidency. If his tenure—like that of, say, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter—should end by inviting scorn, then it may open as many wounds as it heals. On the other hand, it is not unimaginable that he may rise to the challenge of the office and govern from the center, as he will have to do to succeed. This, however, would truly involve reinventing himself, a task for which his intellectual and ideological background furnishes few materials.

With his sharply partisan speech to the Democratic national convention in late August, Obama appeared to zag to the Left after months of zigging toward the center in hopes of winning over independent voters, which had stirred cries of alarm among some of his leftist supporters. Others among them, however, were and are nothing fazed. As the Nation’s Robert Dreyfuss explained, they “put their faith in the Senator’s character and innate instincts.” Heaven help us, they are probably right.

About the Author

Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently completed a book about Arab and Muslim Democrats. His “Obamas's `Talking' Cure” appeared in last month's COMMENTARY.

from City Journal online, 2008-Sep-22, by Heather Mac Donald:

Greed Is for Other People
And other people’s money is very handy for “homeless” advocates and their clients.

It’s funny how greed only afflicts the other guy. With John McCain jumping on the anti-avarice bandwagon, the consensus that the greed of rich Wall Street CEOs, analysts, and investors is to blame for the financial market turmoil now spans the New York Times editorial page, the Democratic punditocracy, and the highest reaches of the Republican ticket. Liberal columnists, university professors, and crusading politicians railing against market selfishness are all supremely confident that their own salaries reflect exactly their worth and not a penny more—because they would never seek to make a profit from their labor, right?

It’s also axiomatic that only the rich—that is, anyone making more money than you—seek to get something for nothing. Thus, several developments last week in New York City’s massive housing-welfare regime will never be portrayed as a manifestation of greed among the poor, but only as social justice.

In June, the city’s Rent Guidelines Board approved a rent increase for apartments whose tenants have lived in them for more than six years and that rent for less than $1,000 a month. The Board acted in response to rising fuel, water, and tax expenses, which have hit small property owners particularly hard. On September 16, the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services of New York sued the Rent Guidelines Board over the new rates.

The rent increase—$45 a month for one-year leases and $85 a month for two-year leases—will affect tenants like Santiago Garza, who has been living in a rent-stabilized apartment on West 48th Street since 1981. Garza pays $570 a month for his digs, while a comparable apartment next to him rents for $1,800, he told the New York Post in June. Yet Garza and the hundreds of angry tenants and advocates who protested the rent hike when it was approved believe that they are merely getting what they deserve—unlike their landlords, who don’t “do enough,” Garza complained. Getting a $1200-a-month subsidy from your landlord, and forcing him to take a huge loss on the market value of his property, isn’t greed, it’s a right! A $1200-a-month windfall to a tenant: simple justice. A market-driven level of rent: landlord avarice.

This remarkable sense of entitlement is of course the official creed in New York, whose city council and representatives in Albany believe that landlords are virtually public entities, obligated—at whatever cost to themselves in foregone income—to provide services and shelter to a lucky group of renters (and at whatever cost to the city in unbuilt rental units). Imagine if the New York City Council, whose speaker, Christine Quinn, enjoys a rent-stabilized apartment in Chelsea, capped worker salaries, so that employers would not face the hardship of competing in the marketplace for employee talent. Such a law would be denounced as a grotesque infringement on the economic rights of the common man. But if the first-time owner of a duplex in Queens seeks a market return on his investment, he is pilloried for ripping off the poor.

New York’s entitlements for “homeless” families are another case where what would appear to be the desire to get something for nothing is reformulated as a victory against capitalist hard-heartedness. Last week, the Bloomberg administration settled a lawsuit that has required the city to provide immediate free shelter to families claiming homelessness. The Legal Aid Society has kept the litigation churning and generating handsome fees for 25 years, at enormous taxpayer expense. But taxpayers can hardly breathe a sigh of relief. While the settlement ends, at least for now, the judicial dictatorship over the city’s gigantic homeless services department, it writes into law a family right to shelter, which the Legal Aid Society can choose to litigate at any moment.

The main sticking point in the case over the years has been whether a family is “homeless.” Virtually all the families in the system are single-mother households, many headed by very young women or teenagers. These young unwed mothers often live with their own single mothers, who themselves usually occupy public housing or rent-controlled apartments. At some point, grandmother, mother, and grandchildren decide they’ve had enough family togetherness, and the younger single mother applies to the city’s homeless-services department for her own city-subsidized apartment. The second-generation single mother and her lawyers claim that she is “homeless”; the city maintains that she has available housing, even if it is more crowded than an apartment of her own would be. This scenario has many possible variants: the single mother may be living with friends or other relatives, or she may be facing eviction from her own apartment but have another possible apartment—that of friends or relatives—theoretically available to her. In almost none of the cases has the shelter-seeking mother literally lost her home through an emergency like a natural disaster. Her housing situation, while crowded, is usually no worse than that of immigrants who may live five to a room and sleep in rotating shifts.

If the city does declare the single mother “homeless,” she will stay an average of nearly a year in free shelter housing, costing taxpayers $31,000. Don’t think of these family “shelters” as communal barracks; with private cooking and bathroom facilities, they are indistinguishable from apartments. In 2008, taxpayers will shell out at least $433 million for homeless family housing alone. That gigantic sum does not include city homeless “prevention” spending—nearly $200 million for one-time cash grants averaging $1,315 and for funding lawyers to defend against eviction suits (naturally, the landlords have to pay their own legal costs). And when her shelter stay is over, the “homeless” mother receives the biggest taxpayer-subsidized benefit of all: fast-tracked eligibility for a federal Section 8 housing voucher or for an apartment in a public housing project.

Two alternatives to the “homeless” housing scenario lie outside the conceptual universe of New York pols and welfare advocates: getting help from the baby’s daddy or moving to a less expensive city. The fathers in these would-be homeless families are not just absent; as far as the city is concerned, they don’t even exist. It is simply inconceivable that a city bureaucrat would ask the mother: Why doesn’t the able-bodied father of your children support them? Such a possibility is apparently too radical to contemplate. So, too, is the idea of relocating to a city that one can afford. The poor once moved in search of opportunity and affordability, but now, living in New York City is considered an entitlement.

The economic instability of single-mother households is a given. It’s also foreseeable and preventable: a simple solution to family homelessness is to marry the father of your children. If you’re not prepared to marry the father of your children, and you can’t support them without a husband, then don’t have them in the first place. Marriage would wipe out not just family homelessness, but also a large portion of poverty in New York City and the nation. Yet to suggest marriage as a solution to poverty and homelessness is to commit a faux pas among the liberal intelligentsia: such a thing is simply not mentioned, much less done.

Equally indiscreet is the suggestion that single-parent families in New York’s shelter system are trying to get something for nothing. Only derivatives traders and subprime mortgage bundlers do that. But many “homeless” families have alternatives to taxpayer support—admittedly, less than ideal ones in the case of doubling up with relatives or friends. Until these alternatives are exhausted, however, it’s hard to see why “greed” should be considered a unique affliction of the rich.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2004-Nov-12, by Bret Stephens:

Um, You're Right. (Not Really.)
What makes liberals think they have the right to decide what's acceptable to say?

An e-mail from an old friend arrived Wednesday evening, on news of changes at the Justice Department.

"God be praised," he wrote. "At least, I hope, we can all agree that it's good that Ashcroft is out."

Yes, we can all agree about John Ashcroft. He's A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover rolled into one. He's a national embarrassment. Worse: He's a conservative embarrassment, which is to say, a personal embarrassment to me as a conservative.

But here's the truth: I don't actually have an opinion in the matter of The People v. John Ashcroft. I lived abroad for the past five years, so I never actually witnessed the midnight arrests or experienced the general atmosphere of intimidation said to have taken hold in America. And, to be frank, I have my doubts about whether there ever really was much by way of midnight arrests and mass intimidation, at least not as I understand those things. And, while I'm at it, anyone who gets cast in the role of liberal voodoo doll is doing OK in my book, even when I know nothing else about him.

This is not a column about Mr. Ashcroft, however, or the relative soundness of American liberties. It is about the liberal assumption, and how that relates, vexingly and unpleasantly, to me. What is the liberal assumption? It is the self-declared right to set the moral parameters of political debate. Hence my friend's words, "at least" and "we." Who are the "we"? Apparently it is the community of sensible people. What is the "at least"? The lowest common denominator that unites me to my friend as persons of sense.

Question: What happens if I don't subscribe to the "at least"? Answer: I cease to belong to the "we."

---

Of course, liberals are not the only ones who make these kinds of assumptions. In Israel, for example, the Orthodox rabbinate has the statutory right to decide who is, and who is not, a Jew. So if you are a convert to Judaism but your conversion was overseen by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, then by Orthodox lights you are not a Jew, and you are not entitled to the things that in Israel Orthodox rabbis alone can provide, like a Jewish wedding. As a result, thousands of Israeli couples must go abroad to marry. No doubt other religions enforce similar rules for in-group/out-group behavior, just as countries have rules to determine who qualifies for citizenship.

But with liberals, there is a difference. For starters, they are liberal: that is, "tolerant," "open-minded," "not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values," "having views or policies advocating individual freedom of action and expression," to mention some of the dictionary definitions. Sure, rabbis, priests and politicians earn their living by making distinctions between Us and Them. But liberals speak for all mankind: Their decencies are human decencies, not group ones, supposedly. And while human decency shouldn't connote limitless toleration for aberrant behavior, surely the liberal "at least" would be notched a couple inches below whatever level of human debasement John Ashcroft is supposed to have reached.

Yet, to paraphrase Bruce Hornsby, that's not the way it is. Not long ago, the New York Sun, a conservative broadsheet, dispatched six brave souls to traipse around Manhattan donning conspicuous Bush-Cheney campaign paraphernalia. One reporter, Roderick Boyd, encountered a woman in Union Square who "spat on the ground at his feet and proceeded to deliver a lecture on alleged Republican fascism and 'blood for oil.' " Another reporter, Maura Yates, "received a more personal greeting from a fellow pedestrian: He walked up and stuck his middle finger in her face."

---

What gave this story particular interest was that it was inspired by a similar stunt by Slate reporter Richard Rushfield, who spent some time in Republican and Democratic districts wearing paraphernalia of the opposing candidate. "In my Kerry-Edwards shirt," he writes, "I enter Red America certain that I am on the verge of inciting to rage a gang of angry yachtsmen. . . . Instead I encounter only shades of indifference."

That's not the way it is in Kerry Country, however, where Mr. Rushfield's experiences tend to be a bit more vivid. "Reflecting on the sting of being called 'a--------' during my trips through Blue America, I wonder: If I were truly a Bush supporter, how long would I be able to endure a life filled with epithets before I gave up on the shirt?"

Good question, Richard, and one I often ask myself. For here's something most thoughtful conservatives learn at some point in their political education: However "Red" this country may be at the ballot box, it remains for us the land of the liberal assumption, in which merely to express our opinion is to risk seeming rude. And being the conservatives we are, most of us are way too polite for that.

Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

from the Weekly Standard, 2008-Sep-15, by Jeffrey Bell:

Why They Hate Her
Sarah Palin is a smart missile aimed at the heart of the left.

For months John McCain has apparently been hoping to use his selection of a running mate to shake up the presidential race. By picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin, McCain has accomplished that--and very likely a lot more than that, more than he or anyone else could have imagined.

I'm not talking about the widely remarked fact that if Palin performs well, and regardless of whether McCain wins or loses, she becomes a future Republican presidential prospect. Given the end of the remarkable 28-year run of the Bush family--present on six of the last seven GOP national tickets, a record that could stand forever--and McCain's own status as a pre-baby boomer, this was baked in the cake no matter what younger Republican politician McCain chose to elevate.

But even apart from its political implications, the rollout of the Sarah Palin vice presidential candidacy may be regarded decades from now as a nationally shared Rorschach test of enormous cultural significance.

From the instant of Palin's designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards's affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire. It's not simply that it is highly capable of generating sympathy for Palin among puzzled undecided voters and of infuriating and motivating a previously placid GOP base, neither of which is in the interest of the Obama-Biden campaign. It also created an opening for Palin herself to look calm, composed, competent, and funny in response.

In her acceptance speech last Wednesday night, anyone could see the poise and skill that undoubtedly attracted McCain's attention months ago, when few others were even aware that he was looking. But it was precisely the venom of the left's assault that heightened the drama and made it a riveting television event. Palin benefited from her ability to project full awareness of the volume and relentlessness of the attacks without showing a scintilla of resentment or self-pity.

This is a rare talent, one shared by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. For this quality to have even a chance to develop, there must be something real to serve as an emotional backdrop: disproportionate, crazy-seeming rage by one's political enemies. Roosevelt was on his party's national ticket five times and Reagan sought the presidency four times. Each became governor of what at the time was the nation's most populous state. It took Roosevelt and Reagan decades of national prominence and pitched ideological combat to achieve the gift of enemies like these. Yet the American left awarded Sarah Palin this gift seemingly within a microsecond of her appearance on the national stage in Dayton, Ohio. Why?

The most important thing to know about the left today is that it is centered on social issues. At root, it always has been, ever since the movement took form and received its name in the revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. In order to drive toward a vision of true human liberation, all the institutions and moral codes we associate with civilization had to be torn down. The institutions targeted in revolutionary France included the monarchy and the nobility, but even higher on the enemies list of the Jacobins and their allies were organized religion and the family, institutions in which the moral values of traditional society could be preserved and passed on outside the control of the leftist vanguard.

Full human liberation always remained the ultimate vision of the left--Marx, for one, was explicit on this point--but the left in its more than 200-year history has been flexible and adaptable in the forms it was willing to assume and the projects it was willing to undertake in pursuit of its anti-institutional goals. For more than a hundred years, the central project of the global left was socialism.

It's hard to credit today, but as recently as the 1940s most Western political elites believed government ownership of business and national planning were the keys to economic modernization. Even when socialism's economic prestige was eroded by the West's capitalist boom after World War II, socialism retained credibility as a means of income redistribution.

It was the turbulent 1960s that proved a strategic turning point for the left. The worldwide social and cultural upheavals that culminated in 1968 were felt as a crisis of confidence by institutions in the West. Some institutions (universities, for example) defected to the rebels, while others saw their centuries-long influence on the population greatly weaken or drain away virtually overnight.

In the short run, most political elites weathered the storm. A big reason, the left gradually realized, was that socialist economics had become an albatross. Increasingly, the democratic parties of the left in Western countries downplayed socialism or even decoupled from it, leaving them free to pursue the anti-institutional, relativistic moral crusade that has been in the DNA of the left all along.

This newly revitalized social and cultural agenda made it possible for the left to shrug off the collapse of European communism and the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago. Even in countries like China where the Communist party retained dictatorial power, socialist economics became a thing of the past. Attempts to suppress religion and limit the autonomy of the family did not.

For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory "liberated" men.

With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc. China, which discouraged contraception and welcomed population gains under Mao Zedong, flipped to the extreme of the One Child policy in 1979, shortly after pro-capitalist reformers took charge and fixed on strict population control as an integral and unquestioned part of the package of Western-style development.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. "No fault" divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

Though earlier versions of feminism tended to embrace children and elevate motherhood, the more adversarial feminism that gained a mass base in virtually every affluent democracy beginning in the 1970s preached that children and childbearing were the central instrumentality of men's subjugation of women. This more than anything else in the menu of the post-socialist left raised toward cultural consensus a vision in which the monogamous family was what prevented humanity from achieving a Rousseau-like "natural" state of freedom from all laws and all bonds of mutual obligation.

If this analysis is correct, the single most important narrative holding the left together in today's politics and culture is the one offered--often with little or no dissent--by adversarial feminism. The premise of this narrative is that for women to achieve dignity and self-fulfillment in modern society, they must distance themselves, not necessarily from men or marriage or childbearing, but from the kind of marriage in which a mother's temptation to be with and enjoy several children becomes a synonym for holding women back and cheating them out of professional success.

On August 29, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement by the McCain campaign, all that was widely known of the governor of Alaska was that she was married with five children, the last one of whom had been carried to term with Down syndrome, and that she was pro-life. No one knew that her oldest daughter was pregnant. No one knew much about what she had done as governor or in her previous career. No one knew how she had been drawn into politics, or that her sister had had a reckless husband and a contentious divorce. Above all, with the possible exception of John McCain, no one knew that Sarah Palin was both a married mother of five and a brilliant political talent with a chance not just to change the dynamics of the 2008 election but to rise to the top level of American politics, whatever happens this year.

The simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was--before anything else about her was known--enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction. She could not be allowed to contradict symbolically one of the central narratives of the left. How galling it will be to Sarah Palin's many new enemies if she survives this assault and prevails. If she does, her success may be an important moment in the struggle to shape not just America's politics but its culture.

Jeffrey Bell, author of Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality (1992), is completing work on Social Conservatism: The Movement That Polarized American Politics. He is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Sep-15, p.A21, by Cathy Young:

Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a "Christian Stepford Wife" and a "Republican blow-up doll." Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

You'd think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman's right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she's just too good at having it all.

In the Boston Globe on Friday, columnist Ellen Goodman frets that Mrs. Palin is a "supermom" whose supporters "think a woman can have it all as long as she can do it all . . . by herself." In fact, Sarah Palin is doing it with the help of her husband Todd, who is currently on leave from his job as an oil worker. But Ms. Goodman's problem is that "she doesn't need anything from anyone outside the family. She isn't lobbying for, say, maternity leave, equal pay, or universal pre-K."

This also galls Katherine Marsh, writing in the latest issue of The New Republic. Mrs. Palin admits to having "an incredible support system -- a husband with flexible jobs rather than a competing career . . . and a host of nearby grandparents, aunts, and uncles." Yet, Ms. Marsh charges, she does not endorse government policies to help less-advantaged working mothers -- for instance, by promoting day-care centers.

Mrs. Palin's marriage actually makes her a terrific role model. One of the best choices a woman can make if she wants a career and a family is to pick a partner who will be able to take on equal or primary responsibility for child-rearing. Our culture still harbors a lingering perception that such men are less than manly -- and who better to smash that stereotype than "First Dude" Todd Palin?

Nevertheless, when Sarah Palin offered a tribute to her husband in her Republican National Convention speech, New York Times columnist Judith Warner read this as a message that she is "subordinate to a great man." Perhaps the message was a brilliant reversal of the old saw that behind every man is a great woman: Here, the great woman is out in front and the great man provides the support. Isn't that real feminism?

Not to Ms. Marsh, who insists that feminism must demand support for women from the government. In this worldview, advocating more federal subsidies for institutional day care is pro-woman; advocating tax breaks or regulatory reform that would help home-based care providers -- preferred by most working parents -- is not. Trying to legislate away the gender gap in earnings (which no self-respecting economist today blames primarily on discrimination) is feminist. Expanding opportunities for part-time and flexible jobs is "the Republican Party line."

I disagree with Sarah Palin on a number of issues, including abortion rights. But when the feminist establishment treats not only pro-life feminism but small-government, individualist feminism as heresy, it writes off multitudes of women.

Of course, being a feminist role model is not part of the vice president's job description, and there are legitimate questions about Mrs. Palin's qualifications. And yet, like millions of American women -- and men -- I find her can-do feminism infinitely more liberated than the what-can-the-government-do-for-me brand espoused by the sisterhood.

Ms. Young, a contributing editor at Reason magazine, is author of "Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces To Achieve True Equality" (Free Press, 1999).

from City Journal, 2008-Summer, by Michael Knox Beran:

Obama, Shaman
The candidate’s post-masculine charisma tempts America in the age of Oprah.

In the patois of punditry, “charismatic” has come to mean little more than “like a rock star.” But the striking thing about the charismatic leader is the extent to which his followers regard him as a healer of wounds, an alleviator of pain. In this sense, surely, Senator Barack Obama is charismatic. The carefully knotted ties and the dark, conservatively tailored suits only accentuate the exoticness of his shamanism; he has entered the American psyche not as a hero but as a healer.

The country, or much of it, has longed for such a figure, a man from the once-oppressed race whose rise to power will atone for the sins of slavery and racial stigmatization. But Obama’s rhetoric encompasses more than a promise of racial healing. He is not the first politician to argue that politics can redeem us, but in posing as the Adonis who will turn winter into spring, he revives one of the more pernicious political swindles: the belief that a charismatic leader can ordain a civic happy hour and give a people a sense of community that will make them feel less bad.

In his unfinished treatise Economy and Society, Max Weber defined charisma as “a certain quality in an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Weber was able to do little more, before he died in 1920, than give a pseudoscientific élan to an idea that had been kicking around for centuries. Most of what he said about charismatic authority was stated more cogently in Book III of Aristotle’s Politics, which described the great-souled man who “may truly be deemed a God among men” and who, by virtue of his greatness, is exempt from ordinary laws.

What both Aristotle and Weber made too little of is the mentality of the charismatic leader’s followers, the disciples who discover in him, or delusively endow him with, superhuman qualities. “Charisma” was originally a religious term signifying a gift of God: it often denotes (according to the seventeenth-century scholar-physician John Bulwer) a “miraculous gift of healing.” James G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, demonstrated that the connection between charismatic leadership and the melioration of suffering was historically a close one: many primitive peoples believed that the magical virtues of a priest-king could guarantee the soil’s fertility and that such a leader could therefore alleviate one of the most elementary forms of suffering, hunger. The identification of leadership with the mitigation of pain persists in folklore and myth. In the Arthurian legends, Percival possesses an extraordinary magic that enables him to heal the fisher king and redeem the waste land; in England, the touch of the monarch’s hand was believed to cure scrofula.

It is a sign of growing maturity in a people when, laying aside these beliefs, it acknowledges that suffering is an element of life that sympathetic magic cannot eradicate, and recognizes a residue of pain in existence that even the application of technical knowledge cannot assuage. Advances in knowledge may end particular kinds of suffering, but these give way to new forms of hurt—milder, perhaps (one would rather be depressed than famished), yet not without their sting. We do not draw closer to a painless world.

One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition. The American Founders recognized this, as did the English statesmen who presided at the Revolution of 1688: they rejected utopianism. And yet, precisely because they knew that human beings are by nature far from perfect, they allowed a degree of scope, in their constitutional settlements, for the mysterious, quasi-magical qualities that Weber associated with charisma—rather as an architect, as a concession to human frailty, might omit the number 13 when labeling the floors of a building. The “magic” of the post-1688 English constitution, Walter Bagehot observed, lay in the pageantry of the monarchy, a relic of the mysterious grace of the healer-redeemer chiefs of old. The American Founders, after experimenting with weaker forms of executive power, created the presidency, an office spacious enough for a charismatic leader to work his wizardry but narrow enough to prevent delusory overreaching.

Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.

Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. As a society, Obama says, we are hurting. Our schools are “crumbling.” There are “lines in the emergency rooms” of the hospitals, and our corporate culture is “rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed.” He points to the millions of Americans who, in struggling with life’s difficulties (“high gas bills, insufficient health insurance, and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable”), have become bitter and unhappy. Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics—a politics, he argues, that breeds “division, and conflict, and cynicism” and that has become a “dead zone” in which “narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth.”

The solution, he says, lies in a political reformation. Unless we “begin the process of changing politics and our civic life,” we will bequeath to our children “a weaker and more fractured America” than the one we inherited. Hence his mantra, “Change we can believe in.” Like the Nicene Creed, Obama’s doctrine begins in belief. Credo. Once we believe in the possibility of a transformative politics, “the perfection begins.” The selfish politics of the present yields to the selfless politics of the future. We discover that “this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.” So believing, we can replace a politics that breeds division, conflict, and cynicism with a politics that fosters unity and peace. In Obama’s “project of national renewal,” government can become an expression of “our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity.”

Even as Obama suggests that a new communitarianism can heal America’s pain and change American lives, radically and for the better, he is careful to anticipate the charge of utopian delusion. Government, he tells people, cannot “solve all their problems.” But presumably it can solve most of them.

The danger of Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.

In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In the Discourses on Livy and The Art of War, Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy’s (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would “make citizens love one another.” The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.

To liberate a people from the bondage of pain and establish a new communal order, a statesman must possess, Machiavelli argued, a kind of charisma he called virtù. He described the most charismatic statesman with whom he was (personally) acquainted, Cesare Borgia, in Weberian terms, as one who “exhibits a fortune unheard of, a virtù and confidence [so much] more than human that he can attain all he desires.”

Jacob Burckhardt credited the luminaries of the Italian Renaissance with envisioning the state as a work of art. More tragically, they envisioned it as a machinery of redemption. Machiavelli’s prince was the first intimation of a modern charismatic type, the demiurge who used a demonic virtù to overcome divisive self-seeking in the name of social solidarity. Self-interest led to market capitalism and alienation; civic selflessness led to public-spirited communitarianism and happiness. The “Machiavellian vocabulary,” the historian J. G. A. Pocock argued in The Machiavellian Moment, became the “vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism.” Machiavelli rejected the commercial ethos (predicated on the pursuit of private interest) that the leading Anglo-American statesmen sought to encourage.

In doing so, he anticipated modernity’s childish dream of an anodyne world. His communitarian state is the prototype of the workers’ paradises of Marx and Lenin and the Nordic Valhallas of Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. His influence is evident in both the enlightened despot celebrated by the Continental philosophes and the socialist wizard admired by intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, who hailed Marx as a mix of “Prometheus and Lucifer,” a heroically diabolic figure who could redeem the waste land of modern capitalism, the forerunner of Lenin and Stalin, Castro and Mao. The Machiavellian ideal of a communitarian paradise haunts, too, the welfare-state philosophy that Bismarck (for his own cynical reasons) promoted when he established the world’s first Wohlfahrtsstaat, a model for socialists in Germany and welfare-state liberals in England and the United States.

In breathing fresh life into Machiavelli’s communitarian daydream, Obama revives a style of charismatic leadership that fell out of favor in the United States after the death of FDR. Of the three presidents since 1945 most often regarded as possessing charismatic qualities, the first, Kennedy, was a tax cutter who questioned liberal utopianism when he said that “life is not fair,” and the second, Reagan, sought to curb the hubris of New Deal étatisme. The third, Clinton, said that he could feel our pain but retreated from his pledge to heal it when he scrapped a plan to nationalize medicine. Obama, by contrast, is faithful to the old-style charismatics, whose slogans (“social solidarity,” for example) he has taken out of cold storage.

Of course, he would not have gotten far had he simply defrosted the ideas of Henry Wallace and George McGovern. Obama’s charisma is tuned to the mood of the moment. The charisma of American political leaders has typically rested on images of unflinching strength and masculine authority: Teddy Roosevelt in the North Dakota Badlands; Kennedy, the naval hero whose sexual prowess was acknowledged even in his Secret Service code name (“Lancer”); Reagan, the man on horseback whom the Secret Service called “Rawhide.” Obama’s charisma, by contrast, is closer to what critic Camille Paglia has identified with today’s television talk-show culture, in which admissions of weakness are offered as proof of empathetic qualities. Talk-show culture is occupied with the question of why we feel so bad, when it is our right under the liberal dispensation to feel eternally good. The man who would succeed in such a culture must appear to sympathize with these obscure hurts; he must take pains, Paglia writes in Sexual Personae, to appear an “androgyne, the nurturant male or male mother.”

Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the thirties. Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: “Everybody who’s dealt with him,” columnist David Brooks says, “has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them.” His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

With the triumph of Obama’s post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the empathetic mommy-state that Balzac prophesied in La Comédie humaine. The leader of the future, Balzac foresaw, would be a man who, like his diabolically charismatic Jacques Collin, possesses a capacity for maternal love. When his protégé Lucien dies, Collin exclaims: “This blow has been more than death to me, but you can’t understand what I’m saying. . . . If you’re fathers, you’re only that and no more. . . . I’m a mother, too!” Collin ends his career as a functionary of the state—and a policeman. The Grand Inquisitor of the future, Balzac intimates, will undertake his inquisitions in the name of matriarchal pity.

Yet if Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders’ adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as “ideological minorities” to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those “absolutists” who would defy the community. The “ideological core of today’s GOP,” he writes, is “absolutism, not conservatism,” an absolutism driven by those who prize “absolute truth” over “communal values.” This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives.

Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is “a rejection of absolute truth.” His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West’s traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man’s fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of utopian overreaching.

Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he undermined the West’s most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two years after he completed The Prince, Machiavelli composed a fable, Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife, in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take possession of a man’s mind and corrupt those around him. In assuming (correctly) that the diabolic qualities of his redemptive prince would be easier to swallow once the devil himself became a joke, Machiavelli blazed a path that Voltaire, Diderot, Goethe, and Shaw afterward trod. No one fears the devil that Voltaire refused to renounce on his deathbed. (“This is no time to be making enemies,” he jested.) Goethe’s Mephistopheles is charming, as is Shaw’s (in Man and Superman). Even those characters whom modern European artists have intended to be diabolic (such as Balzac’s Collin) arouse sympathy in a way that older devil-characters (Shakespeare’s Iago, for example) do not.

Dostoyevsky was among the few who grasped the momentousness of the change that Machiavelli initiated in the West’s conception of diablerie. Near the end of The Brothers Karamazov, he describes an encounter between the devil and Ivan Karamazov. The devil appears, not with claws and horns, but in the guise of an elegant man of the world: he phrases his mordant taunts in French and laughs at modern intellectuals who believe that he doesn’t exist or who worry that to admit his existence would harm their “progressive image.” Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and “be as gods”—demiurges with the power to heal the world’s pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea.

Obama has revived a cruel mirage, but the good news is that the country has defenses against his brand of redemptive politics. Some of these defenses are constitutional, others cultural. The very strength of America’s religious ideal of redemption has restrained, though it has not entirely forestalled, the development of alternative secular ideals of redemption. A religiously inspired belief in original sin has made Americans wary of succumbing to the Pelagian notion that a mere mortal, however charismatic, can build the New Jerusalem out of purely secular materials. The country’s constitutional system, itself founded on the theory of original sin, has created a perpetual conflict of factions and interests that so far has prevented any single party from imposing a monolithic unity from above, such as Europe’s collectivists were able to do.

And then there is Old Nick, the West’s traditional symbol of evil, who has retained a good deal more apotropaic power on these shores than in Europe. A 1991 survey by the International Social Survey Programme found that 45.4 percent of Americans believed in the devil (61 percent, according to a 2005 Harris poll), compared with 20.4 percent of Italians, 12.5 percent of Russians, 9.5 percent of West Germans, and 3.6 percent of East Germans. We often read about differences between America and Europe with respect to belief in God, but differences with respect to belief in diabolic evil may be even more revealing. It is significant that belief in the devil is lowest in those countries (Russia and Germany) that suffered, during the twentieth century, most acutely from forms of evil that might without exaggeration be called diabolic. Europeans, it may be, have proved more susceptible to the element of diabolic temptation in charismatic leadership precisely because they are less likely to believe in the reality of diabolic evil.

Still, it’s hard to deny that Obama has found a weakness in America’s defenses. His post-masculine charisma is likely to flourish in a political environment that has come to resemble not only a TV talk show but a TV reality show, in which the candidate rarely escapes the camera’s eye. The masculine leader of old had to conceal his weaknesses. “I rather tell thee what is to be feared,” Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, “than what I fear, for always I am Caesar.” When scrutiny was less intense, the man on horseback could hope to get away with it. Shakespeare’s Cassius laments that the public never knew how weak Caesar really was:

He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake; ’tis true, this god did shake . . .

Today a camera would capture the image of the shaking god. Superman, Norman Mailer said in his famous essay on Kennedy, can thrive in the supermarket—but in cable TV and YouTube, the Übermensch may finally have met his match.

Meanwhile, the very images of frailty that undermine the masculine leader’s pose of strength help the practitioner of the new post-masculine charisma, whose object is to appear human—all too human. Softness has become an asset for candidates who have molded themselves on the exhibitionist model of the Oprah matriarchy.

Hence Obama’s spectacular rise. But Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system’s wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make sense of our condition.

Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Aug-7, p.A13, by Mart Laar:

Stalinism Was Just as Bad as Nazism

Last week Russia furiously attacked President Bush for his proclamation on Captive Nations Week (July 20-July 26), which was established to raise awareness of countries living under communist and other oppressive regimes. Mr. Bush said that, "In the 20th century, the evils of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism were defeated and freedom spread around the world as new democracies emerged."

The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that treating Nazi fascism and Soviet communism as "a single evil" was an insult that "hurt the hearts" of World War II veterans in Russia and in allied countries, including the United States. "While condemning the abuse of power and unjustified severity of the Soviet regime's internal policies, we nevertheless can neither treat indifferently attempts to equate Communism and Nazism nor agree that they were inspired by the same ideas and aims," the ministry said in a statement.

Actually, the Bush statement is correct: There is really no big difference between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. When World War II began in September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies; indeed Stalin and Hitler launched the war together.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty of Aug. 23 was a nonaggression pact between Germany and Russia; but a secret protocol in the treaty also opened the way for the division of Europe by carving Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania into spheres of influence. Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1 from the north, south and west; Stalin invaded Poland from the east on Sept. 17.

And this was only the beginning. The second campaign of the war was Soviet aggression against Finland in November 1939; only the third campaign, against Denmark and Norway (in April) was a pure German operation. The fourth campaign, the invasion of France in May 1940, was accompanied by Stalin's annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In this period, Stalin was a most devoted ally of Hitler. Without Soviet oil and grain, Hitler would probably not have survived the first year of the war. Stalin even ordered European communists not to help their governments fight against Hitler.

In occupied countries, Poland for example, the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD worked hand in hand. Germany's secret police killed people in its zone of occupation according to racial criteria. In its zone, the Soviet secret police killed according to social or political criteria. The Nazi SS handed over Ukrainian nationalists to the Soviets; in return the NKVD handed over escaped German communists to the Gestapo.

Only when the two totalitarian leaders could not agree how to divide the world did war between them come. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941; the resulting anti-Nazi coalition helped the West survive and come out of the war with half of Europe rescued from totalitarianism. But for the rest of Europe under communist control, World War II ended only in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet empire.

In his marvelous book, "No Simple Victory," British historian Norman Davies asks us to remember that "the war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one. Each of the monsters consumed the best people in its territory before embarking on a fight to the death for supremacy. The third force in the struggle -- the Western Powers -- was all but eliminated in the opening stage, and took much of the war to reassert its influence."

This statement in no way insults the millions of people who fought against the Nazis. The victims of the crimes of Stalin and Hitler included the people of the Soviet Union. Soviet losses in World War II were very high, according to some estimates, including by Mr. Davies, 27 million soldiers and civilians. But these losses not only include those killed by the German invasion; they also include people killed by communist repressions and deportations, as well as the killings by the Soviets of their own soldiers. Mr. Davies thinks that the number of Soviet soldiers killed by the NKVD could exceed the total number of battle deaths of the British and U.S. armies.

So why, in some quarters, are the crimes of communism not yet condemned? There are still many people who say that, whilst the crimes of Nazism were proven and condemned in the Nuremberg Trials, the crimes of communism still need investigation. Others hesitate to condemn communism because, knowing that Hitler saw in Bolshevism its main opponent, they fear to share a common position with the Nazis.

This is not a logical position. If we find two gangsters fighting each other and one of them kills another, this does not make the first gangster less of a criminal.

Communist terror was in the same league of infamy as the crimes of the Third Reich. It actually lasted longer, killing significantly more people than the Nazis did. This does not make Nazis better than communists. They were both fighting against freedom and human dignity, and must be condemned in the same way as evils of the 20th century.

Mr. Laar, a former prime minister of Estonia, is a founder of the Foundation for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.

from the Washington Examiner, 2008-Jun-2, by Peter Schweizer:

Conservatives more honest than liberals?

WASHINGTON -- The headline may seem like a trick question — even a dangerous one — to ask during an election year. And notice, please, that I didn't ask whether certain politicians are more honest than others. (Politicians are a different species altogether.) Yet there is a striking gap between the manner in which liberals and conservatives address the issue of honesty.

Consider these results:

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend's company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn't deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

Another survey by Barna Research found that political liberals were two and a half times more likely to say that they illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet.

A study by professors published in the American Taxation Association's Journal of Legal Tax Research found conservative students took the issue of accounting scandals and tax evasion more seriously than their fellow liberal students. Those with a “liberal outlook” who “reject the idea of absolute truth” were more accepting of cheating at school, according to another study, involving 291 students and published in the Journal of Education for Business.

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward “conservatism” translated into “higher levels of ethical values.” And academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between “political liberalism” and “lying in your own self-interest,” based on a study involving 156 adults.

Liberals were more willing to “let others take the blame” for their own ethical lapses, “copy a published article” and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of “cheating on an exam,” according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Now, I'm not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of “bad people” becoming liberals and “good people” becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate “doesn't have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist.”

During this political season, honesty is often in short supply. But at least we can improve things by accepting the idea that truth and honesty exist. As the late scholar Sidney Hook put it, “the easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.”

Peter Schweizer is the author of “Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less ... And Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals” (Doubleday).

from NewsMax.com, 2008-Jun-2, by Ronald Kessler:

Peter Schweizer: Liberals Are More Selfish Than Conservatives

Contrary to the image they try to project, liberals are less compassionate and more selfish than conservatives, according to a new book by Peter Schweizer.

Drawing on extensive attitude surveys, Schweizer's “Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals,” which comes out this week, says liberals are much more likely than conservatives to think about themselves first and are less willing to make sacrifices for others.

Some 71 percent of conservatives say they have an obligation to care for a seriously injured spouse or parent, compared with 46 percent for liberals. Asked if they would endure all things for the one they love, 55 percent of conservatives say yes, compared with 26 percent of liberals.

Equally revealing, liberals are far more likely to say they are depressed and to view the world bleakly. Schweizer attributes that to an attitude that they and those around them are victims and helpless unless the government intervenes.

In answer to a question from Newsmax, Schweizer says that may help explain why liberal politicians and reporters tend to see everything with pessimism, from the economy to the war on terror and the war in Iraq.

Schweizer says the media and liberal professors have successfully obscured these differences by painting a picture of conservatives as mean-spirited. He quotes one professor as saying that conservatives embrace the “unimpeded pursuit of self-interest” to get what they want and that as children, they were insecure and whiny.

Conservatives are selfish, Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former labor secretary, has said, and “they pander to the worst of us.”

Sen. Charles Schumer said on Bill Maher's HBO show “Real Time,” “There are some, you know, there are some anti-Semites in this county, but most of them would vote Republican anyway.”

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has said conservatives and Republicans are “evil,” “corrupt,” brain-dead,” and “not very nice people” who have “never made an honest living in their lives.”

If Schweizer's book is a ground-breaker, it also raises the question of why Schweizer's findings may come as a surprise even to conservatives. Schweizer cites ample evidence that the media have ignored good news about conservatives and have helped perpetuate the myth that liberals are more compassionate and caring.

Katie Couric has said that during the Reagan era, "greed and materialism was the norm.” Alan Colmes of Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes" has said that “Jesus was a liberal” because he was much more generous with limited resources than a conservative would be.

Liberals Perpetuate the Myth

“The media have perpetuated these myths about conservatives over the years,” Schweizer tells Newsmax. “And the media were very comfortable passing these things along because they conformed to their world view."

Drawing on hard polling data, Schweizer demonstrates that the truth is quite the opposite. In doing so, he explodes more myths than firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

In fact, Schweizer writes, self-described liberals and Democrats, who profess to be tolerant, are much more likely to embrace stereotypes of Jews than conservatives or Republicans. Some 45 percent of self-described “strong” Democrats or liberals agree with the statement that Jews are inordinately rich and money-driven, compared with 36 percent of strong Republicans and conservatives.

Schweizer cites similar research to show that even when they are in the same income brackets, liberals are far more likely to complain about their jobs, families, neighbors, health, and their relative wealth than conservatives.

Liberals are much more likely to say that money is important to them, according to the surveys Schweizer cites. They are two and a half times more likely to be resentful of others' success and 50 percent more likely to be jealous of other people's good luck. Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to spend time with their families, hug their children, and be close to their parents.

Liberals tend to work less hard and are more likely than conservatives to embrace leisure time as desirable. When asked if competition is good, those who defined themselves as very liberal say yes only 14 percent of the time, compared with 43 percent for conservatives.

Liberals are more likely to say that truth is something that is “relative.” When asked if they believe in ghosts, 42 percent of liberals say they do, compared with 25 percent of conservatives. Liberals are more likely to say that's it's OK to be dishonest or deceptive, cheat on taxes, keep money that doesn't belong to them, and sell a used car with a faulty transmission to a family member.

Overall, conservatives are more satisfied with their lives, their professions, and their health compared with liberals of the same age and income level.

Schweizer balances these findings with a few issues where liberals come out ahead. He says liberals are more likely than conservatives to be open to new experiences in travel, art, and music. But Schweizer exposes hypocrisy at the core of liberal beliefs. While liberals claim to be compassionate and to care about the poor, conservatives are much more likely to donate their time and money to charitable causes.

When Reich ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, his tax returns revealed income of more than $1 million, but he contributed just $2,714 to charity, or less than 0.3 percent.

Ned Lamont, the anti-war Democrat who ran against Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, is worth $200 million and made $2.8 million in 2005. He has talked about the need to raise taxes because the wealthy are not doing enough to help those in need. Yet in 2005, he donated only $5,385 to charity, or less than 0.2 percent of his income.

In contrast, George Bush gave 10 percent of his income to charity in 2005. In 2005, Barack Obama made $1.7 million, or 2.5 times what Bush made that year, but gave the same amount to charity as Bush did. That same year, Dick Cheney gave away 77 percent of his income to charity.

Proud Conservatives

While Schweizer does not address attitudes about national security (the subject of his next book), he says liberals are more concerned about what others think than conservatives. When asked what is most important to prepare a child for life, 40 percent of liberals listed “being popular” among them, compared with 24 percent of conservatives.

On the other hand, conservatives were more likely to say one of their main goals in life is to “make my parents proud.” Presumably, those who are more concerned about what others think are more likely to be concerned about criticism of firm national security policies.

Finally, liberals try to paint conservatives as dumb — Clark Clifford called Ronald Reagan an “amiable dunce.” Schweizer shows that while John Kerry scored in the 91st percentile on a military IQ test, George Bush scored in the 95th percentile. Contrary to misrepresentations in the media, Bush also had slightly higher grades at Yale than Kerry.

Schweizer attributes liberals' bleaker outlook on life to their deep-seated victim mentality.

This feeds a view that they cannot help themselves and encourages them to be passive. They are far more likely to say that luck or fate plays a role in their lives, as opposed to citing the need to take action themselves.

The victim mentality, in turn, makes them more likely to become depressed, suffer from a nervous breakdown, attempt suicide, be chronically angry, throw something in a fit of anger, seek revenge, and have a bleak outlook on life in general.

In one survey, 34 percent of liberals said the problems of life were just too big to cope with, compared with 19 percent of conservatives.

“Liberals often feel overwhelmed by life's problems because they are waiting for the government to fix them,” Schweizer says. “”When it doesn't, liberals blame others (and `society') for their misfortune.” Thus, liberalism “often damages its own adherents the most,” Schweitzer says.

“Modern liberal ideas consistently encourage bad habits and destructive behavioral tendencies,” says Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Schweizer says liberalism is appealing because it gives lip service to lofty ideals but demands little action. Liberalism considers as noble those who complain about personal difficulties and display anger or denounce our “money-making culture,” but liberalism does not stress taking personal responsibility and action.

Thus, “While liberals tend to be much more fixated on money, they convince themselves that if they hold the belief that our society is too obsessed by money, the money culture doesn't influence them adversely the way that it does other people,” Schweizer says.

“Modern liberalism is a wonderful tool to kind of avoid having to make much change in your life,” Schweizer says. “It's kind of in my mind the equivalent to carbon offsets. You don't need to change anything in your life, you simply have to sort of stamp this document or pay this minor price, and the problems in your life just sort of go away.”

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.

from City Journal, 1994-Autumn, by Anthony Daniels (nom de plume: Theodore Dalrymple):

“The Knife Went In”

It is a mistake to suppose that all men, or at least all Englishmen, want to be free. On the contrary, if freedom entails responsibility, many of them want none of it. They would happily exchange their liberty for a modest (if illusory) security. Even those who claim to cherish their freedom are rather less enthusiastic about taking the consequences of their actions. The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years. It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaint, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe to their own efforts, choices, and actions. Implicitly, they disagree with Bacon's famous dictum that “chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.” Instead, they experience themselves as putty in the hands of fate.

It is instructive to listen to the language they use to describe their lives. The language of prisoners in particular teaches much about the dishonest fatalism with which people seek to explain themselves to others, especially when those others are in a position to help them in some way. As a doctor who sees patients in a prison once or twice a week, I am fascinated by prisoners' use of the passive mood and other modes of speech that are supposed to indicate their helplessness. They describe themselves as the marionettes of happenstance.

Not long ago, a murderer entered my room in the prison shortly after his arrest to seek a prescription for the methadone to which he was addicted. I told him that I would prescribe a reducing dose, and that within a relatively short time my prescription would cease. I would not prescribe a maintenance dose for a man with a life sentence.

“Yes,” he said, “it's just my luck to be here on this charge.”

Luck? He had already served a dozen prison sentences, many of them for violence, and on the night in question had carried a knife with him, which he must have known from experience that he was inclined to use. But it was the victim of the stabbing who was the real author of the killer's action: if he hadn't been there, he wouldn't have been stabbed.

My murderer was by no means alone in explaining his deed as due to circumstances beyond his control. As it happens, there are three stabbers (two of them unto death) at present in the prison who used precisely the same expression when describing to me what happened. “The knife went in,” they said when pressed to recover their allegedly lost memories of the deed.

The knife went in—unguided by human hand, apparently. That the long-hated victims were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.

It might be objected by psychologists, of course, that the deeds of these men were so heinous that it was a natural and perhaps even necessary psychic defense for them to ascribe the deaths of their victims to forces beyond their control: too swift an acknowledgment of responsibility would result in a total collapse of their morale and, possibly, in suicide. But the evasion in their own minds of the responsibility for their deeds was in no way different from that exhibited by lesser criminals: offenders against property or, more accurately, against the owners of property.

A few examples will suffice. A prisoner, recently convicted for the umpteenth time, came to me to complain that he had been depressed ever since his trouble came on him again. And what, I asked, was this trouble which came on him periodically? It was breaking and entering churches, stealing their valuables, and burning them down to destroy the evidence.

And why churches? Was it that he had been dragged as a child to tedious services by hypocritical parents and wished to be revenged upon religion, perhaps? Not at all; it was because in general churches were poorly secured, easy to break into, and contained valuable objects in silver.

Oddly enough, he did not deduce from this pragmatic, reasonable, and honest explanation of his choice of ecclesiastical burglary as a career that he was himself responsible for the trouble which mysteriously overtook him every time he was released from prison: he blamed the church authorities for the laxness of their security, which first caused and then reinforced his compulsion to steal from them. Echoing the police, who increasingly blame theft on the owners of property—for failing to take the proper precautions against its misappropriation—rather than on those who actually carry out the theft, the ecclesiastical burglar said that the church authorities should have known of his proclivities and taken the necessary measures to prevent him from acting upon them.

Another burglar demanded to know from me why he repeatedly broke into houses and stole VCRs. He asked the question aggressively, as if “the system” had so far let him down in not supplying him with the answer; as if it were my duty as a doctor to provide him with the buried psychological secret which, once revealed, would in and of itself lead him unfailingly on the path of virtue. Until then, he would continue to break into houses and steal VCRs (when at liberty to do so), and the blame would be mine.

When I refused to examine his past, he exclaimed, “But something must make me do it!”
“How about greed, laziness, and a thirst for excitement?” I suggested.
“What about my childhood?” he asked.
“Nothing to do with it,” I replied firmly.

He looked at me as if I had assaulted him. Actually, I thought the matter more complex than I was admitting, but I did not want him to misunderstand my main message: that he was the author of his own deeds.

Another prisoner claimed to be under so strong a compulsion to steal cars that it was irresistible—an addiction, he called it. He stole up to forty vehicles a week, but nevertheless considered himself a fundamentally good person because he was never violent towards anyone, and all the vehicles he stole were insured, and therefore the owners would lose nothing. But regardless of any financial incentive to do so, he contended, he stole cars for the excitement of it: if prevented for a few days from indulging in this activity, he became restless, depressed, and anxious. It was a true addiction, he repeated at frequent intervals, in case I should have forgotten in the meantime.

Now the generally prevalent conception of an addiction is of an illness, characterized by an irresistible urge (mediated neurochemically and possibly hereditary in nature) to consume a drug or other substance, or to behave in a repetitively self-destructive or antisocial way. An addict can't help himself, and because his behavior is a manifestation of illness, it has no more moral content than the weather.

So in effect what my car thief was telling me was that his compulsive car-stealing was not merely not his fault, but that the responsibility for stopping him from behaving thus was mine, since I was the doctor treating him. And until such time as the medical profession found the behavioral equivalent of an antibiotic in the treatment of pneumonia, he could continue to cause untold misery and inconvenience to the owners of cars and yet consider himself fundamentally a decent person.

That criminals often shift the locus of responsibility for their acts elsewhere is illustrated by some of the expressions they use most frequently in their consultations with me. Describing, for example, their habitual loss of temper, which leads them to assault whomever displeases them sufficiently, they say, “My head goes,” or “My head just went.”

What exactly do they mean by this? They mean that they consider themselves to suffer from a form of epilepsy or other cerebral pathology whose only manifestation is involuntary rage, of which it is the doctor's duty to cure them. Quite often they put me on warning that unless I find the cure for their behavior, or at least prescribe the drugs they demand, they are going to kill or maim someone. The responsibility when they do so will be mine, not theirs, for I knew what they were going to do, yet failed to prevent it. So their putative illness has not only explained and, therefore, absolved them from past misconduct, but it has exonerated them in advance from all future misconduct.

Moreover, by warning me of their intention to carry out further assaults, they have set themselves up to be victims rather than perpetrators. They told the authorities (me) what they were going to do, and yet the authorities (I, again) did nothing; and so when they return to prison after committing a further horrible crime, they will feel aggrieved that “the system,” represented by me, has once again let them down.

But were I to take the opposite tack and suggest preventive detention until such time as they could control their temper, they would be outraged at the injustice of it. What about habeas corpus? What about innocence until guilt is proven? And they deduce nothing from the fact that they can usually control their tempers in the presence of a sufficiently opposing force.

Violent criminals often use an expression auxiliary to “My head went” when explaining their deeds: “It wasn't me.” Here is the psychobabble of the slums, the doctrine of the “Real Me” as refracted through the lens of urban degradation. The Real Me has nothing to do with the phenomenal me, the me that snatches old ladies' bags, breaks into other people's houses, beats up my wife and children, or repeatedly drinks too much and gets involved in brawls. No, the Real Me is an immaculate conception, untouched by human conduct: it is that unassailable core of virtue that enables me to retain my self-respect whatever I do. What I am is not at all determined by what I do; and insofar as what I do has any moral significance at all, it is up to others to ensure that the phenomenal me acts in accordance with the Real Me.

Hence one further expression frequently used by prisoners: “My head needs sorting out.” The visual image they have of their minds, I suspect, is of a child's box of bricks, piled higgledy-piggledy, which the doctor, rummaging around in the skull, has the capacity and the duty to put into perfect order, ensuring that henceforth all conduct will automatically be honest, law-abiding, and economically advantageous. Until this sorting out is done, constructive suggestions—learn a skill, enroll in a correspondence course—are met with the refrain, “I will—once my head's sorted out.”

At the very heart of all this passivity and refusal of responsibility is a deep dishonesty—what Sartre would have called bad faith. For however vehemently criminals try to blame others, and whatever appearance of sincerity they manage to convey while they do so, they know at least some of the time that what they say is untrue.

That's clear in the habit drug addicts often have of altering their language according to their interlocutors. To doctors, social workers, and probation officers—to all who might prove useful to them either in a prescribing or a testimonial capacity—they emphasize their overwhelming and overpowering craving for a drug, the intolerability of the withdrawal effects from it, the deleterious effects it has upon their character, judgment, and behavior. Among themselves, though, their language is quite different, optimistic rather than abject: it is about where you can obtain the best-quality drug, where it is cheapest, and how to heighten its effects.

I suspect (though I cannot prove, except by anecdote) that it is the same among prisoners. It is hardly a new observation that prisons are the universities of crime. Yet prisoners invariably describe to doctors and psychologists their difficult upbringings (which they bring out for the occasion almost like heirlooms), their violent or absent fathers, their poverty and all the difficulties and disadvantages to which urban flesh is heir. Among themselves, though, what must be the discourse, as they establish contacts, learn new techniques—and deride the poor fools who earn an honest living but never grow rich?

That their outlook is dishonest and self-serving is apparent in their attitude to those whom they believe to have done them wrong. For example, they do not say of the policemen who they allege (often plausibly) have beaten them up, “Poor cops! They were brought up in authoritarian homes and now project the anger that is really directed at their bullying fathers onto me. They need counseling. They need their heads sorted out.” On the contrary, they say, with force and explosive emotion, “The bastards!” They assume that the police act out of free, if malevolent, will.

The prisoner's public presentation of himself often takes on a curious resemblance to the portrayal of him by liberals. “You want me to be a victim of circumstance?” he seems to say. “All right, I'll be a victim for you.” With repetition of his story, he comes to believe it, at least some of the time and with part of his mind. Denial of guilt—both juridical and moral—thus becomes possible in the presence of the most minute memory of the circumstances of the crime.

Man has always had a capacity for deceit of others and for self-deception, of course. It was Nietzsche who famously observed that pride and self-regard have no difficulty in overcoming memory; and every psychic defense mechanism known to the modem psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare. Yet one's impression nonetheless is that the ease with which people discard responsibility for what they have done—their intellectual and emotional dishonesty about their own actions—has increased greatly in the last few decades.

Why should this occur just when, objectively speaking, freedom and opportunity for the individual have never been greater?

In the first place, there is now a much enlarged constituency for liberal views: the legions of helpers and carers, social workers and therapists, whose incomes and careers depend crucially on the supposed incapacity of large numbers of people to fend for themselves or behave reasonably. Without the supposed powerlessness of drug addicts, burglars, and others in the face of their own undesirable inclinations, there would be nothing for the professional redeemers to do. They have a vested interest in psychopathology, and their entire therapeutic world view of the patient as the passive, helpless victim of illness legitimizes the very behavior from which they are to redeem him. Indeed, the tangible advantages to the wrongdoer of appearing helpless are now so great that he needs but little encouragement to do so.

In the second place, there has been a widespread dissemination of psychotherapeutic concepts, in however garbled or misinterpreted a form. These concepts have become the currency even of the uneducated. Thus the idea has become entrenched that if one does not know or understand the unconscious motives for one's acts, one is not truly responsible for them. This, of course, applies only to those acts which someone regards as undesirable: no one puzzles over his own meritoriousness. But since there is no single ultimate explanation of anything, one can always claim ignorance of one's own motives. Here is a perpetual getout.

Third, there has been a widespread acceptance of sociological determinism, especially by the guilt-laden middle classes. Statistical association has been taken indiscriminately as proving causation: thus, if criminal behavior is more common among the poorer classes, it must be poverty that causes crime.

Nobody, of course, experiences himself as sociologically determined—certainly not the sociologist. And few of the liberals who espouse such a viewpoint recognize its profoundly dehumanizing consequences. If poverty is the cause of crime, burglars do not decide to break into houses any more than amoebae decide to move a pseudopod towards a particle of food. They are automata—and presumably should be treated as such.

Here the subliminal influence of Marxist philosophy surfaces: the notion that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. If this were so, men would still live in caves; but it has just enough plausibility to shake the confidence of the middle classes that crime is a moral problem, not just a problem of morale.

Into this rich brew of uncertainty and equivocation, social historians are inclined to add their dash of seasoning, pointing out that the middle classes saw crime as a moral problem even in the eighteenth century, when for many malefactors it really was quite another thing, since sometimes the only way for them to obtain food was to steal it. To say this, of course, is to overlook the fundamental change in life chances that has occurred since then. In Georgian London, for example, the life expectancy at birth was about 25 years, whereas it is now 75. At the height of the Victorian era, the life expectancy of the Royal Family was 50 percent lower than that of the very poorest section of the population today. Surely to cling to explanations that might once have held some force but are no longer plausible is, in the most literal sense, reactionary.

The very form of the explanation offered by liberals for modern crime—from social conditions direct to behavior, without passing through the human mind—offers those who commit crime an excuse in advance, an excuse which with part of their minds they know to be false but which is nonetheless useful and convenient to them in dealing with officialdom.

Finally, consider the effect that the mass media's constant rehearsal of injustices has upon the population. People come to believe that, far from being extremely fortunate by the standards of all previously existing populations, we actually live in the worst of times and under the most unjust of dispensations. Every wrongful conviction, every instance of police malfeasance, is so publicized that even professional criminals, even those who have performed appalling deeds, feel on a priori grounds they too must have been unjustly, or at least hypocritically, dealt with.

And the widespread notion that material inequality is in itself a sign of institutionalized injustice also helps foster crime. If property is theft, then theft is a form of just retribution. This leads to the development of that most curious phenomenon, the ethical thief: the thief who prides himself on stealing only from those who in his estimation can stand the loss. Thus I have had many burglars tell me in a glow of self-satisfaction that they would not steal from the old, from children, or the poor, because that would be wrong.

“In fact, you'd steal only from people like me,” I say to them. (A house opposite mine has been burgled four times in two years, incidentally.)

They agree; and strangely enough they expect my approbation of their restrained feloniousness. That's how far things have gone.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Aug-16, by Daniel Henninger:

The Death of Diversity
People in ethnically diverse settings don't care about each other.

Diversity was once just another word. Now it's a fighting word. One of the biggest problems with diversity is that it won't let you alone. Corporations everywhere have force-marched middle managers into training sessions led by "diversity trainers." Most people already knew that the basic idea beneath diversity emerged about 2,000 years ago under two rubrics: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Do unto others as they would do unto you. Then suddenly this got rewritten as "appreciating differentness."

George Bernard Shaw is said to have demurred from the Golden Rule. "Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Shaw advised. "Their tastes may not be the same." No such voluntary opt-out is permissible in our time. The parsons of the press made diversity into a secular commandment; do a word-search of "diversity" in a broad database of newspapers and it might come up 250 million times. In the Supreme Court term just ended, the Seattle schools integration case led most of the justices into arcane discussions of diversity's legal compulsions. More recently it emerged that the University of Michigan, a virtual Mecca of diversity, announced it would install Muslim footbaths in bathrooms, causing a fight.

Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller "Bowling Alone" announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other. "Social capital" erodes. Diversity has a downside.

Prof. Putnam isn't exactly hiding these volatile conclusions, though he did introduce them in a journal called Scandinavian Political Studies. A great believer in the efficacy of what social scientists call "reciprocity," he wasn't happy with what he found but didn't mince words describing the results:

"Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." The diversity nightmare gets worse: They have little confidence in the "local news media." This after all we've done for them.

Colleagues and diversity advocates, disturbed at what was emerging from the study, suggested alternative explanations. Prof. Putnam and his team re-ran the data every which way from Sunday and the result was always the same: Diverse communities may be yeasty and even creative, but trust, altruism and community cooperation fall. He calls it "hunkering down."

---

Give me a break! you scream. What about New York City or L.A.? From the time of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" through "Peyton Place" and beyond, people have fled the flat-lined, gossip-driven homogeneity of small American "communities" for the welcome anonymity of big-city apartment building--so long as your name wasn't Kitty Genovese, the famous New York woman who bled to death crying for help.

It's a wonderfully thought-provoking study, suitable for arguing the length of a long August weekend and available as a lecture on Prof. Putnam's Harvard Web site, the "Saguaro Seminar." Astute readers, however, have already guessed who's thrilled with the results.

Pat Buchanan, reflecting an array of commentaries on the study from the American right, says, "Putnam provides supporting fire from Harvard Yard for those who say America needs a time-out from mass immigration, be it legal or illegal." The "antis" believe the Putnam study hammers the final intellectual nail in the coffin of immigration and diversity.

The diversity ideologues deserve whatever ill tidings they get. They're the ones who weren't willing to persuade the public of diversity's merits, preferring to turn "diversity" into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance. The conversions were forced conversions. As always, with politics comes pushback. And it never stops.

The harvest of bitter fruit from the diversity wars begun three decades ago across campuses, corporations and newsrooms has made the immigration debate significantly worse. Diversity's advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, indeed arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. So they demoted assimilation and elevated "differences." Then they took the nation to court. Little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust.

The diversity ideologues ruined a good word and, properly understood, a decent notion. What's needed now is for a younger black, brown or polka-dot writer to recast the idea in a way that restores the worth and utility of assimilation. Somebody had better do it soon; the first chart offered in the Putnam study depicts inexorably rising rates of immigration in many nations. The idea that the U.S. can wave into effect a 10-year "time out" on immigration flows is as likely as King Canute commanding the tides to recede.

Here, too, Robert Putnam has a possible assimilation model. Hold onto your hat. It's Christian evangelical megachurches. "In many large evangelical congregations," he writes, "the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed." This, too, is an inconvenient truth. They do it with low entry barriers to the church and by offering lots of little groups to join inside the larger "shared identity" of the church. A Harvard prof finds good in evangelical megachurches. Send this man a suit of body armor!

My own model for the way forward in a 21st century American society of unavoidable ethnic multitudes is an old one, a phrase found nowhere in the Putnam study or any commentary on it: the middle class. Its assimilating virtues may be boring, but it works, if you work at getting into it.

Of course Hillary Clinton believes this can't happen here because the middle class has been "invisible" to George Bush. As with diversity, progress is always just beyond the horizon.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2008-Jun-16, by Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

Why Brazil Isn't Ashamed to Exploit Its Oil

Petrobras CEO José Sergio Gabrielli was flush with bullish insights when he stopped by the Journal's New York office last week to talk about the Brazilian oil company.

One reason for Mr. Gabrielli's optimism is last year's discovery of the offshore Tupi field, which is said to contain between five billion and eight billion barrels of black gold. Another, equally important reason is that, according to Mr. Gabrielli, neither environmentalists nor Brazilian politicians have raised concerns about exploiting oil in the waters off the Brazilian coast.

That's quite a contrast with attitudes in the U.S., where offshore exploration and development has been all but shut down save in the Gulf of Mexico. One company official explains the difference by saying that Brazilians understand the importance of energy to their future, while Americans do not.

I have another theory. And mine fits the pattern of resource development – or lack thereof – all over the Western Hemisphere. It comes down to this: Where government has the property right, restrictions on development tend to be low. But when the private sector is the owner, environmental concerns blossom.

Exhibit A is Petrobras. Not only did Mr. Gabrielli say there is no appetite for stopping offshore projects in his country. He went further. "Brazil has one of the freest and most investor-oriented regulation in the world. Even freer than the United States of America," he said, referring to the climate for oil exploration.

That may be so, but it would be interesting to know why, given Brazil's prominent embrace of socialism. It could be that the country is changing. After all there is now private-sector competition in the oil industry. Yet it is also worth noting that the Brazilian government has a 58% controlling stake in Petrobras's voting shares and 32% of its total shares. This means that some of Petrobras profits go straight to the government's bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents.

In the U.S., Congress doesn't have nearly such a vested interest in a successful oil industry. What good are corporate profits if they go to shareholders, pensioners and employees? Congress has even been denied the windfall profits tax. For American politicians there is a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the "greens."

There are plenty of other examples. In 1995, the British government sold its final remaining shares of British Petroleum, which had been largely privatized throughout the 1980s. In October 1996, a British member of the European Parliament, Socialist Richard Howitt, began harassing BP for alleged environmental and human-rights violations in Colombia. Had the company suddenly gone from being a model citizen to a murderous, contaminating corporation? Or did the Socialists lose their incentive to support the company and discover new reasons to attack it, since left-wing constituents were ideologically allied with the Colombian rebels who were blowing up BP pipelines?

At least Petrobras is a well-run, publicly listed company that has to answer to shareholders. Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil monopoly, has a history as a notorious polluter yet is seemingly exempt from political pressure to clean up its act.

Mining provides an even better window on this contradiction. Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba all boast aggressive, state-owned mining operations. Yet neither the nongovernmental enviro-movement nor the political class utters a peep to object.

Wherever the private sector is proposing mineral exploration, the story is flipped on its head. In February, I visited a rural town in El Salvador, where Pacific Rim Mining Corp. is trying to reopen the El Dorado gold mine. The company spent a year building the designs for the mine, in a process that included more than 20 public meetings with the local community. It says that the final design exceeds international standards. The government of President Tony Saca acknowledges this by telling the company that there is no technical problem with the mine, only political ones.

Those political problems come from the left-wing FMLN political party, and the NGOs that share the FMLN's antiprivate-sector ideology. They have raised an environmental stink about the mine, though none of it has been substantiated. Even so, the Saca government has responded by sitting on Pacific Rim's permits for four years, sending a signal to investors that El Salvador is not open for business.

The local mayor told me that the community wants the project, which will directly create 600 new jobs and could produce as many as 3,000 indirect jobs. The real problem is that since the government isn't the owner, El Dorado doesn't inspire politicians in San Salvador the way Petrobras inspires Brasilia.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jul-1, by Amity Shlaes:

The Real Deal
Reconsidering our reverence for FDR.

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."

Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era--or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal. Rather, the question is why it has taken us all so long. Roosevelt did famously well by one measure, the political poll. He flunked by two other meters that we today know are critically important: the unemployment rate and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt spoke of a primary goal: "to put people to work." Unemployment stood at 20% in 1937, five years into the New Deal. As for the Dow, it did not come back to its 1929 level until the 1950s. International factors and monetary errors cannot entirely account for these abysmal showings.

When I went back to study those years for a book, I realized two things. The first was that the picture we received growing up was distorted in a number of important regards. The second was that the old argument about the immorality of scrutinizing the New Deal was counterproductive.

The premier line in the standard history is that Herbert Hoover was a right-winger whose laissez-faire politics helped convert the 1929 Crash into the Great Depression. But a review of the new president's actions reveals him to be a control freak, an interventionist in spite of himself. Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which worsened a global downturn, even though he had long lived in London and understood better than almost anyone the interconnectedness of markets. He also bullied companies into maintaining high wages and keeping employees on their payrolls when they could ill afford to do so. Perhaps worst of all, he berated the stock market as a speculative sinner even though he knew better. For example, Hoover opposed shorting as a practice, a policy that frightened markets at an especially vulnerable time.

The second standard understanding is that the Brain Trusters were moderate people who drew from American history when they wrote the New Deal. If their philosophies were left wing, then that aspect ought to be treated parenthetically, the attitude was. But the leftishness of the Brain Trust was not parenthetical. It was central.

---

In the summer of 1927, a group of future New Dealers, mostly junior professors or minor union officials, were received by Stalin for a full six hours when they traveled on a junket to the Soviet Union. Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously. The Brain Trusters were not, for the most part, fascists or communists. They were thoughtful people who wrote in the New Republic. But their ideas were wrong. Their intense romanticization of the concept of the economy of scale ignored the small man. One of the New Dealers from the old Soviet trip, Rex Tugwell, even created his very own version of Animal Farm in Casa Grande, Ariz. As in the Orwell book, the farmers revolted.

The third familiar story line in the received wisdom about the New Deal is that, while it may not have been perfect, it did inspire the American people and tide them over. Here the emphasis is wrong. Roosevelt's radio voice may have inspired--yes. But the New Deal hurt the economy, and that mattered more. At some points Roosevelt seemed to understand the need to counter deflation. But his method for doing so generated a whole new set of uncertainties. Roosevelt personally experimented with the currency--one day, in bed, he raised the gold price by 21 cents. When Henry Morgenthau, who would shortly become Treasury Secretary, asked him why, Roosevelt said that "it's a lucky number, because it's three times seven." Morgenthau wrote later: "If anybody ever knew how we set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened."

The centerpiece of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was perverse. The premises of its codes were ones anyone would reject outright today--the concept that price cutting caused deflation, for example. Everyone, even Roosevelt's own agonized advisers, understood this. The poet Ogden Nash wrote a poem that captured the inanity--its title was "One from One Leaves Two":

Mumblety-pumbledy my red cow
She's cooperating now
At first she didn't understand
That milk production must be
planned
She didn't understand at first
She had to either plan or burst

A think tank produced a report of 900 pages in 1935 concluding the NRA "on the whole retarded recovery" (that think tank was the Brookings Institution). Some of the great heroes of the period were the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers who fought the NRA all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Their case was not only jurisprudential but also based on common sense--management from above was killing recovery. The Schechter case is as important to history, as, say, the Gideon case that Anthony Lewis wrote about in his great book about the right to counsel, "Gideon's Trumpet." Where is the "Gideon's Trumpet" for free marketeers?

The fourth rule we learned is that Roosevelt's call to "bold, persistent experimentation" was, on balance, good. But this conviction ignores the cost of uncertainty, as the economic historian Robert Higgs first pointed out. Today we know that unknown unknowns are inherently destabilizing. Roosevelt, a man of impulses, changed policies routinely. He moved from supporting big business to attacking it to supporting it again, many times in his presidency.

On some days, as Anne O'Hare McCormick, a Maureen Dowd of her time, wrote during FDR's second term, Roosevelt was the personification of "the Dutch householder who carefully totes up his accounts every month and who is really annoyed, now that he is bent on balancing the budget, when Congress can't stop spending." Other days he was a big spender.

Uncertainty caused markets to freeze in fear; so did investment--the old New Yorker cartoons of the plutocrats in the salon were true. Yet Roosevelt counterattacked by compiling lists of the wealthy to prosecute--his administration prosecuted the Alan Greenspan of the day, Andrew Mellon, until Mellon died. Roosevelt's administration pushed a plan for an undistributed profits tax to eat the essence out of companies. Policies like this caused the most unnecessary part of the Depression: the Depression within the Depression of the late 1930s.

---

The final line in the traditional story is that Roosevelt's government offices were somehow better than their private sector counterparts--when it came to utilities, for example, we learned that only the federal government could electrify backward rural areas. This is a false memory, for there was a company that already planned to light up the South, Commonwealth and Southern. David Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority set out to gut it, and succeeded. But the battle over electric power was also, literally, a power struggle between coequals, not a contest between a good policeman and a sinning company.

The most useful economic philosophy for understanding what went on is not Keynesianism. It is the public choice theory of James Buchanan and others, which says that government is a competitor that will annihilate what comes in its path.

So why has it taken so long to revisit this period? The first reason is that the Great Depression was a disaster. From the Crash to the Dust Bowl and the floods, it all felt like a permanent Katrina, and Americans suspended disbelief. But the reality was that the depression did not mean permanent Katrina--indeed, we see now that that downturn was the exception in the century, not the rule.

The next reason we hesitate is World War II. War always trumps economics. New Deal critics were right on the economy, but they were wrong in their estimations of Hitler. To write sympathetically about the Liberty Leaguers is seen, even today, as siding with the appeasers. The incredible rightness of FDR's war policy obscures the flaws in his prior actions.

The Cold War also played a role in delaying examination of the 1930s. Nearly all writers today--whether they write policy or history--make a point to avoid being classed with Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But that fear of being labeled as a red-baiter prevented the necessary discussion of the counterproductive policy of the 1930s.

In the Cold War, there was also the assumption that Europe certainly, or even the U.S., might conceivably go communist. The premise therefore was that safety nets--from Social Security in the U.S. to codetermination in German boardrooms--were necessary to prevent such an event. Bismarck's social democracy and Roosevelt's New Deal were therefore glorified as justified.

In the past half-century, we have learned that much of our capital comes from the private sector, not the public sector, and that most of our growth inheres in the private sector. After the 1980s and 1990s we know that markets can do much of the work that Roosevelt believed only government capital could do.

---

My own sense is that there is a final reason we have all paused at the New Deal--a generational one. To insult the New Deal is to insult the Social Security that we, our parents, or grandparents receive. The Baby Boomers have a reputation as being selfish. But their reverence in regard to Social Security, not to mention Medicare Part D, is overly unselfish, and comes out of misplaced filial piety. Younger Baby Boomers and the generations after them will doubtless pay higher taxes because of our current unwillingness to criticize entitlements. Americans owe them as much as we owe senior citizens.

After all, the argument of markets has its own powerful morality. It is immoral to cause unemployment by pretending that a big government policy is morally necessary. When Andrew Mellon and Calvin Coolidge put through their tax cuts in the 1920s, they made the efficiency argument that supply-siders make today: lower rates could yield, they posited, higher revenues. But they also had a moral argument: high taxes were wrong, confiscatory and illiberal, in the classical sense. You can acknowledge this without being a Roosevelt-hater.

Schlesinger, who so often contributed to these pages, has already issued the invitation. It is more than time that the rest of us took him up on his offer.

Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of the just-published "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins), from which this is adapted, and which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore..

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jun-29, by David Gratzer:

Who's Really 'Sicko'
In Canada, dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week. Humans can wait two to three years.

TORONTO--"I haven't seen 'Sicko,' " says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She's just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario's provincial government about its health-care system next month.

Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he's suing for the right to opt out of Canada's government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.

Ms. Allen figures the lawsuit has a fighting chance: In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "access to wait lists is not access to health care," striking down key Quebec laws that prohibited private medicine and private health insurance.

In the U.S., 83 House Democrats voted for a bill in 1993 calling for single-payer health care. That idea collapsed with HillaryCare and since then has existed on the fringes of the debate--winning praise from academics and pressure groups, but remaining largely out of the political discussion. Mr. Moore's documentary intends to change that, exposing millions to his argument that American health care is sick and socialized medicine is the cure.

It's not simply that Mr. Moore is wrong. His grand tour of public health care systems misses the big story: While he prescribes socialism, market-oriented reforms are percolating in cities from Stockholm to Saskatoon.

Mr. Moore goes to London, Ontario, where he notes that not a single patient has waited in the hospital emergency room more than 45 minutes. "It's a fabulous system," a woman explains. In Britain, he tours a hospital where patients marvel at their free care. A patient's husband explains: "It's not America." Humorously, Mr. Moore finds a cashier dispensing money to patients (for transportation). In France, a doctor explains the success of the health-care system with the old Marxist axiom: "You pay according to your means, and you receive according to your needs."

It's compelling material--I know because, born and raised in Canada, I used to believe in government-run health care. Then I was mugged by reality.

---

Consider, for instance, Mr. Moore's claim that ERs don't overcrowd in Canada. A Canadian government study recently found that only about half of patients are treated in a timely manner, as defined by local medical and hospital associations. "The research merely confirms anecdotal reports of interminable waits," reported a national newspaper. While people in rural areas seem to fare better, Toronto patients receive care in four hours on average; one in 10 patients waits more than a dozen hours.

This problem hit close to home last year: A relative, living in Winnipeg, nearly died of a strangulated bowel while lying on a stretcher for five hours, writhing in pain. To get the needed ultrasound, he was sent by ambulance to another hospital.

In Britain, the Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients wait more than a year for surgery. Around the time Mr. Moore was putting the finishing touches on his documentary, a hospital in Sutton Coldfield announced its new money-saving linen policy: Housekeeping will no longer change the bed sheets between patients, just turn them over. France's system failed so spectacularly in the summer heat of 2003 that 13,000 people died, largely of dehydration. Hospitals stopped answering the phones and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.

With such problems, it's not surprising that people are looking for alternatives. Private clinics--some operating in a "gray zone" of the law--are now opening in Canada at a rate of about one per week.

---

Canadian doctors, once quiet on the issue of private health care, elected Brian Day as president of their national association. Dr. Day is a leading critic of Canadian medicare; he opened a private surgery hospital and then challenged the government to shut it down. "This is a country," Dr. Day said by way of explanation, "in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."

Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as "Americanization." Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. The Labour government aspires to give patients a choice of four providers for surgeries, at least one of them private, and recently considered the contracting out of some primary-care services--perhaps even to American companies.

Other European countries follow this same path. In Sweden, after the latest privatizations, the government will contract out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of total health services, including Stockholm's largest hospital. Beginning before the election of the new conservative chancellor, Germany enhanced insurance competition and turned state enterprises over to the private sector (including the majority of public hospitals). Even in Slovakia, a former Marxist country, privatizations are actively debated.

Under the weight of demographic shifts and strained by the limits of command-and-control economics, government-run health systems have turned out to be less than utopian. The stories are the same: dirty hospitals, poor standards and difficulty accessing modern drugs and tests.

Admittedly, the recent market reforms are gradual and controversial. But facts are facts, the reforms are real, and they represent a major trend in health care. What does Mr. Moore's documentary say about that? Nothing.

Dr. Gratzer, a practicing physician licensed in Canada and the U.S. and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care" (Encounter, 2006).

from the Associated Press, 2008-Oct-17, by Mark Niesse:

Hawaii ending universal child health care

HONOLULU — Hawaii is dropping the only state universal child health care program in the country just seven months after it launched.

Gov. Linda Lingle's administration cited budget shortfalls and other available health care options for eliminating funding for the program. A state official said families were dropping private coverage so their children would be eligible for the subsidized plan.

"People who were already able to afford health care began to stop paying for it so they could get it for free," said Dr. Kenny Fink, the administrator for Med-QUEST at the Department of Human Services. "I don't believe that was the intent of the program."

State officials said Thursday they will stop giving health coverage to the 2,000 children enrolled by Nov. 1, but private partner Hawaii Medical Service Association will pay to extend their coverage through the end of the year without government support.

"We're very disappointed in the state's decision, and it came as a complete surprise to us," said Jennifer Diesman, a spokeswoman for HMSA, the state's largest health care provider. "We believe the program is working, and given Hawaii's economic uncertainty, we don't think now is the time to cut all funding for this kind of program."

Hawaii lawmakers approved the health plan in 2007 as a way to ensure every child can get basic medical help. The Keiki (child) Care program aimed to cover every child from birth to 18 years old who didn't already have health insurance — mostly immigrants and members of lower-income families.

It costs the state about $50,000 per month, or $25.50 per child — an amount that was more than matched by HMSA.

State health officials argued that most of the children enrolled in the universal child care program previously had private health insurance, indicating that it was helping those who didn't need it.

The Republican governor signed Keiki Care into law in 2007, but it and many other government services are facing cuts as the state deals with a projected $900 million general fund shortfall by 2011.

While it's difficult to determine how many children lack health coverage in the islands, estimates range from 3,500 to 16,000 in a state of about 1.3 million people. All were eligible for the program.

"Children are a lot more vulnerable in terms of needing care," said Democratic Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland. "It's not very good to try to be a leader and then renege on that commitment."

The universal health care system was free except for copays of $7 per office visit.

Families with children currently enrolled in the universal system are being encouraged to seek more comprehensive Medicaid coverage, which may be available to children in a family of four earning up to $73,000 annually.

These children also could sign up for the HMSA Children's Plan, which costs about $55 a month.

"Most of them won't be eligible for Medicaid, and that's why they were enrolled in Keiki Care," Diesman said. "It's the gap group that we're trying to ensure has coverage."

from National Review, 2007-Mar-15, by Fred Thompson:

Gandhi's Way Isn't the American Way
Collective suicide is no foreign policy.

Editor's note: Click here to listen to the original radio commentary this transcript is based on.

I feel bad for Nancy Pelosi, AND her neighbors. Anti-war activists from the group Code Pink have been giving her the same treatment the president gets at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. Camping on her San Francisco lawn, they're demanding she cut off funds to the troops in Iraq.

Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”

And that's a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi's way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won't cut it in this country. When American's think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

Gandhi probably wouldn't approve, but I can live with that.

— Fred Thompson is an actor and former United States senator from Tennessee.

from WhiteHouse.gov, 2007-Jun-12:

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 12, 2007

President Bush Attends Dedication of Victims of Communism Memorial

Washington, D.C.

10:35 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming. Please be seated. Dr. Edwards, thanks for your kind words. Congressman Lantos -- no better friend to freedom, by the way; Congressman Rohrabacher, the same. Members of the Czech and Hungarian parliaments; ambassadors; distinguished guests; and more importantly, the survivors of Communist oppression, I'm honored to join you on this historic day. (Applause.)

President George W. Bush addresses his remarks Tuesday, June 12, 2007, at the dedication ceremony for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. President Bush, in recalling the lessons of the Cold War said, “ that freedom is precious and cannot be taken for granted; that evil is real and must be confronted.” White House photo by Joyce Boghosian And here in the company of men and women who resisted evil and helped bring down an empire, I proudly accept the Victims of Communism Memorial on behalf of the American people. (Applause.)

The 20th century will be remembered as the deadliest century in human history. And the record of this brutal era is commemorated in memorials across this city. Yet, until now, our Nation's Capital had no monument to the victims of imperial Communism, an ideology that took the lives of an estimated 100 million innocent men, women and children. So it's fitting that we gather to remember those who perished at Communism's hands, and dedicate this memorial that will enshrine their suffering and sacrifice in the conscience of the world.

Building this memorial took more than a decade of effort, and its presence in our capital is a testament to the passion and determination of two distinguished Americans: Lev Dobriansky, whose daughter Paula is here -- (applause) -- give your dad our best. And Dr. Lee Edwards. (Applause.) They faced setbacks and challenges along the way, yet they never gave up, because in their hearts, they heard the voices of the fallen crying out: "Remember us."

These voices cry out to all, and they're legion. The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism's name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe.

Behind these numbers are human stories of individuals with families and dreams whose lives were cut short by men in pursuit of totalitarian power. Some of Communism's victims are well-known. They include a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, only to be arrested on Stalin's orders and sent to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison, where he disappeared without a trace. They include a Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnaped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vitsula by the secret police.

The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history -- and behind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism's brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin's Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin's purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot's Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the "Red Terror"; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny. We'll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, Communism's unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever.

President George W. Bush addresses his remarks Tuesday, June 12, 2007, at the dedication ceremony for the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. President Bush, speaking on the anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's Berlin Wall speech, said “ It's appropriate that on the anniversary of that speech, that we dedicate a monument that reflects our confidence in freedom's power.” White House photo by Joyce Boghosian We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to those who died, to acknowledge their lives and honor their memory. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described the struggle against Communism as "the struggle of memory against forgetting." Communist regimes did more than take their victims' lives; they sought to steal their humanity and erase their memory. With this memorial, we restore their humanity and we reclaim their memory. With this memorial, we say of Communism's innocent and anonymous victims, these men and women lived and they shall not be forgotten. (Applause.)

We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to future generations to record the crimes of the 20th century and ensure they're never repeated. In this hallowed place we recall the great lessons of the Cold War: that freedom is precious and cannot be taken for granted; that evil is real and must be confronted; and that given the chance, men commanded by harsh and hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes and take the lives of millions.

It's important that we recall these lessons because the evil and hatred that inspired the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century is still at work in the world. We saw its face on September the 11th, 2001. Like the Communists, the terrorists and radicals who attacked our nation are followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims. Like the Communists, our new enemies believe the innocent can be murdered to serve a radical vision. Like the Communists, our new enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming that those of us who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our free way of life. And like the Communists, the followers of violent Islamic radicalism are doomed to fail. (Applause.) By remaining steadfast in freedom's cause, we will ensure that a future American President does not have to stand in a place like this and dedicate a memorial to the millions killed by the radicals and extremists of the 21st century.

We can have confidence in the power of freedom because we've seen freedom overcome tyranny and terror before. Dr. Edwards said President Reagan went to Berlin. He was clear in his statement. He said, "tear down the wall," and two years later the wall fell. And millions across Central and Eastern Europe were liberated from unspeakable oppression. It's appropriate that on the anniversary of that speech, that we dedicate a monument that reflects our confidence in freedom's power.

The men and women who designed this memorial could have chosen an image of repression for this space, a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls. Instead, they chose an image of hope -- a woman holding a lamp of liberty. She reminds us of the victims of Communism, and also of the power that overcame Communism.

Like our Statue of Liberty, she reminds us that the flame for freedom burns in every human heart, and that it is a light that cannot be extinguished by the brutality of terrorists or tyrants. And she reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is contending with a power greater than death. (Applause.) She reminds us that freedom is the gift of our Creator, freedom is the birthright of all humanity, and in the end, freedom will prevail. (Applause.)

I thank each of you who made this memorial possible for your service in freedom's cause. I thank you for your devotion to the memory of those who lost their lives to Communist terror. May the victims of Communism rest in peace. May those who continue to suffer under Communism find their freedom. And may the God who gave us liberty bless this great memorial and all who come to visit her.

God bless. (Applause.)

END 10:47 A.M. EDT

from Investors Business Daily, 2008-Jul-25, by Victor Davis Hanson:

But Sadly, 'Me' Generation Still Has A Say

What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies?

Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed "change" to America in civil rights, the environment, women's liberation and world peace.

Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory.

Everyone can at least agree that the spirit of the Me Generation is not going quietly into the night — especially since that generation ushered in a certain coarseness and self-righteousness that still plagues our politics.

Take grandiose sermonizing about changing the world while offering few practical details how to do it. Al Gore recently prophesied that the U.S. within 10 years could generate all its electrical needs from "renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels" — mainly wind, solar and geothermal power (which currently together account for less than 10% of our aggregate production).

Childish Fits

In truth, that daydream has about as much chance of being realized by 2018 as Al Gore this year swearing off the use of polluting SUVs and gas-guzzling private jets as he whizzes to his next environmental pulpit.

Barack Obama, a child during the '60s, is imbued nonetheless with that decade's "hope and change" messianic sermonizing. Now he wants a mammoth government-funded "civilian national security force," one "that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the Pentagon.

Sounds utopian, but at a time of record aggregate national debt, are we really going to borrow another half-trillion dollars a year to fund a kinder, gentler version of the military?

Gore and Obama may mean well. And we may someday rely mostly on wind and solar electrical power, and even benefit by having more aid workers abroad. But they discredit their proposals with '60s-style exaggeration and feel-good fantasies that cannot be realized as promised.

Another permanent '60s legacy is the assumption that the ends justify crude means. The so-called net-root bloggers often celebrate online with glee the illnesses or deaths of supposedly reactionary political opponents.

The crass anti-war group Moveon.org was not just content to object to Gen. David Petraeus testifying before Congress last autumn. In the fashion of 1960s agitprop, it had to go the next step in demonizing at a time of war our top-ranking Iraq ground commander as a traitor — a "General Betray Us," as the group's ad in the New York Times blared.

Due to a "grass-roots effort" to garner thousands of petition signatures, the city of San Francisco will have on the November ballot a measure to change the name of one of its water "pollution control plants" to the "George W. Bush Sewage Plant." What a national trend that would be! Should red states follow that pettiness and rename their own sewers and dumps after John Kerry or Bill Clinton?

We still suffer from the same 1960s juvenile petulance when the powers that be did not immediately fall in line as protestors demanded. Now the spirit of that age permeates Congress, whose members won't drill oil off our coasts or the continental shelf, or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Yet in infantile fashion, they rant about "big oil's" high gas prices.

So Congress instead threatens to sue OPEC to be fairer and to pump more oil. And we beg the Saudis to drill and pump more in their waters so we don't have to in ours.

Graying Hypocrites

Even in the much-poorer 1960s, it was hard to take seriously the idea of loud middle-class suburban kids as street revolutionaries, given the fact that America was the richest and freest society in history.

It's even harder now when many of them are rich seniors and the country itself is far wealthier.

So when a member of the aging baby boom generation finger-points at us that drilling oil is the moral equivalent of invading Iraq, or that America has become two nations (the haves and have-nots), we can often expect to discover that the self-righteous sermonizer is a hypocrite.

Green Al Gore uses a lot more energy than the average American. Populist John Edwards lives in a huge mansion.

By now, we've grown accustomed to elites railing about America's pathologies from the comfort of their own privilege — along with the usual '60s-style apologies that their own lives don't need to match their rhetoric, and that we should just concentrate on their near-divine messages.

In their defense, they can't help it — it's still a '60s thing.

from the San Francisco Chronicle, 2007-Oct-9, p.A1, by C.W. Nevius:

'Enough is enough,' S.F. says of homeless
Residents of a famously liberal city appear to be changing views

San Francisco - the liberal, left-coast city conservatives love to mock - could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless people. Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.

"Maybe there has been an epiphany," says David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics, a local market research firm. "People have realized they can hate George Bush but still not want people crapping in their doorway."

Consider the case of David Kiely, who has lived in the South of Market area for 18 years. He bought a home when prices were low and now lives there with his wife, Jenny, and their three boys, ages 7, 4 and 1. Kiely insists "we're not some white, yuppie parents saying we can't take this." In fact, he says, they donate to programs for homeless people at Glide Memorial Methodist Church and the food bank at St. Anthony Dining Room. But he's finally saying "enough is enough."

"I don't expect it to be Cow Hollow or Pacific Heights," he says. "But the other day Jenny is bringing the kids back from the park, and some guy is standing on the corner throwing up on himself."

Trent Rhorer, executive director of San Francisco's Human Services Agency, is at ground zero for homelessness concerns. He's heard it from local residents at meetings, he's read the polls, and he noted the huge response to Chronicle columns about the homeless people and intravenous drug users in Golden Gate park. Like others, he thinks there's been a change in the way San Franciscans think the homelessness problem should be approached.

"I don't think this is a conservative or liberal thing," he says. "This is quality of life for everyone. What research has shown and what we have seen from visits to cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Portland and New York is that you need to combine good social outreach with law enforcement."

That means something more than an offer of help, which often is declined anyhow. (One city official estimated that nine out of 10 say they are not interested in a shelter or housing when approached.)

"Maybe," Rhorer says, "you just need a guy with a badge standing over them and saying, you can't stay there any more."

That's tough talk for a city that's been known as a friendly place for those down on their luck. And in previous years it would have been a political non-starter. When Mayor Frank Jordan tried to push homeless people off the street with his "Matrix" program, the crackdown got much of the blame for his failure to win a second term.

But this has the feel of a new day in San Francisco.

"Homelessness, and quality of life issues, are dividing the liberals and the progressives in this city," says David Binder, a statistical analyst and founder of David Binder Research. "The liberals will say we've got to get tough on the homeless and the progressives are more old-line liberal."

How that debate will come out is anyone's guess, but it is hard to disagree with Latterman's blunt assessment, which is, "People are just pissed. For the first time, even the left is saying they've had enough."

In an informal poll by SFGate.com, 90 percent of respondents said Mayor Gavin Newsom's crackdown South of Market was a great idea.

Latterman points to the neighborhood uprising in the Haight when it was proposed that a needle exchange program be moved to the Hamilton Methodist Church. When some 200 residents showed up, mostly to protest the idea, it was shelved.

"One sample doesn't make a trend, but it is telling," says Latterman. "C'mon, they live in the upper Haight. They're liberal by definition."

But they are also, in many cases, homeowners and thus have a sense of ownership and emotional investment. That's another part of what has caused this sea change in thinking. From TIC (tenants in common) units, to condominiums, to luxury townhouses, the city has created the potential for an influx of buyers, despite the downward trend in home sales in much of the country.

Cathy Pickering, assistant project manager for the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, suggests a look to South of Market, which is within Newsom's pilot program to issue citations to vagrants on the sidewalks and streets. What once was an area of old warehouses now is booming.

"As you travel around South of Market," she says, "there is no doubt there has been a huge increase in residents."

Some of them are young couples, able to buy into their first home. And some might be empty nesters who have sold their home in the suburbs, following the national trend and moving to an urban center. But either way, they can understand the objections of a father like Kiely.

"We go out to drive the kids to school," he says, "and there's human poop between the cars."

There must be many who are as fed up as Kiely, because politicians like Newsom are taking a tough stand. In an election year, you can bet he wouldn't go out on an unpopular limb. Now it will be interesting to see how the Board of Supervisors, traditionally progressive and more pro-homeless people, will react.

One proposal that could come from the Newsom administration is some form of a "sit-lie" law. Rhorer says the idea is "that you can't be in the same place on the sidewalk for longer than a certain time." (Even Berkeley has a version of that for Telegraph Avenue.) That would create howls of protests from the advocates for homeless people (and it should be said that such laws have had mixed success), but usual arguments against strong action against vagrants might not be as effective with the new mind-set of city residents.

"This isn't the war in the Iraq," says Latterman. "We've been fed that line for a long time. If you support this, you're a Bush supporter. You're a fascist. Maybe people are fed up with that."

Sound off: Have something to say on this story? Call (415) 777-6268 to comment for an Open Mic podcast on sfgate.com.

How you can help

-- To volunteer to help provide services to the homeless, call Project Homeless Connect: (415) 255-3908.

-- To contact authorities about specific problems related to vagrancy and the behavior of a homeless person, call the city's services hot line: 311.

C.W. Nevius' column appears on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

from the Associated Press, 2008-Jul-17, by Evelyn Nieves:

Hippie town's homeless attack portends trend

BOLINAS, Calif. - Ricky Green wandered into this town some months ago, a stranger just a bit stranger than most. He had shed his middle-class respectability — a job as a graphic artist in the 'burbs — strapped a guitar over his shoulder and landed here on what he told people was "a spiritual journey."

Bolinas seemed like a good fit. The unincorporated town of 1,600 on the Pacific coast is Marin County's most blatant throwback to the Summer of Love, a hippie haven that is bent on stopping tourists from spoiling its laid-back groove.

The 33-year-old Green, prone to age of Aquarius-speak about the moon and the stars, already looked sort of like a local.

As one resident, Bill Boman, put it, "He had this Jimi Hendrix vibe."

But Green never quite meshed with the Bolinas social fabric. The night of June 23 proved how much he remained an outsider, in a liberal enclave stubbornly averse to strangers.

Six young people — including two juveniles — allegedly attacked and stabbed Green with a viciousness that is forcing Bolinas to search its soul for meaning.

The attack also underscores what advocates for homeless people say is a growing problem across the country: attacks on society's most vulnerable members, almost as sport, especially by young people.

"I'm not surprised that an incident like this happened in Bolinas," said Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. "We have found that these kinds of incidences happen everywhere. There was an incident just last month in Cleveland. It's no longer a big city thing."

The typical attack involves a mob of youths that beats a homeless person with blunt objects, sometimes setting the person on fire, Stoops said.

In the first six months of this year, 13 homeless people have been killed across the country, he said, a pace on par with last year's, in which 28 homeless people were killed, up from 20 in 2006. Nonfatal attacks also are rising, Stoops said, up from 142 in 2006 to 160 in 2007.

"Why are these attacks happening?" Stoops said. "The main reason is that you can't go anywhere in society without coming across homeless folks. And there is this antipathy or scorn towards them." Add the boredom young people face in the summer, drugs or alcohol and a group mentality, Stoops said, and the mix becomes dangerous, if not lethal.

Detectives are still investigating the Bolinas attack. But by all accounts, Green confronted a group of young people that had been drinking. He was angry about an altercation another homeless man had the day before with some youths.

The attack happened on the beach. Green was stabbed multiple times and pummeled with a skateboard, flashlight and bottles. While he was down, the mob kicked and jumped on him.

Sheriff's investigators said up to 20 witnesses watched the beating, but no one stopped it.

Green, found semiconscious and bleeding profusely, was airlifted to a hospital in Santa Rosa, 50 miles away. He spent nearly two weeks there recovering from lacerations to the head and body.

Five people have been charged with attempted murder.

In Bolinas, where everyone knows, or knows of, the victim and the suspects, the attack is raising hard questions. Bolinas wears its xenophobia proudly. For decades, a group known as the Bolinas Border Patrol has torn down all signs pointing the way to the enclave from Highway One. But now, some wonder whether Bolinas' inbred hostility to outsiders exploded the night of Green's attack.

Others are pondering whether the attack means that Bolinas, despite its barefoot youth, loose-roaming dogs and ponytailed, tie-dyed 60-year-olds, is more like the rest of society than it wanted to admit.

That thought is especially jarring. Bolinas fancies itself special. The town keeps a "free box" outside the natural foods store for anyone to donate or pick up clothes or household items. A few years ago, it passed a ballot measure officially declaring itself "a socially acknowledged, nature-loving town" that likes blueberries, bears and skunks. The town saloon has the word "peace" outside, written in seashells.

"I knew of Bolinas as a peaceful place," said Boman, a musician who moved to Bolinas several weeks ago. "What has happened to the children of the revolution?"

Almost no one else approached for this story wanted to talk, be quoted or have their name used.

Still in shock, Bolinas is trying to understand what happened and make amends. Anguished town meetings are taking place, with discussions focused on finding solutions to disaffected youth.

But there are some hard feelings for Green here, too.

Derek James, a bartender at Smiley's saloon, approached a reporter to say Green had been causing trouble in town for months. He had been barred from Smiley's for harassing people, James said.

"He was getting into people's business," he said. "I really felt like something was going to happen."

The other day, fresh out of the hospital, Green was spotted back in town. (He proved elusive, always a step ahead of visitors trying to find him. The Associated Press was unable to reach him.)

Many were relieved to see him back on his beat. But James could not believe the news.

"I know a lot of people in this community," he said, "are not really happy to see him back."

from NewsBusters.org, 2007-May-30, by Michael Chapman:

Bob Dylan Tells Rolling Stone: "Where's the Global Warming? It's Freezing Here."

In the new 40th Anniversary Edition of Rolling Stone magazine, Editor Jann Wenner asks rocker-icon Bob Dylan, "Do you worry about global warming?" and Dylan responds: "Where's the global warming? It's freezing here."

The point is that Dylan was half-serious and questioning Wenner's liberal assumptions, as were a number of other 1960s rock icons who gave some startlingly sober answers to the hyper-idealized drivel regurgitated by Wenner and other questioners. (Hat tip to Cincinnati.com.) [...]

Neil Young, who wrote a famous song about Richard Nixon having soul, was asked "Can you ever imagine saying George W. Bush has soul?" and Young replied, "I'm sure he does." Of course, not everything these 1960s rockers and celebrities say is accurate or conservative or even coherent, but it is a little comforting to see that they are not blindly following the liberal playbook in every single instance, which is hard to say for much of today's top media. [...]

from the Cincinatti Enquirer, 2007-May-29, by Peter Bronson:

Someone should tell Rolling Stone that the '60s are history
And a few rock stars do

It smells like patchouli oil, sounds like Jimi Hendrix and looks like bell-bottom jeans, tie-dyed shirts and kids with so much hair they must have used Miracle-Gro like Brylcreem. But nobody can really describe what we call "the 60s."

The latest proof is the 40th anniversary edition of Rolling Stone. To celebrate its official over-the-hill birthday - 1967 to 2007 - Rolling Stone interviewed "the most important and influential musical artists, politicians, actors, writers and directors of our time."

In other words, a Who's Who of the far-out left - Jane Fonda, Jimmy Carter, Norman Mailer, George McGovern, Steven Spielberg, Bill Moyers, Michael Moore, Neil Young and the other usual suspects. It's predictable from a magazine that calls the Bush administration "a band of reckless, power-drunk ideologues" who "steal elections."

Mailer calls Bush a "spiritual terrorist," Paul McCartney says the answer is "peace and love," Fonda says, "We're fighting for ... the life of the Earth." And Rolling Stone waves its Bic lighter in a rock-concert cheer - "More, More!''

It's almost as if the clock stopped at Rolling Stone in 1967. The interviews are a time capsule - with only a few words changed. Nixon becomes Bush. Vietnam becomes Iraq. Pollution becomes global warming.

And through it all, there's the same old stubborn hippie optimism that catastrophe is just around the corner.

In every interview, the questioner eventually asks something like: "Isn't it a drag that the world is coming to an end because nobody listened to us in the '60s - and they still don't?"

But here's a bigger bummer than a dime bag of oregano: Some of the rock stars refused to play along.

"Do you think it's gloomy on the horizon," Editor Jann Wenner asks Bob Dylan.

"In what sense do you mean," Dylan replies.

"Bob, come on," Wenner goads.

"No, you come on. In what sense do you mean that?" Dylan demands.

Wenner tries again: "We seem to be hell-bent on destruction. Do you worry about global warming?"

"Where's the global warming?" Dylan asks. "It's freezing here."

As my friend Mike McCarthy said, "There's some surprising stuff in there." He's right.

Author Tom Wolfe: "Anyone who thinks that religion is bad for society is out of his mind. We are now beginning to see what happens when you don't have it."

Spielberg, on the dark legacy of the '60s: "Just narcissism, a collective and personal narcissism."

Jack Nicholson: "I'm a patriotic fella and this factionalism today isn't to my liking. I'm incapable of hating a president of the United States."

Stewart Brand, LSD tripper and inventor of the Whole Earth Catalog: "Almost everything we tried either failed hideously or didn't pan out. Communes failed, drugs went nowhere, free love led pretty much to AIDS. A lot of people thought Mao Tse Tung was a hero."

Neil Young is asked, "Can you ever imagine saying George W. Bush has soul?"

from the Los Angeles Times, 2007-May-29, by John M. Glionna:

There's not a lot of love in the Haight
Gutter punks roam where, 40 years ago, flower children protested the war in Vietnam.

SAN FRANCISCO — From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.

The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to "tune in, turn on and drop out."

But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.

They're known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. "Please Help Us Get Un-Sober," one reads. Another: "Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money."

Sometimes aggressive, they block sidewalks as they strum guitars or bang on bongos. Gangs of them skateboard down the middle of Haight Street. Some throw used hypodermic needles into a nearby pond they call Hep-C Lake.

Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.

"I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long," he said. "But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior."

Panhandler Jonah Lawrence, 25, insists it is residents who need civilizing. "They say, 'Get a job!' " he said. "And I say, 'You got clothes for me? Or a place I can take a shower so I can look for work?' It's so bogus to tell me to get a job if I have nothing."

In the 40 years since 1967's Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury has remained a beacon for drifters, dreamers and dropouts. Most are drawn by the Haight's reputation as a safe place to hang out, experiment with drugs and search for life's direction.

They come expecting a warm welcome, but their presence has become increasingly divisive in the gentrifying neighborhood, where old-timers now rub shoulders with newcomers who are buying up the old Victorian houses for $2 million and more.

Empathetic residents say homeless kids deserve as much respect as those with roofs over their heads. "People suffer from compassion fatigue," said Pam Brennan, owner of the Haight-Ashbury Flower Power Walking Tour. "If they're fatigued, they should go take a nap so others can work to help these kids."

But a lot of ex-hippies-turned-homeowners are weary of the youthful intruders. They want the Haight to adopt a more mature demeanor, just as they have.

Outreach services, they say, only draw more young people to the area. Many suggest sending the homeless to centers in other areas, including the inner-city Tenderloin district.

"I'm sick of stepping over gangs of kids, only to be told 'Die, yuppie!' A lot of us were flower children, but we grew up," said Robert Shadoian, 58, a retired family therapist. "There are responsibilities in this world you have to meet. You can't be drugged out 24/7 and expect the world to take care of you."

It was easier not to ask for help here in the 1960s, when communal crash pads rented for $40 a month. Back then, a lot of the young new arrivals were middle-class. That's changed too. Today, young people who spend their days in the Haight spend their nights in Golden Gate Park.

Many are blue-collar misfits fleeing broken homes, sexual abuse, parents with drug and alcohol problems. Some are addicted to crack, heroin and other hard drugs. Proud to live on society's fringes, they rely on a tribal closeness for survival, resisting contact with outsiders.

Each morning, groups of sleepy-eyed young people trudge stiffly from their encampments, looking for food and coffee. Some spend the day at an area of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, where their nomadic forebears got stoned.

Others hit Haight Street, a stretch of head shops and hip clothing stores whose names are a reminder of the area's heyday: the People's Cafe, Pipe Dreams, Coffee for the People.

"I know people hate me. I can see it in their eyes. But they're never going to get rid of junkies in the Haight," said Steffon Haaby, 22, a former heroin addict who said he fled a troubled single-parent home in Spokane, Wash. "If I lived my life trying to please everybody, I would have stayed home with my mother."

'I was idealistic'

Sarah Thibault is a suburban outcast. She was raised in Colorado, where her father went to prison and her mother went on welfare when Sarah was 12.

The straight-A student began ditching school and doing drugs. One day, a boyfriend said, "Let's go to Haight-Ashbury."

"It sounded good. I was idealistic," she said. "I believed the '60s attitude, when people were intentionally kind to each other."

What she found when she arrived in 1999 was decidedly different. The only people who were kind to her were other homeless people.

For years, she bought and sold drugs, using so much heroin that her health began to fail.

She felt invisible. "When you're a kid on the street, people don't see you, they don't acknowledge you," she said. "The only connection you have is with other homeless kids. No matter how tired, hungry or lonely you are, people just pass you by."

Now 25, Thibault works at the Homeless Youth Alliance, a storefront outreach center that offers a no-questions-asked refuge from the streets.

She greets drop-ins, some suffering from hacking coughs, others reeking from days without bathing. The street kids raid the center's refrigerator like college students home on spring break. One recent day, a teen devoured a bowl of cereal with a Swiss Army knife spoon as others dozed on couches.

With her tattoos and pierced nose, Thibault looks like a regular — which she once was.

When she got clean, she wanted to give something back to the place she says helped her get off the street. Her approach to clients: play the role of a friend, not counselor. "We don't tell people to get a job," she said. "But we offer them tools to do it."

The center's recent survey of 60 homeless youths found that six of 10 had no relationship with their families. Nearly two-thirds suffered mental health issues that included depression and "social anxiety." Seven of 10 said they would take advantage of housing if available.

In 2000, Sarah Thibault's mother, Sherril, showed up looking for the girl known on the street as Sphinx.

She eventually found her daughter, who admitted she was addicted to heroin; before long, Sarah Thibault entered drug rehab.

She recently graduated from San Francisco State with a degree in anthropology and holistic health. Both her parents were there to celebrate the return of the child they almost lost.

"Most homeless kids in Haight-Ashbury have parents who care about them but who don't know what to do to get them back," Sherril Thibault said. "I understand why Haight residents are upset. But these kids are somebody's children. They need a place to survive the trials of being young."

'I don't owe you'

Barbara Libasci's home sits near a rock 'n' roll landmark: the house at 710 Ashbury St. where Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead once lived.

She has a front-row seat at a daily alternative music event she'd rather not attend. She often finds homeless kids sleeping on the lawn of the former Dead house. They climb the picket fence to peer inside the front windows and pick flowers from the garden.

"They camp right in the driveway," said the retired nurse, who lives in the former Haight-Ashbury headquarters of the Hells Angels. "I have to tell them to move so the owners don't back out over them. They're degrading the property."

Even some of those who try to help are getting fed up.

John Grima, a program director at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, founded in the 1960s, says his agency provides "nonjudgmental" services for homeless youths. "Still, there's this assumption of a free ride," he said.

Grima said a teen asked him for change on Haight Street. Grima offered him slices of pepperoni pizza. The young man refused, saying he was vegetarian.

"I said, 'OK, then don't eat it,' then I got mad," Grima said. "I said, 'Wait a minute, I don't owe you anything. I'm happy to help you, but I don't owe you a thing.' "

Recently, the stance against the homeless has hardened. Residents last year resurrected the Haight Ashbury Improvement Assn. to push the city to crack down on loitering. They have started a "court watch" program to monitor cases and push judges to sentence offenders to community service and order them into treatment.

Police have also cracked down. The department has sent teens home on its own dime and maintains two full-time outreach officers to coax youths into seeking help. But now officers ticket for "quality of life" offenses, including illegal camping and drinking in public.

At a recent public meeting, Homeless Youth Alliance director Mary Howe's plan for a center with beds and showers was greeted with anger.

"We're setting ourselves up as the last stop on the help train," fumed Carolyn McKenna, 54, a substitute teacher who moved to the area in 2003.

"Like, if we don't help these kids, they're going to be forever subjected to a life of misery and agony," she added.

McKenna said she was tired of being criticized for the "crime" of owning a home. "Haight-Ashbury is not synonymous with anarchy," she said. "It's not fair to homeowners with their entire net worth tied up here. I'd be disingenuous if I said I wasn't worried about property values."

Still, the Haight isn't just any neighborhood, and some say it needs to hold on to its legacy. One ex-hippie who returns frequently for its bohemian vibe said he makes a point to hand out cash to panhandlers.

"This used to be a place where kids could come to reinvent themselves, 'Like a rolling stone, like a complete unknown, no direction home,' " said actor Peter Coyote, a Marin County resident who once handed out free food to hippies through a group known as the Diggers.

"Now the Haight is a grittier, less forgiving reality. But these are still our kids. You don't help them by deporting them. You do it right in your own neighborhood. If any place can do this, it's Haight-Ashbury."

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Jul-4, by Ted Nugent:

The Summer of Drugs
Forty years ago, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love. Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs.

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.

As a diehard musician, I terribly miss these very talented people who squandered God's gifts in favor of poison and the joke of hipness. I often wonder what musical peaks they could have climbed had they not gagged to death on their own vomit. Their choice of dope over quality of life, musical talent and meaningful relationships with loved ones can only be categorized as despicably selfish.

I literally had to step over stoned, drooling fans, band mates, concert promoters and staff to pursue my musical American Dream throughout the 1960s and 1970s. I flushed more dope and cocaine down backstage toilets than I care to remember. In utter frustration I was even forced to punch my way through violent dopers on occasion. So much for peace and love. The DEA should make me an honorary officer.

I was forced to fire band members and business associates due to mindless, dangerous, illegal drug use. Clean and sober for 59 years, I am still rocking my brains out and approaching my 6,000th concert. Clean and sober is the real party.

---

Young people make mistakes. I've made my share, but none that involved placing my life or the lives of others at risk because of dope. I saw first-hand too many destroyed lives and wrecked families to ever want to drool and vomit on myself and call that a good time. I put my heart and soul into creating the best music I possibly could and I went hunting instead. My dream continues with ferocity, thank you.

The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.

A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.

So now, 40 years later, there are actually people who want to celebrate the anniversary of the Summer of Drugs. Hippies are once again descending on ultra-liberal San Francisco--a city that once wanted to give shopping carts to the homeless--to celebrate and try to remember their dopey days of youth when so many of their musical heroes and friends long ago assumed room temperature by "partying" themselves to death. Nice.

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what is truly was.

---

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

Death due to drugs and the social carnage heaped upon America by hippies is nothing to celebrate. That is a fool's game, but it is quite apparent some burned-out hippies never learn.

Mr. Nugent is a rock star releasing his 35th album, "Love Grenade," this summer.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Apr-3, by Tawfik Hamid:

The Trouble With Islam
Sadly, mainstream Muslim teaching accepts and promotes violence.

Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right.

But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace.

Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals--who unceasingly claim to support human rights--have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror.

---

Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria--which happened in the last few decades--or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.

Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies.

Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today.

Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand--but so far haven't--that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates."

---

All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.

Dr. Hamid, a onetime member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2007-Feb-23, p.A10, by Nick Cohen:

An Upside-Down World

LONDON -- The other day Ken Livingstone, the mayor of my hometown of London, organized a conference on Islam and the West. It was a carefully rigged affair in which handpicked speaker after handpicked speaker stood up and announced that the democracies were to blame for the tidal wave of murder sweeping the world. To provide a spurious air of balance, the organizers invited a few people who dissented from the line of the Muslim Brotherhood and its British allies. Agnès Poirier, a French feminist, was one of them, but she pulled out because although there were no special facilities for Christians, Hindus and Jews, Mr. Livingstone had provided separate prayer rooms for Muslim men and Muslim women.

She wanted to know: Does Ken Livingstone's idea of multiculturalism acknowledge and condone segregation? It clearly does, but what made this vignette of ethnic politics in a European city worth noting is that commentators for the BBC and nearly every newspaper here describe Mr. Livingstone as one of the most left-wing politicians in British public life. Hardly any of them notices the weirdness of an apparent socialist pandering to a reactionary strain of Islam, pushing its arguments and accepting its dictates.

Mr. Livingstone's not alone. After suicide bombers massacred Londoners on July 7, 2005, leftish rather than conservative papers held British foreign policy responsible for the slaughters on the transport network. ("Blair's Bombs," ran the headline in my own leftish New Statesman.) In any university, you are more likely to hear campaigns for the rights of Muslim women derided by postmodernists than by crusty conservative dons. Our Stop the War coalition is an alliance of the white far left and the Islamist far right, and George Galloway, its leader, and the first allegedly "far left" MP to be elected to the British parliament in 50 years, is an admirer of Saddam Hussein and Hezbollah.

I could go on with specific examples, but the crucial point is the pervasive European attitude to the Iraq catastrophe. As al Qaeda, the Baathists and Shiite Islamists slaughter thousands, there is virtually no sense that their successes are our defeats. Iraqi socialists and trade unionists I know are close to despair. They turn for support to Europe, the home of liberalism, feminism and socialism, and find that rich democrats, liberals and feminists won't help them or even acknowledge their existence.

There were plenty of leftish people in the 20th century who excused communism, but they could at least say that communism was a left-wing idea. Now overwhelmingly and everywhere you find people who scream their heads off about the smallest sexist or racist remark, yet refuse to confront ultra-reactionary movements that explicitly reject every principle they profess to hold.

Why is the world upside down? In part, it is a measure of President Bush's failure that anti-Americanism has swept out of the intelligentsia and become mainstream in Britain. A country that was once the most pro-American in Western Europe now derides Tony Blair for sticking with the Atlantic alliance. But if Iraq has pummeled Mr. Blair's reputation, it has also shone a very harsh light on the British and European left. No one noticed it when the Berlin Wall came down, but the death of socialism gave people who called themselves "left wing" a paradoxical advantage. They no longer had a practical program they needed to defend and could go along with ultra-right movements that would once have been taboo. In moments of crisis, otherwise sane liberals will turn to these movements and be reassured by the professed leftism of the protest organizers that they are not making a nonsense of their beliefs.

If, that is, they have strong beliefs to abandon. In Europe and North America extreme versions of multiculturalism and identity politics have left a poisonous legacy. Far too many liberal-minded people think that is somehow culturally imperialist to criticize reactionary movements and ideas -- as long as they aren't European or American reactionary movements. This delusion is everywhere. Until very recently our Labour government was allowing its dealings with Britain's Muslim minority to be controlled by an unelected group, the Muslim Council of Britain, which stood for everything social democrats were against. In their desperate attempts to ingratiate themselves, ministers gave its leader a knighthood -- even though he had said that "death was too good" for Salman Rushdie, who happens to be a British citizen as well as a great novelist.

Beyond the contortions and betrayals of liberal and leftish thinking lies a simple emotion that I don't believe Americans take account of: an insidious fear that has produced the ideal conditions for appeasement. Radical Islam does worry Europeans but we are trying to prevent an explosion by going along with Islamist victimhood. We blame ourselves for the Islamist rage, in the hope that our admission of guilt will pacify our enemies. We are scared, but not scared enough to take a stand.

I hope conservative American readers come to Britain. But if you do, expect to find an upside-down world. People who call themselves liberals or leftists will argue with you, and when they have finished you may experience the strange realization that they have become far more reactionary than you have ever been.

Mr. Cohen, a columnist for the Observer and the New Statesman, is the author of "What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way" (Fourth Estate, 2007).

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2007-Feb-22, by William Anthony Hay:

Misplaced Faith
Why no one questioned the implications of bringing large Muslim populations into a secularizing West.

Although many observers predicted that religion would enter a pattern of terminal decline in the 20th century, events took a different course. Religion not only revived but found expression in unexpected forms. The theologian Paul Tillich noted the way in which people invested worldly things, especially politics, with transcendent meaning. In a 1937 speech, Winston Churchill described communism and Nazism as "non-God religions" that aimed to reignite old religious wars. In "Sacred Causes," Michael Burleigh tracks the fate of religious and secular forces in the 20th century, registering their collisions and their effects on the culture we live in today.

By undermining European stability, Mr. Burleigh notes, World War I created a space for radical alternatives to the bourgeois norms that had gone before. He shows how the Protestant middle classes in Germany, for instance, distanced themselves from their churches, viewing traditional religious observance as the remnant of a discredited past. Science and culture, along with militant nationalism, filled the role that churches had once played, and the pattern replicated itself beyond Germany. A traditional outlook gave way to cultural pessimism, intensifying throughout the 1920s.

In such a cultural atmosphere, Adolf Hitler emerged as a prophet of neo-paganism. Mr. Burleigh highlights the sheer weirdness of dropouts in Germany who seized upon social disruption to make their fortunes, playing to an apocalyptic mood and crying for a purifying upheaval. Once Hitler took power, the Nazi Party became a new civil religion.

---

Marxist revolution marked a more direct challenge to the bourgeois order and traditional belief. Communism explicitly sought to destroy religion (an enemy to the new society) and enshrine itself as an alternative faith. Soviet leaders seized the property of the churches, including consecrated objects, and corrupted the church hierarchy by requiring political obeisance. With its Promethean faith in man's capacity for progress, the Communist Party made itself into a secular church, setting up its own "sacred" hierarchy and instituting its own rituals. Its opponents, though, were beyond redemption.

The 20th century's political religions, Mr. Burleigh argues, challenged the very existence of their God-centered rivals, and vicious anticlericalism often drove churches toward accommodation with brutal regimes. But he reveals a more complex reality. Churches that held fast to Christian teaching resisted corruption more effectively than their appeasing counterparts. Government reports on public opinion in the 1930s showed that many German Christians resisted Nazism. Opposing state control, some Protestant theologians insisted that "the Church must remain the Church." International ties gave Roman Catholics a stronger position from which to resist.

Mr. Burleigh defends the Catholic response to Nazism, noting that recent attacks on Pope Pius XII and the church's wartime role typically recycle anticlerical propaganda from the early Cold War and owe more to current anger over church teaching than to the historical record. The Vatican, he shows, regarded both Nazism and communism as alien ideologies opposed to Christian morality. It never saw Nazism as a barrier to godless Bolshevism.

Encyclicals denounced Nazi policies, and more than a few prelates and pastors openly resisted them. Catholics denounced the Holocaust and aided its victims; those like Slovakia's Father Tiso, who aided the Nazis, did so against Vatican instructions. Tiso faced the humiliation of being required to read a pastoral letter from the pulpit condemning his own actions. Mr. Burleigh contrasts the Orthodox hierarchy's accommodating response to Romanian anti-Semitism with Catholic actions elsewhere to show what collaboration really meant. Germany's Protestant hierarchy, it should be said, is much more open to criticism, often showing a willingness to truckle to its Nazi overlords and an eagerness to promote their racial views. Even so, Dietrich Bonhoffer and Martin Niemoller provide examples of resistance noted at the time. Such opposition, Mr. Burleigh argues, gave churches moral credibility in the aftermath of defeat.

After the war, religion played a key role in stabilizing Western Europe. Christian Democratic parties gave a structure to political activity that went beyond confessional boundaries. They also helped to anchor Italy and Germany in the Atlantic alliance. Communist repression strained the churches in Eastern Europe, but eventually they survived as the only sphere for independent civil society. Rather than become fading anachronisms, the churches challenged communist regimes, especially when the material underpinnings of the Soviet order eroded. "We want God" became the opposition rallying cry in the 1980s. Dialectical materialism offered a weak substitute for transcendent belief.

By the 1960s, Mr. Burleigh argues, consumerism in Western Europe and the U.S. had become a substitute faith. The effect was the kind of debased popular culture that we are all familiar with. But Mr. Burleigh is more concerned about another postwar development. He describes sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland as a portent for Europe's future. In the 1960s and 1970s, rival gangs in Northern Ireland seized the mantle of community leadership with appeals to atavistic, religiously based quarrels. Violence and rhetoric borrowed from the civil-rights movement led the state to withdraw from the province, ceding authority to leaders who radicalized their communities. Religion became a marker for tribal identity in a struggle for power.

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What might seem to be a mere local echo of conflicts from Oliver Cromwell's day, Mr. Burleigh says, has a current parallel in Muslim ghettos across Europe. Alienated youths find meaning in Islam, and governments leave such communities to their own devices, allowing radical subcultures to grow. The 9/11 attacks, of course, brought political Islam into focus for many who had not given the matter any thought before. Mr. Burleigh asks why no one questioned the implications of introducing large Muslim populations into a secularizing West.

Absolute tolerance, Mr. Burleigh believes, makes Western societies particularly vulnerable to those who play by other rules, particularly when self-doubt hobbles Western leaders. Mr. Burleigh ends his fascinating chronicle by suggesting the new "sacred causes" are no less potent than the old ones, a truly troubling thought.

Mr. Hay is a historian at Mississippi State University and the author of "The Whig Revival: 1808-1830." You can buy "Sacred Causes" from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, from Best of the Web, 2007-Feb-16, by James Taranto:

Al Qaeda as Inkblot

"Venezuela's defense minister said Thursday that the nation would reinforce security measures after a branch of al Qaeda called for attacks on suppliers of oil to the United States," Reuters reports from Caracas. But one Venezuelan official isn't worried:

Luis Cabrera, a military adviser to the president, earlier had questioned the authenticity of the threat in comments published by local media.

He said it was illogical that "al Qaeda, which is against North American imperialism, would go against a state that is fighting, though in a different way, against that hegemony."

Cabrera may be right that al Qaeda views Hugo Chavez's Venezuela as a de facto ally and thus fairly low on its hit list. But what's interesting about his comment is how he ascribes his own ideology to the terror group. As we noted in September, Chavez himself, speaking before the U.N. General Assembly, slyly claimed the 9/11 attacks as an example of "rising up against American imperialism."

In truth, al Qaeda's leaders do not see themselves fundamentally as fighting against "American imperialism," much less for Third World socialism. Theirs is a movement based in religion; their grievance against America is infidelity, not imperialism.

There is a certain ideological parochialism among many on the hard left (and some on the right, if the reviews of Dinesh D'Souza's new book are accurate). For them, al Qaeda is essentially an inkblot. Recall Michael Moore's immediate reaction to 9/11: He was flummoxed that al Qaeda would attack a part of the country that had not supported George W. Bush--as if the only motive for the attack that he could understand was American domestic politics. Or remember George McGovern's analysis of a few years ago:

President Bush has said repeatedly that the terrorists hate us because of our freedom. I don't believe that. The world's people have always admired our freedom. What they don't like is the arrogance and indifference to world opinion inherent in so much of our international policy. Plenty of my fellow citizens don't like that either. I'm not alone . . .

Note how McGovern equates "terrorists" with "the world's people," then moves on quickly to "plenty of my fellow citizens" and finally to himself. It seems he is simply unable to imagine someone seeing the world through anything but a McGovernite prism.

After 9/11, we kept hearing: Why do they hate America? It's an important question, but the inquiry is pointless if the only answer it yields is: For the same reasons I do. Obviously!

from TCSDaily.com, 2006-Nov-14, by Jagadeesh Gokhale:

Are We Really Entitled to This?

The new Congress faces an urgent need to reposition the big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, on a sounder financial footing. With each passing year, these programs' massive fiscal imbalances grow larger, making it harder to solve the problem, but all the more necessary to do so.

As reported by its trustees, Social Security's total imbalance has increased from $10.4 trillion in 2004 to $13.4 trillion in 2006 - a jump of $3.0 trillion in just two years. And Medicare's imbalance has grown from $61.6 trillion in 2004 to $70.5 trillion today - an increase of $8.9 trillion in the same period.

That's $11.9 trillion in new debt in the past two years alone. Put another way, it's 85 percent of the $14 trillion of GDP that the United States will likely produce this year.

Some of this increase reflects changes in underlying economic assumptions, but a significant portion of it arises from accruing interest costs on the existing fiscal imbalance. At the current interest rate of 2.9 percent, for example, the combined imbalance of Social Security and Medicare - $83.9 trillion - will accrue added costs of $2.4 trillion this year. Next year's interest cost accrual will be even larger, as additional interest accrues on this year's interest costs as well. This situation is clearly not sustainable, because US economic growth cannot keep pace with such massive accruals in future government obligations.

There is considerable debate about whether and how to "recognize" on the government's books future Social Security and Medicare payment obligations. Members of the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board recently released preliminary views indicating a split between its members on the issue. FASAB was established by the Treasury, Office of Management and Budget, and The Comptroller General. Three of its members currently oppose recognizing any more than benefits currently "due and payable" as government "liabilities."

However, six other FASAB members favor earlier recognition of entitlement liabilities—as soon as workers meet every benefit-eligibility requirement except that of attaining retirement age. That means the present value of future benefits as earned to date by all benefit-eligible workers - even those far from retirement - would be recognized and reported as explicit government liabilities, not unlike outstanding government bonds.

Why is this debate important? There are two main concerns about broadening the definition of entitlement liabilities beyond the current "due and payable" standard. First, it might make future entitlement obligations more difficult to change. But those obligations are extremely difficult to alter even now - as we witnessed last year when the American Association of Retired Persons led voters opposed to entitlement changes to thwart the Social Security reform debate that President Bush was attempting to initiate. Broadening entitlement liability recognition would only render this reality more transparent.

Second, earlier recognition of entitlement liabilities would make the government's finances appear a lot shakier, and may make it more difficult for it to raise funds in capital markets. Whether and to what extent this would occur is difficult to foretell.

However, consider the flip side: Hiding the reality that the government must raise trillions more in future taxes to meet its benefit obligations - or forcibly cut those obligations when the costs of tax increases become unacceptably large - creates a seemingly benign economic outlook today. It provides a false sense of security to consumers and policymakers. As a result, consumers continue to save less, making them more vulnerable to future adjustments in taxes, entitlement benefits, or other public expenditures. And the lack of visibility and market discipline encourages relatively shortsighted politicians to postpone difficult reform decisions.

Lawmakers and Administration officials recently highlighted the Congressional Budget Office report of a $248 billion "deficit" for the just-completed 2006 fiscal year, and everyone applauded how much smaller the deficit had turned out to be than projections suggested two years ago. But this year's actual cost accrual in Social Security and Medicare alone amounts to $2.4 trillion - ten times as much - a reality that remains hidden under current budget accounting standards.

Historically - and irrespective of which political party is in power - government officials have opposed earlier recognition of entitlement obligations as explicit government liabilities. They usually justify their position by observing that such obligations would only relate to current entitlement laws, which are subject to future changes. Of course, future changes are inevitable given the programs' insolvency. But, ironically, that perspective appears to be the biggest hurdle preventing pro-active changes in entitlement policies.

Lawmakers should resume entitlement reform discussions soon. The policy debate would take on greater urgency, however, if the size of entitlement obligations were explicitly recognized on the government's books. And clear recognition that the government faces payment commitments much larger than its outstanding Treasury securities would impose greater discipline on lawmakers who might otherwise be inclined to spend public funds like there's no tomorrow.

Jagadeesh Gokhale is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former senior economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

from Slate.com, 2007-Mar-9, by Steven E. Landsburg:

The Theory of the Leisure Class
An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?

As you've probably heard, there's been an explosion of inequality in the United States over the past four decades. The gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers is bigger than ever before, and it continues to grow.

How can we close the gap? Well, I suppose we could round up a bunch of assembly-line workers and force them to mow the lawns of corporate vice presidents. Because the gap I'm talking about is the gap in leisure time, and it's the least educated who are pulling ahead.

In 1965, leisure was pretty much equally distributed across classes. People of the same age, sex, and family size tended to have about the same amount of leisure, regardless of their socioeconomic status. But since then, two things have happened. First, leisure (like income) has increased dramatically across the board. Second, though everyone's a winner, the biggest winners are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

To quantify those changes, you've got to decide exactly what leisure means. You can start by deciding what it's not. Surely working at your desk or on the assembly line is not leisure. Neither is cleaning or ironing. But what about standing around the water cooler, riding the train to work, gardening, pet care, or tinkering with your car? What about playing board games with your children?

Those are judgment calls, but it turns out not to matter very much what calls you make. When professors Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst combined the results of several large surveys (including studies where randomly chosen subjects kept detailed time diaries), they found that by any definition, the trends are clear.

In 1965, the average man spent 42 hours a week working at the office or the factory; throw in coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and commuting time, and you're up to 51 hours. Today, instead of spending 42 and 51 hours, he spends 36 and 40. What's he doing with all that extra time? He spends a little on shopping, a little on housework, and a lot on watching TV, reading the newspaper, going to parties, relaxing, going to bars, playing golf, surfing the Web, visiting friends, and having sex. Overall, depending on exactly what you count, he's got an extra six to eight hours a week of leisure—call it the equivalent of nine extra weeks of vacation per year.

For women, time spent on the job is up from 17 hours a week to 24. With breaks and commuting thrown in, it's up from 20 hours to 26. But time spent on household chores is down from 35 hours a week to 22, for a net leisure gain of four to six hours. Call it five extra vacation weeks.

A small part of those gains is because of demographic change. The average American is older now and has fewer children, so it's not surprising that he or she works less. But even when you compare modern Americans to their 1965 counterparts—people with the same family size, age, and education—the gains are still on the order of 4 to 8 hours a week, or something like seven extra weeks of leisure per year.

But not for everyone. About 10 percent of us are stuck in 1965, leisurewise. At the opposite extreme, 10 percent of us have gained a staggering 14 hours a week or more. (Once again, your gains are measured in comparison to a person who, in 1965, had the same characteristics that you have today.) By and large, the biggest leisure gains have gone precisely to those with the most stagnant incomes—that is, the least skilled and the least educated. And conversely, the smallest leisure gains have been concentrated among the most educated, the same group that's had the biggest gains in income.

Aguiar and Hurst can't explain fully that rising inequality, just as nobody can explain fully the rising inequality in income. But there are, I think, two important morals here.

First, man does not live by bread alone. Our happiness depends partly on our incomes, but also on the time we spend with our friends, our hobbies, and our favorite TV shows. So, it's a good exercise in perspective to remember that by and large, the big winners in the income derby have been the small winners in the leisure derby, and vice versa.

Second, a certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jun-8:

Taxes Everlasting
Why the superrich don't mind the death tax.

If you've followed the death tax debate, you know that few issues raise liberal blood pressure more. Liberal journalists in particular are around the bend: How in the world can the public support repealing a tax that most Americans will never pay? Good question, so let us try to answer.

Americans favor repealing the death tax not because they think it will help them directly. They're more principled than that. Two-thirds of the public wants to repeal it because they think taxing a lifetime of thrift due to the accident of death is unfair, and even immoral. They also understand that the really rich won't pay the tax anyway because they hire lawyers to avoid it.

For proof that they're right, they need only watch the current debate. The superrich or their kin--such as Bill Gates Sr. and Warren Buffett--are some of the loudest voices opposing repeal. Yet they are able to shelter their own vast wealth by creating foundations or via other crafty estate planning. Edward McCaffery, an estate tax expert at USC Law School, argues that "if breaking up large concentrations of wealth is the intention of the death tax, then it is a miserable failure."

Do the Kennedys or Rockefellers look any poorer from the existence of a tax first created in 1917? The real people who pay the levy are the thrifty middle class and entrepreneurs who've built up a modest nest egg or business and are hit by a 46% tax rate when they die. Americans want family businesses, ranches, farms and other assets to be passed from one generation to the next. Yet the U.S. has one of the highest death tax rates in the world.

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By far the largest supporter of preserving the death tax is the life insurance lobby, which could lose billions of dollars from policies written to avoid the tax. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that the insurance industry is the main funder of an anti-repeal outfit known as the Coalition for America's Priorities. A Coalition ad features a sound-alike of heiress Paris Hilton praising the Senate as "like awesome" for cutting her family's taxes. But this is the opposite of the truth. The American Family Business Institute has found that the bulk of the Hilton estate has long been sheltered from the IRS in tax- free trusts.

Frank Keating, president of the American Council of Life Insurers, has criticized repeal by saying: "I am institutionally and intestinally against huge blocs of inherited wealth. I don't think we need the Viscount of Enron or the Duke of Microsoft." But while he was Oklahoma Governor in the 1990s, Mr. Keating took a different line: "I believe death taxes are un-American. They are rooted in the failed collectivist schemes of the past and have no place in a society that values entrepreneurship, work, saving, and families." We can appreciate how such a marked change of views would give Mr. Keating intestinal issues.

Which brings us back to the political paradox that, even with Republicans at a low ebb, voters still support death tax repeal. A majority in both houses of Congress also supports it, so Senate Democrats can stop repeal only with the procedural dodge of a filibuster. Even at that, several Democrats are clamoring for a compromise that would take the issue off the table in November. They recall what happened in 2004 to Tom Daschle in South Dakota.

But Republicans should accept a compromise only if it lowers the death tax rate enough (to 15%) to reduce the incentive for avoidance and eliminate its punitive nature. Voters have been saying clearly and for years that they don't want a tax whose only justification is government greed and envy.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Nov-11:

The Wages of Politics
The minimum wage is viewed as an economic free lunch. It isn't.

A hike in the national minimum wage seems all but certain to become one of the first fruits of the Democrats' victories this week. Nancy Pelosi, the presumptive Speaker of the House, has pledged to raise the minimum by over $2, to $7.25 from $5.15. And President Bush has already signaled he'd go along. At the state level, six states not only approved minimum wage hikes in referendums this week but indexed the minimum to inflation going forward. We hope Mr. Bush fights off any attempt at federal indexation and insists on a provision to protect small business.

Raising the minimum wage has been a hardy perennial of the left for decades now. What is striking is the degree to which is has come to be seen as an economic free lunch. Even some reputedly unbiased economists have started to tout the view that raising the minimum wage has no discernible effect on job creation.

But if this were true, they'd be calling for a $10, $20 or even $50-an-hour minimum wage. They're not, and neither is Nancy Pelosi. That's because the law of demand is one of the most dependable precepts of economics. It says that when the price of something goes up, demand for it goes down. An employee's wages are the price the employer pays for his services, so raising their wages means forcing employers to pay more for workers. The price goes up and there is downward pressure on demand for workers. Other things being equal, jobs are lost.

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For a long time, this was so obvious that no serious person doubted it. But a couple of studies in the 1990s purported to find no evidence of job loss associated with minimum-wage hikes, and it's been off to the races ever since. Classical economics teaches that for a given job, there is a market-clearing price--the price at which both someone is willing to do it and someone else is willing to pay them to do it. If you raise the legal minimum above that price, you may get more people willing to perform the job, but you'll probably also get less people (employers) willing to pay the new, higher price to get the job done.

To picture how this works, think about the grocery bagger in the supermarket, a classic low-wage service job. Supermarkets hire grocery baggers for the minimum wage, or close to it, because it's a perk that makes their customers' experience a bit nicer and helps move the lines along, possibly requiring fewer cashiers, who cost more to hire than grocery baggers.

Now, if you pass a law saying everyone, including grocery baggers, has to be paid $10 an hour, what happens? The supermarket probably hires fewer baggers, or has them work fewer hours. Perhaps they decide they only need baggers between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. If you put the minimum wage up to $20 an hour, shoppers bag their own groceries. This is so clear that it's taken some time for the defenders of an ever-rising minimum wage to come up with an adequate theory to obscure it.

Most jobs do not involve bagging groceries. But most jobs don't pay the minimum wage. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the number of minimum-wage earners at 2% of the work force. The majority of these are under 25 years old and single. Minimum-wage jobs also tend to have higher turnover.

The theory propounded by the advocates of a higher minimum wage is this: The market for minimum-wage jobs is neither efficient nor fair. Workers don't have adequate information about the alternatives available to them, and employers don't know enough about what the true market-clearing price is. So employers impose an artificially low wage rate on the disadvantaged, who as a result don't work as hard and tend to quit more often than they would if they were paid "fairly." Raising the minimum wage increases productivity and decreases turnover (because workers are more satisfied), which lowers the real cost of the job as well as the frictional costs of constantly seeking and training new workers (costs the employer was unwittingly paying because he didn't know the "correct" price to pay his workers). Everyone is better off; no one suffers.

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The problems that afflict this idyll are no different from every attempt to replace market-determined prices with planned ones. Even if it is true that some workers are underpaid, and it probably is (we've never met another journalist who thought ink-stained wretches, as a class, were overpaid), there's still the problem of determining what the right wage is. Why would anyone suppose that Nancy Pelosi knows that better than the supermarket manager?

As for the employer who supposedly harms himself and his business by driving off underpaid workers, who is to say he doesn't know what he is doing? Perhaps years of experience have taught him that grocery baggers leave after six months no matter what you pay them (within reason). In any case, we doubt that Ms. Pelosi loses a lot of sleep over the capitalists' misunderstanding of their own labor pool.

It is implicit in the logic behind raising the minimum wage that if we squeeze employers just a little, they won't even notice. Another argument, this one made explicitly, is that jobs are destroyed, but the wage gains more than make up for the reduced number of jobs. But this is only true if it's not your job that is destroyed. If you are a young black male, you are slightly more likely than the general population to be paid minimum wage, but you are almost 10 times as likely not to have a job at all. And if you're unemployed, raising the minimum wage not only doesn't help you find a job; it probably hurts. Welcome to Speaker Pelosi's idea of progress.

from OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jun-21, by James Taranto, from Best of the Web:

Terrorist Eden

Horrific news out of Iraq, where two U.S. soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, were either killed or captured and later killed in an enemy attack Friday. Their bodies were found Monday, CNN reports [here], "mutilated and booby-trapped":

The bodies also had been desecrated and a visual identification was impossible--part of the reason DNA testing was being conducted to verify their identities, the sources said. . . .

Not only were the bodies booby-trapped, but homemade bombs also lined the road leading to the victims, an apparent effort to complicate recovery efforts and target recovery teams, the sources said.

To most of us, this is a reminder of the depravity of our enemies. But blogress Jeralyn Merritt sees it as a reminder of America's sins:

Violence begets violence. Inhumanity and cruelty bring more of the same. The whole world is watching and we don't have the right to claim the moral high ground so long as those responsible for the abuses at Guantanamo and detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan go unpunished, the policies stand uncorrected and the Pentagon continues to prevent the media from learning the facts first-hand.

The always excitable Andrew Sullivan similarly laments "the cycle of depravity and defeat."

This rhetoric about "cycles" appears to reflect a theory of moral equivalence, but in fact it is something else. After all, if the two sides were morally equivalent, one could apply this reasoning in reverse--excusing, for example, the alleged massacre at Haditha on the ground that it was "provoked" by a bombing that killed a U.S. serviceman--and hey, violence begets violence.

But America's critics never make this argument, and its defenders seldom do. That is because it is understood that America knows better. If it is true that U.S. Marines murdered civilians in cold blood at Haditha, the other side's brutality does not excuse it. Only the enemy's evil acts are thought to be explained away by ours.

Implicit in the "cycle" theory, then, is the premise that the enemy is innocent--not in the sense of having done nothing wrong, but in the sense of not knowing any better. The enemy lacks the knowledge of good and evil--or, to put it in theological terms, he is free of original sin.

America ought to hold itself to a high moral standard, of course, but blaming the other side's depraved acts on our own (real and imagined) moral imperfections is a dangerous form of vanity.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jun-27, by Brian M. Carney:

Gulags on Ellis Island
A dissonant note of moral equivalence at an exhibit on communist horrors.

ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y.--Tucked out of the way on the top floor of the main building here is a curious little traveling exhibit about the Soviet Gulag. On the day that I visited, no signs in the lobby of the Ellis Island Museum announced the presence of the exhibit; one happened upon it through determination or by chance, stepping with little warning from display cases devoted to the hopes of immigrants seeking freedom or opportunity in America into the hopeless deprivation and cruelty of Siberian death camps.

The Gulag exhibition is on display at the museum through July 4, after which it will travel around the country over the next two years--to Boston; Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; and Washington. The show's title, "GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom," offers some hint as to why the exhibit is being housed here during its New York stop; Ellis Island is, in its own way, about the struggle for freedom. And it sits, of course, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

In this setting, the exhibit's collection of artifacts from Gulag camps--supplemented by a brief history, Soviet propaganda newsreels and short biographies of notable dissidents who were exiled to the Gulag at one time or another--takes on an affecting, mesmerizing quality. The space it occupies could be tramped through in the blink of an eye. But one is invited to linger, not least by the secluded feeling up in the attic, away from the bustling main reception hall, and the sense of discovery that comes from having found the exhibit at all. Moreover, the small artifacts with which the story of the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps is told are strikingly effective. One display explains that spoons, cups and bowls were in such short supply that the crude and makeshift examples here on display --made from castoff tin cans and bits of scrap metal--were highly prized.

Another explains that the Belomorkanal--a slave-labor-intensive project that was hailed as a great early success of Stalinism--was not only built by terrorized prisoners but proved useless in practice. It is only after this that one is shown the silent newsreels of the allegedly happy socialist workers building the canal, intended to connect the White Sea with the Baltic, while Stalin looks on approvingly. Experienced in this way, the cheerful-seeming newsreel shot takes on a captivating, horrifying double meaning. From the explanatory panels elsewhere in the exhibit, a visitor now knows, watching the grainy footage, that prisoners who grew too weak to move their quota of dirt in this and other projects were routinely killed or left to die; the socialist system had no resources to waste on those who could not contribute their share.

There are also full-scale mockups of a Gulag prison cell and prisoners' firsthand accounts of their degrading treatment at the hands of both guards and fellow prisoners--common criminals were sent to the Gulag along with political dissidents, and the former were often employed by the prison guards as oppressors and tormentors of the latter. As for what constitutes a political crime, we learn of a man sent into exile for scrawling an ironic remark on an allegedly secret ballot (which had, in any case, only one candidate listed). Others, we are told, might receive three years of forced labor for being thrice late to work; indolence was a crime against the people.

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But then, abruptly, the spell is broken, and in a dispiriting if not alarming way. "Brutal systems have played a prominent role in many countries, including the United States," one of the exhibit's last panels tells visitors. By itself, that one clause--"including the United States"--would be bad enough. But the panel continues. "Although slavery ended after the American Civil War, its consequences persist. The repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe and apartheid in South Africa reverberate even today. Similarly, Russians face the legacy of the gulag. How can citizens in these countries face up to the horrors of the past?"

Just as it is the small details of the Gulag exhibit that lead one to consider the depth of the deprivation its captives endured, it is the word "similarly" that so effectively undermines what has just been shown. After all, if the Gulag is "similar" to anything in American life or history, does it teach us anything about the Soviet Union--or about anything at all? "If you cannot distinguish between levels of evil, you are a cause of evil." Such was the astute reaction of a man whose father spent a decade in the Gulag, when confronted with this moral equivalence in the paragraph above.

It is certainly true that learning about evils perpetrated in other times in other countries can too easily lead to a comfortable sense of moral superiority. That can, in its own way, undo what might otherwise be a teaching moment. All the same, however, things are not all the same. If the Gulag is interesting only as a means of turning a mirror on the injustices of our own penal system, it is arguably not interesting at all. The Gulag was, and is, a reductio ad absurdum of sorts of the Soviet system itself. It was where "counterrevolutionary" elements were sent to learn the virtues of work and of collectivism, but the lesson was predominantly that of man's inhumanity to man. All prisoners were slowly starved to death, and those too weak to work were starved faster than the strongest. Thus the weak grew weaker and the strong stronger. The overwhelming impression at the heart of the Gulag exhibit is just this--that cruel and arbitrary power lay at the heart of a system that purported to redress inequalities but instead etched them in stone.

The Soviet Union tried throughout most of its existence to forcibly prevent its citizens from seeking freedom in the West. The rest of Ellis Island tells a very different story about a quite different country and system. It's the story of a country that, for centuries, people have risked their lives to reach. No moral equivalence there.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jul-8, by Kimberley A. Strassel:

Get Your Priorities Right
A rationalist crusader does the math on global warming.

NEW YORK--Bjorn Lomborg is a political scientist by training, but the charismatic, golden-haired Dane is offering me a history lesson. Two hundred years ago, he explains, sitting forward in his chair in this newspaper's Manhattan offices, the left was an "incredibly rational movement." It believed in "encyclopedias," in hard facts, and in the idea that mastery of these basics would help "make a better society." Since then, the world's do-gooders have succumbed to "romanticism; they've become more dreamy." This is a problem in his view, and so this "self-avowed slight lefty" is determined to nudge the whole world back toward "rationalism."

Well, if not the whole world, at least the people who matter. In Mr. Lomborg's universe that means the lawmakers and bureaucrats who are charged with solving the world's most pressing problems--HIV/AIDS, malaria, malnutrition, dirty water, trade barriers. This once-obscure Dane has in recent years risen to the status of international celebrity as the chief advocate of getting leaders to realize the world has limited resources to fix its problems, and that it therefore needs to prioritize.

Prioritization, cost-effectiveness, efficiency--these are the ultimate in rational thinking. (It strikes me they are the ultimate in "free markets," though Mr. Lomborg studiously avoids that term.) They are also nearly unheard-of concepts among the governments, international bodies and aid groups that oversee good works.

Mr. Lomborg's approach has been to organize events around the globe in which leaders are forced to think in new ways. His task is certainly timely, with groups like the U.N. engaged in debate over "reform," and philanthropists such as Warren Buffett throwing billions at charitable foundations. But, I ask, can the world really become more rational? "It's no use just talking about all the great things you'd like to accomplish--we've got to get there," says Mr. Lomborg.

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Bjorn Lomborg busted--and that is the only word for it--onto the world scene in 2001 with the publication of his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist." A one-time Greenpeace enthusiast, he'd originally planned to disprove those who said the environment was getting better. He failed. And to his credit, his book said so, supplying a damning critique of today's environmental pessimism. Carefully researched, it offered endless statistics--from official sources such as the U.N.--showing that from biodiversity to global warming, there simply were no apocalypses in the offing. "Our history shows that we solve more problems than we create," he tells me. For his efforts, Mr. Lomborg was labeled a heretic by environmental groups--whose fundraising depends on scaring the jeepers out of the public--and became more hated by these alarmists than even (if possible) President Bush.

Yet the experience left Mr. Lomborg with a taste for challenging conventional wisdom. In 2004, he invited eight of the world's top economists--including four Nobel Laureates--to Copenhagen, where they were asked to evaluate the world's problems, think of the costs and efficiencies attached to solving each, and then produce a prioritized list of those most deserving of money. The well-publicized results (and let it be said here that Mr. Lomborg is no slouch when it comes to promoting himself and his work) were stunning. While the economists were from varying political stripes, they largely agreed. The numbers were just so compelling: $1 spent preventing HIV/AIDS would result in about $40 of social benefits, so the economists put it at the top of the list (followed by malnutrition, free trade and malaria). In contrast, $1 spent to abate global warming would result in only about two cents to 25 cents worth of good; so that project dropped to the bottom.

"Most people, average people, when faced with these clear choices, would pick the $40-of-good project over others--that's rational," says Mr. Lomborg. "The problem is that most people are simply presented with a menu of projects, with no prices and no quantities. What the Copenhagen Consensus was trying to do was put the slices and prices on a menu. And then require people to make choices."

Easier said than done. As Mr. Lomborg explains, "It's fine to ask economists to prioritize, but economists don't run the world." (This sounds unfortunate to me, although Mr. Lomborg, the "slight lefty," quickly adds "Thank God.") "We now need to get the policy makers on board, the ones who are dealing with the world's problems." And therein lies the rub. Political figures don't like to make choices; they don't like to reward some groups and not others; they don't like to admit that they can't do it all. They are political. Not rational.

So all the more credit to Mr. Lomborg, who several weeks ago got his first big shot at reprogramming world leaders. His organization, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, held a new version of the exercise in Georgetown. In attendance were eight U.N. ambassadors, including John Bolton. (China and India signed on, though no Europeans.) They were presented with global projects, the merits of each of which were passionately argued by experts in those fields. Then they were asked: If you had an extra $50 billion, how would you prioritize your spending?

Mr. Lomborg grins and says that before the event he briefed the ambassadors: "Several of them looked down the list and said 'Wait, I want to put a No. 1 by each of these projects, they are all so important.' And I had to say, 'Yeah, uh, that's exactly the point of this exercise--to make you not do that.'" So rank they did. And perhaps no surprise, their final list looked very similar to that of the wise economists. At the top were better health care, cleaner water, more schools and improved nutrition. At the bottom was . . . global warming.

Wondering how all this might go over with Al Gore, I ask Mr. Lomborg if he'd seen the former vice president's new film that warns of a climate-change disaster. He's planning to, but notes he wasn't impressed by the trailers: "It appears to be so overblown that it isn't helpful to the discussion." Not that Mr. Lomborg doesn't think global warming is a problem--he does. But he lays out the facts. "The proposed way of fixing this--to drastically reduce carbon emissions now and to solve a 100-year problem in a 10-year time frame, is just a bad idea. You do fairly little good at a fairly high price. It makes more sense to solve the 100-year problem in a 50-year time frame, and solve the 10-year problems, like HIV-AIDS, in a five-year time frame. That makes sense, and is the smart way to spend money."

Slipping into his environmentalist's shoes, he also says people need to get some perspective. "The U.N. tells us global warming will result in a sea-level change of one to two feet. It is not going to be the 30 feet Al Gore is scaring us with. Is this one to two feet going to be a problem? Sure," he says. "But remember that this past century sea levels rose between one-third and a full foot. And if you ask old people today what the most important things were that happened in the 20th century, do you think they are going to say: 'Two world wars, the internal combustion engine, the IT revolution . . . and sea levels rose'? It's not to say it isn't a problem. But we fix these problems."

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Perhaps Mr. Lomborg's greatest coup at the recent Copenhagen Consensus event was getting the attention of John Bolton, a foe of U.N. inefficiency and bureaucratic wheel-turning. "I called Bolton's secretary and we finally got them to agree and she said 'Okay, you can have him for one hour.' And I said 'No, we need him for two days.' And she laughed her heart out and said 'That's never going to happen.'" But happen it did, and Mr. Bolton was an enthusiastic supporter, appearing with Mr. Lomborg to announce the results of the exercise and lamenting that too often at the U.N. "everything is a priority." There is already talk of a bigger U.N. event in the fall.

Still, it strikes me that simply getting the top folks to prioritize (which itself would be a minor miracle) is only a start. How does Mr. Lomborg intend to deal with a compartmentalized bureaucracy, where every unit claims it is sacred and each one is petrified of losing funding? Here, Mr. Lomborg himself turns a little less rational and a little more political. It's no accident that the consensus organizers tell its participants to consider what they'd do with an "extra" $50 billion. "Most of these guys, the day-to-day guys at the U.N., went into their business to 'do good.' And we need to appeal to that bigger sense of virtue. The best way to do that is talk about 'extra' money, so that they aren't worried about losing their own job."

Mr. Lomborg hopes that prioritization up top will inspire "competition" down below. "Most people work in their own circles--malaria guys talk to malaria guys, malnutrition guys to malnutrition guys. But if they understand that there are other projects out there, and that they also have price tags, and that the ones with the best performance are the ones that will get the extra money--you start to have an Olympics for best projects. And that means smarter ideas for how to solve problems." In fact, Mr. Lomborg wishes there were more Al Gores. "It's good we have someone educating about global warming. But we need Al Gores for HIV/AIDS, Al Gores for malnutrition, Al Gores for free trade, Al Gores for clean drinking water. We need all these Al Gores passionately roaming the earth with power-point presentations, making the case for their project. Because at that point, the real Al Gore would be slightly sidelined, since he's arguing for the most expensive cure that would do the least good."

Mr. Lomborg is smart enough to realize that what really bothers political leaders with this approach is that "it would be launching a ship and it's unknown where it will land. That makes people uncomfortable." A Copenhagen Consensus exercise for the Inter-American Development Bank in Latin America or for the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. (both of which Mr. Lomborg is working to organize) could result in findings that suggest the leaders of these organizations have been throwing good money after bad for years.

"Right now, politicians know that in public they have to say they support all things, and suggest there is an infinite amount of money to give to an infinite amount of good causes. Semiprivately, they know that if they have 10 good causes, the easiest thing is to give one-tenth of the funds to each--so there are no complaints. But privately they know there isn't enough money for everything and that they probably should have given most of it to the one or two groups that would do the most good."

At the very least, the Copenhagen Consensus might make it harder for public figures to defend bad decisions. "If you have a rational list that tells you that you do a lot more good preventing HIV/AIDS, then those in favor of such projects have slightly better arguments. Those arguing for climate change have slightly worse arguments." And while this may not change the world, it could be a start. "The Consensus isn't about getting it perfectly right," says Mr. Lomborg. "It's about getting it slightly less wrong."

Ms. Strassel is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-May-26, by Heather Wilhelm:

Strange Bedfellows
Evangelicals learn to love big government.

When Al Gore's film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," arrived in theaters on Wednesday, it had the usual endorsements from Hollywood stars, left-leaning politicians and radical professors. But it also had a blurb from a more surprising figure: Richard Cizik, the vice president of government affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals.

Mr. Cizik has been hobnobbing with an unlikely crowd lately. One day he is in a Newsweek photo spread, clutching a Bible in front of the nation's Capitol. The next he is posing barefoot in Vanity Fair, looking suspiciously as if he is walking on water. The following week he is chatting up Berkeley professors and joining political powwows with Bono.

With Mr. Cizik's help, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)--representing 52 member denominations and about 30 million evangelicals--has become one of the most talked-about lobbying groups in the nation. But what are evangelicals lobbying for these days?

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Take the Evangelical Climate Initiative, endorsed by Mr. Cizik, which has "put global warming on the evangelical agenda," according to the NAE's Washington Insight newsletter. The initiative pushes the government to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. It has been supported by Christian leaders from across the spectrum, including Rick Warren, the author of "The Purpose Driven Life"; Peter Borgdorff, the executive director of the conservative Christian Reformed Church; and Jim Wallis, the editor of the liberal Sojourners magazine.

While alliances like these may raise the eyebrows of a few purists, many evangelical leaders are too busy plotting policy to be bothered--and the environment is just the beginning. "We have a realist strategy," Mr. Cizik told me. "You go to the gays to pass the AIDS bill. You go to the ACLU to pass the prison-rights bill. You work with your erstwhile opponents to achieve the common good."

You also, it turns out, expand your notion of what the "common good" is all about. Just ask Ronald Sider. In its April 2000 issue, Christianity Today named Mr. Sider's "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" (1977) one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Recently rereleased and touted at pulpits across the country--the Presbyterian Church USA encourages its 11,000 congregations to use it--the book rails against the "ghastly injustice" of the free market.

Such clichés are music to the ears of NAE members. The group recently recruited Mr. Sider to co-chair the committee drafting its latest public-policy statement: "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility." It's an ambitious document, proposing more government regulation of health care, an expansion of welfare benefits, more protections for the environment and various efforts to correct "unfair socioeconomic systems." It also rests on one central assumption: the government can solve all of our problems.

This sweeping agenda stands in stark contrast to earlier evangelical views. During the early part of the 20th century, evangelicals shied away from politics altogether, viewing it as a dirty business. It was only after the social upheaval of the late '60s that they finally emerged on the Beltway radar screen. Then, evangelicals tended to embrace small-government reforms like tax cuts and the Contract With America.

But the past few years have brought a new liberal breed of evangelical. "Why are these people punting to the federal government?" asks Jay Richards, an evangelical and a research fellow at the Michigan-based Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. "You can't be compassionate with other people's money. Even worse, they're not thinking about the consequences of these policies. They're too busy feeling warm and fuzzy and absorbing liberal ideas."

And now, these ideas are trickling out of the Beltway. In bulletins from four different Chicago-area churches, parishioners are being asked to write their senators, not a personal check. Groups representing more than 40 denominations have signed on to the public declaration of the so-called ONE campaign, whose mission is to dedicate 1% of the U.S. budget to foreign aid each year. ONE boasts the support of George Clooney, Naomi Watts and, of course, Bono. It's all very hip, and very vague. "ONE isn't asking for your money," the Web site declares. "We're asking for your voice." Well, actually, ONE is asking for your money, but the checks go to the IRS rather than directly to charity.

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Are evangelicals concerned that they're putting too much faith in government? "You know," Mr. Cizik told me, "I don't hear that very often. I don't think that's a huge concern among most people. I think they're enthusiastic about the progress we're making."

In the past, evangelicals managed to progress without Uncle Sam. And today, there are still thousands of Christian charities around the world that use only private funds. That they are generally more effective than government-run programs seems now to be an inconvenient truth.

Ms. Wilhelm, a Phillips Foundation fellow, is the director of communications for Americans for Limited Government.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-29:

Pains at the Pump
Don't liberals like sky-high fuel prices?

"If $75 a barrel oil and a $3 average for a gallon of gasoline isn't a wake-up call, then what is?"--Senator Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.), April 23, 2006

Yes, that's a fine question Senator Schumer asks. But a wake-up call for what, exactly? A wake-up call to produce more domestic oil? Heaven forbid.

In fact, Mr. Schumer and most of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate--the very crowd shouting the loudest about "obscene" gas prices--have voted uniformly for nearly 20 years against allowing most domestic oil production. They have vetoed opening even a tiny portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas production. If there is as much oil as the U.S. Geological Survey estimates, this would increase America's proven domestic oil reserves by about 50%.

They have also voted against producing oil from the Outer Continental Shelf, where there are more supplies by some estimates than in Saudi Arabia. Environmental objections seem baseless given that even the high winds and waves of Hurricane Katrina didn't cause oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1970s the environmentalists and their followers in Congress even protested building the Alaska pipeline, which today supplies nearly one million barrels of oil a day. If they've discovered some new law of economics in which a fall in output with rising demand can cause a reduction in price, we'd love to hear it.

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The dirty little secret about oil politics is that today's high gas price is precisely the policy result that Mr. Schumer and other liberals have long desired. High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases. "Why isn't the left dancing in the streets over $3 a gallon gas?" asks Sam Kazman, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who's followed the gasoline wars for years.

Scan the Web sites of the major environmental groups and you will find long tracts on the evils of fossil fuels and how wonderful it would be if only selfish Americans were more like the enlightened and eco-friendly Europeans. You will find plenty of articles with titles such as: "More Taxes Please: Why the Price of Gas Is too Low." Just last weekend Tia Nelson, the daughter of the founder of Earth Day, declared that even at $3 a gallon she wants gas prices to go higher.

Tax on Mobility Average price of a gallon of gas, including tax, on April 10 Price Tax Belgium $6.10 $3.77 Britain $6.13 $4.03 France $5.80 $3.65 Germany $5.96 $3.82 Italy $5.91 $3.57 Netherlands $6.73 $4.12 U.S.* $2.98 $0.38 * Average for 50 states Source: Energy Information Administration

At least Ms. Nelson is honest about wanting European-level gas taxes. We doubt that many American voters would be as enthusiastic. If you think $3 a gallon is pinching your pocketbook, fill up in Paris or Amsterdam, where motorists have the high privilege of paying nearly $6 a gallon thanks to these nations' "progressive" energy policies. (See nearby chart.)

However, you can be sure you won't hear that from Democrats or Northeastern Republicans on Capitol Hill--at least not in public. Far from it. They're suddenly all for cutting gasoline prices, just as long as that doesn't require producing a single additional barrel of oil. We haven't seen this much insincerity since the last Major League Baseball meeting on steroid abuse.

So how do the sages on Capitol Hill propose to reduce gas prices? They want to slap a profits tax on Big Oil because of alleged price gouging. Here we have another head-scratcher that seems to defy even junior-high-school economics. Usually when you tax something, like tobacco, you get less of it. But somehow a tax on oil will magically lead to more oil.

As a Harvard study has shown, when the U.S. imposed a windfall profits tax in 1980, prices rose to an inflation-adjusted range even higher than today, and domestic production fell. As for claims of "gouging," the price of gasoline at the pump in the U.S. has risen 25% less than the rise in the global price of crude oil since 2003, according to Wall Street economist Michael Darda.

We've also heard proposals to force the oil companies to cut the pay of their CEOs to $500,000. That's about what Kobe Bryant makes for a handful of basketball games, but even if the salaries were chopped to this level--and all of the savings passed on to consumers--the gas price would fall by at most one-tenth of a penny. In any case, CEO pay is an issue to be resolved by shareholders, not Congress.

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Which brings us to the Bush Administration, which is bludgeoned daily by the likes of Mr. Schumer, whose real concern is exploiting an issue that might elect a Democratic Senate in November. Meanwhile, the White House refuses to attack the left's anti-consumer energy policies and has even capitulated on requiring a rise in auto fuel-efficiency standards. Mr. Bush could instead be talking about the national and economic security need for a pro-domestic-production energy policy--starting with drilling in Alaska. It's worth reminding the American public that in 1995 the Republican Congress passed an ANWR production bill, which Bill Clinton vetoed because he said it could be five to 10 years before the oil would be produced. We would have that oil today if Mr. Clinton had signed that bill.

Instead we have rising gas prices and record dependence on foreign oil. Is that enough to spur Congress to act on ANWR and deep-sea production? If not at $75 a barrel and $3 a gallon, Mr. Schumer, then when?

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Apr-8:

GM, France and Albany
What the declines of all three have in common.

At first glance, they seem to have little in common. But the riots in France over labor reform, the slow-motion suicide of General Motors, and the continuing decline of the New York economy all share one defining trait: entrenched and unchangeable union power.

These columns have always favored the right to collectively bargain, and any private company that allows a union to organize its workers deserves what it gets. But that doesn't mean we should fail to appreciate the consequences when unions become entrenched inside any organization. On the evidence throughout business and politics today, unions do not provide individual job or income security. On the contrary, they undermine security by contributing to broader business and economic decline.

At the national level, the French example is clear enough. While the French private sector is less unionized than America's, it must cope with mandated work rules that make it all but impossible to fire someone; so naturally companies are also reluctant to hire. The jobless rate is double America's, while youth unemployment is 23%. More significant is that the political clout of public-sector unions has blocked all but minor changes in these rules. Public-sector workers account for more than a quarter of the entire French work force (6.4 million of out 24.6 million), and their salaries and pensions made up 45% of the entire state budget as recently as 2003.

The current French protests are in response to a modest change that would allow employers to fire people under age 26 more easily. So entrenched has the politics of union entitlement become in France that even at the onset of their careers these young protesters are demanding security over opportunity. In the global economy, this means they will end up with less of both.

France remains a wealthy country, and its economic decline can be masked for a time as it lives off accumulated capital. But already the promises that its unions have extracted from the government seem unlikely to be kept. A growth rate of between 1% and 2% a year won't be enough to finance the pensions and health care of an aging nation. And facing up to those facts will require an increasingly painful political reckoning.

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Here in the U.S., the same burden is slowly crippling New York, once a bulwark of American industry. Power in the state capital of Albany is shared by Republicans and Democrats. But both parties bow before the public-sector unions, especially the teachers, and the health-care workers led by perhaps the most powerful man in the state, Dennis Rivera.

Thanks to his political clout, New York's Medicaid costs are higher than those of Texas and Florida combined; a health-care insurance premium for a young family of four is roughly six times what it is across the border in Connecticut; and high-deductible health-savings accounts that can help the self-employed afford insurance can't even be offered in the state. New York is also a rare state that actually taxes private health insurance, to the tune of about $2.4 billion a year.

Another union-driven business cost is workers' compensation, and in New York the average cost per claim is second highest in the nation (after Louisiana) and 72% higher than the national average. Governor George Pataki has proposed a reform that would lower costs while actually raising the average payout for the truly disabled, but he's run up against a French-like union roadblock in the legislature.

Thanks to immigration, as well as America's continuing advantage in financial services, New York City has so far been able to avoid another fiscal collapse of the kind it had in the 1970s. But upstate is a different story, with jobs and young people fleeing to better business climes. New York manufacturing employment fell by 41% between 1990 and 2005, or double the national rate.

Even Eliot Spitzer recently referred to upstate New York as "Appalachia." Alas, the Attorney General shows no sign of understanding that the heart of the problem lies in Albany. One reason he hasn't pursued the state's rampant Medicaid fraud with any vigor is because it would get him crosswise with Mr. Rivera.

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As for GM, its management mistakes are legion and its weak product line well-known. But the root of its problem is that it long ago became a corporate version of the welfare state, with the same entrenched union interests. Yes, as a private company it has had to answer to shareholders. But the size of its market dominance going back to its heyday 40 years ago allowed its managers to avoid confronting its uncompetitive wages, benefits and work rules even as they saw Toyota and Honda gaining in the rearview mirror.

In retrospect, GM management should have provoked a union showdown. Yet only a very brave CEO would have been willing to risk a potentially catastrophic strike on his watch for the sake of making the company more competitive after he retired. In any case, would the United Auto Workers really have budged? In 1998, young executive and future CEO Rick Wagoner endured a 54-day UAW wildcat strike at two plants in Flint, Michigan, after GM had tried to change some production rules. The strike shut down most GM production in North America and cost the company some $2 billion. In the end GM caved and the UAW escaped, having made virtually no concessions.

Even now at auto-parts maker Delphi--which is already in Chapter 11--the UAW is declaring it will take a strike that could destroy both Delphi and GM rather than agree to Delphi's proposed job cuts and work changes. As in France and New York, these union leaders would rather sink the company than make concessions that would reduce their own power.

This pattern has repeated itself again and again--in the steel and textile industries attacked by foreign competition, or the unionized grocery chains routed by Wal-Mart. The union answer has rarely been to work with a company to allow more job flexibility to become more competitive. The answer has typically been to seek a ruinous strike or lobby for political intervention that might stave off disaster for at best a few more years.

We recount all this because, even amid GM's decline and France's economic turmoil, most of America's liberal elites refuse to draw the right lesson. They cling to the belief that if only the Democrats can retake Congress, or the union movement can once again organize more of the American labor force, the old economy of union-backed job security and egalité will return. Or, worse, they propose seceding from global competition via protectionism. It is all a delusion. Down that road lies France--a nice place to vacation, but you wouldn't want to work there.

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This is the central problem the liberal wing of the Democratic Party faces as it plots what to do if it does regain power this year, or in 2008. Democrats will eventually win an election or two because of Republican ineptitude or an economic slowdown. But to govern for the long haul they need better ideas than trade barriers, a tax hike to increase the size of government, or the defense of the entitlement status quo.

They need to champion reforms to help individual workers better secure their own futures in a competitive global economy, rather than relying on the false hope of restoring the age of Walter Reuther. They need to promote portable pensions, cheaper health insurance and education choice. So far all we see is Jacques Chirac in American drag.

from the New Criterion, 2006-Jan, via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Jan-4, by Mark Steyn:

It's the Demography, Stupid
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society--government health care, government day care (which Canada's thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain's just introduced). We've prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity--"Go forth and multiply," because if you don't you won't be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.

Americans sometimes don't understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don't think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health and Human Services.

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The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

Speaking of which, if we are at war--and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don't accept that proposition--than what exactly is the war about?

We know it's not really a "war on terror." Nor is it, at heart, a war against Islam, or even "radical Islam." The Muslim faith, whatever its merits for the believers, is a problematic business for the rest of us. There are many trouble spots around the world, but as a general rule, it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs. Jews in "Palestine," Muslims vs. Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs. Christians in Africa, Muslims vs. Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs. Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs. backpacking tourists in Bali. Like the environmentalists, these guys think globally but act locally.

Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it's not what this thing's about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It's not the HIV that kills you, it's the pneumonia you get when your body's too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose--as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.

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That's what the war's about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder"--as can be seen throughout much of "the Western world" right now. The progressive agenda--lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism--is collectively the real suicide bomb. Take multiculturalism. The great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures--the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It's fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis. Most adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched native dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent Western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the prince of Wales did, the prime minister of the United Kingdom did, the prime minister of Canada did . . . The premier of Ontario didn't, and so 20 Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque. I don't know why he didn't. Maybe there was a big backlog, it was mosque drive time, prime ministers in gridlock up and down the freeway trying to get to the Sword of the Infidel-Slayer Mosque on Elm Street. But for whatever reason he couldn't fit it into his hectic schedule. Ontario's citizenship minister did show up at a mosque, but the imams took that as a great insult, like the Queen sending Fergie to open the Commonwealth Games. So the premier of Ontario had to hold a big meeting with the aggrieved imams to apologize for not going to a mosque and, as the Toronto Star's reported it, "to provide them with reassurance that the provincial government does not see them as the enemy."

Anyway, the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died down, but it set the tone for our general approach to these atrocities. The old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between the traffic light changing in New York and the first honk from a car behind. The new definition is the gap between a terrorist bombing and the press release from an Islamic lobby group warning of a backlash against Muslims. In most circumstances, it would be considered appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual "hate crime" by scaremongering about a purely hypothetical one. Needless to say, there is no campaign of Islamophobic hate crimes. If anything, the West is awash in an epidemic of self-hate crimes. A commenter on Tim Blair's Web site in Australia summed it up in a note-perfect parody of a Guardian headline: "Muslim Community Leaders Warn of Backlash from Tomorrow Morning's Terrorist Attack." Those community leaders have the measure of us.

Radical Islam is what multiculturalism has been waiting for all along. In "The Survival of Culture," I quoted the eminent British barrister Helena Kennedy, Queen's Counsel. Shortly after September 11, Baroness Kennedy argued on a BBC show that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists." "We as Western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves," she complained. "We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

Well, said the interviewer, what exactly would those Western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you're nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.

For example, one day in 2004, a couple of Canadians returned home, to Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They were the son and widow of a fellow called Ahmed Said Khadr, who back on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier was known as "al-Kanadi." Why? Because he was the highest-ranking Canadian in al Qaeda--plenty of other Canucks in al Qaeda, but he was the Numero Uno. In fact, one could argue that the Khadr family is Canada's principal contribution to the war on terror. Granted they're on the wrong side (if you'll forgive my being judgmental) but no can argue that they aren't in the thick of things. One of Mr. Khadr's sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a U.S. Special Forces medic. Another was captured and held at Guantanamo. A third blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pa Khadr himself died in an al Qaeda shootout with Pakistani forces in early 2004. And they say we Canadians aren't doing our bit in this war!

In the course of the fatal shootout of al-Kanadi, his youngest son was paralyzed. And, not unreasonably, Junior didn't fancy a prison hospital in Peshawar. So Mrs. Khadr and her boy returned to Toronto so he could enjoy the benefits of Ontario government health care. "I'm Canadian, and I'm not begging for my rights," declared the widow Khadr. "I'm demanding my rights."

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As they always say, treason's hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr. Khadr's death it seems clear that not only was he providing "aid and comfort to the Queen's enemies" but that he was, in fact, the Queen's enemy. The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal 22nd Regiment and other Canucks have been participating in Afghanistan, on one side of the conflict, and the Khadr family had been over there participating on the other side. Nonetheless, the prime minister of Canada thought Boy Khadr's claims on the public health system was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his own deep personal commitment to "diversity." Asked about the Khadrs' return to Toronto, he said, "I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree."

That's the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: You can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick "home team" or "enemy," according to taste. The Canadian prime minister is a typical late-stage Western politician: He could have said, well, these are contemptible people and I know many of us are disgusted at the idea of our tax dollars being used to provide health care for a man whose Canadian citizenship is no more than a flag of convenience, but unfortunately that's the law and, while we can try to tighten it, it looks like this lowlife's got away with it. Instead, his reflex instinct was to proclaim this as a wholehearted demonstration of the virtues of the multicultural state. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian prime minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.

We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and we're right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn't be that serious: The mob could rise up and hang 'em from lampposts--a scenario that's not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life--child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents--has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point--I would say socialized health care is a good marker--you cross a line, and it's very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn't big enough to get you to give anything back. That's what the French and German political classes are discovering.

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Go back to that list of local conflicts I mentioned. The jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis, the Russians, the Indians and the Nigerians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Danes and New Zealanders?

So the jihadists are for the most part doing no more than giving us a prod in the rear as we sleepwalk to the cliff. When I say "sleepwalk," it's not because we're a blasé culture. On the contrary, one of the clearest signs of our decline is the way we expend so much energy worrying about the wrong things. If you've read Jared Diamond's bestselling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," you'll know it goes into a lot of detail about Easter Island going belly up because they chopped down all their trees. Apparently that's why they're not a G-8 member or on the U.N. Security Council. Same with the Greenlanders and the Mayans and Diamond's other curious choices of "societies." Indeed, as the author sees it, pretty much every society collapses because it chops down its trees.

Poor old Diamond can't see the forest because of his obsession with the trees. (Russia's collapsing even as it's undergoing reforestation.) One way "societies choose to fail or succeed" is by choosing what to worry about. The Western world has delivered more wealth and more comfort to more of its citizens than any other civilization in history, and in return we've developed a great cult of worrying. You know the classics of the genre: In 1968, in his bestselling book "The Population Bomb," the eminent scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines--hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." In 1972, in their landmark study "The Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and gas by 1993.

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None of these things happened. In fact, quite the opposite is happening. We're pretty much awash in resources, but we're running out of people--the one truly indispensable resource, without which none of the others matter. Russia's the most obvious example: it's the largest country on earth, it's full of natural resources, and yet it's dying--its population is falling calamitously.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens--from terrorism to tsunamis--can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

And even though none of the prognostications of the eco-doom blockbusters of the 1970s came to pass, all that means is that 30 years on, the end of the world has to be rescheduled. The amended estimated time of arrival is now 2032. That's to say, in 2002, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in thirty years, mass extinction of species. . . . More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95 percent of people in the Middle East with severe problems . . . 25 percent of all species of mammals and 10 percent of birds will be extinct . . ."

Etc., etc., for 450 pages. Or to cut to the chase, as the Guardian headlined it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."

Well, here's my prediction for 2032: unless we change our ways the world faces a future . . . where the environment will look pretty darn good. If you're a tree or a rock, you'll be living in clover. It's the Italians and the Swedes who'll be facing extinction and the loss of their natural habitat.

There will be no environmental doomsday. Oil, carbon dioxide emissions, deforestation: none of these things is worth worrying about. What's worrying is that we spend so much time worrying about things that aren't worth worrying about that we don't worry about the things we should be worrying about. For 30 years, we've had endless wake-up calls for things that aren't worth waking up for. But for the very real, remorseless shifts in our society--the ones truly jeopardizing our future--we're sound asleep. The world is changing dramatically right now, and hysterical experts twitter about a hypothetical decrease in the Antarctic krill that might conceivably possibly happen so far down the road there are unlikely to be any Italian or Japanese enviro-worriers left alive to be devastated by it.

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo . . .

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What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.

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What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Permanence is the illusion of every age. In 1913, no one thought the Russian, Austrian, German and Turkish empires would be gone within half a decade. Seventy years on, all those fellows who dismissed Reagan as an "amiable dunce" (in Clark Clifford's phrase) assured us the Soviet Union was likewise here to stay. The CIA analysts' position was that East Germany was the ninth biggest economic power in the world. In 1987 there was no rash of experts predicting the imminent fall of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself.

Yet, even by the minimal standards of these wretched precedents, so-called post-Christian civilizations--as a prominent EU official described his continent to me--are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining "the great majority" in "the unseen world." But if secularism's starting point is that this is all there is, it's no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it's ever had. The idea that progressive Euro-welfarism is the permanent resting place of human development was always foolish; we now know that it's suicidally so.

To avoid collapse, European nations will need to take in immigrants at a rate no stable society has ever attempted. The CIA is predicting the EU will collapse by 2020. Given that the CIA's got pretty much everything wrong for half a century, that would suggest the EU is a shoo-in to be the colossus of the new millennium. But even a flop spook is right twice a generation. If anything, the date of EU collapse is rather a cautious estimate. It seems more likely that within the next couple of European election cycles, the internal contradictions of the EU will manifest themselves in the usual way, and that by 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on American network news every night. Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what's left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: Its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it's populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it's populated by Algerians? That's a trickier proposition.

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

In July 2003, speaking to the U.S. Congress, Tony Blair remarked: "As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?"

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Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today--Australia, India, South Africa--and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People's Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.

A decade and a half after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the "what do you leave behind?" question is more urgent than most of us expected. "The West," as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying.

What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

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This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.

I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving "Keep your Bush off my bush" placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a "woman's right to choose," Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their "reproductive rights" still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting "Hands off my bush!"

Just before the 2004 election, that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to explain what was at stake:

"Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. . . . If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body," she advised Oprah's viewers, "then you should vote."

Poor Cameron. A couple of weeks later, the scary people won. She lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she couldn't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.

But, after framing the 2004 presidential election as a referendum on the right to rape, Miss Diaz might be interested to know that men enjoy that right under many Islamic legal codes around the world. In his book "The Empty Cradle," Philip Longman asks: "So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism--a new Dark Ages."

Bottom line for Cameron Diaz: There are worse things than John Ashcroft out there.

Mr. Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, "Racism!" To fret about what proportion of the population is "white" is grotesque and inappropriate. But it's not about race, it's about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn't matter whether 70% of them are "white" or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.

Since the president unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine--the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world--innumerable "progressives" have routinely asserted that there's no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that's true, it's a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under Shariah--in the United Kingdom. If a population "at odds with the modern world" is the fastest-breeding group on the planet--if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions--how safe a bet is the survival of the "modern world"?

Not good.

"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.

Mr. Steyn is a syndicated columnist and theater critic for The New Criterion, in whose January issue this article appears.

from The Freeman, 1972-Mar, posted to Mises.org 2005-Nov-3, by Henry Hazlitt:

On Appeasing Envy

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. "Your levellers," said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, "wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves."

And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: "I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy."¹

At least a handful of writers have begun to recognize explicitly the all-pervasive role played by envy or the fear of envy in life and in contemporary political thought. In 1966, Helmut Schoeck, professor of sociology at the University of Mainz, devoted a scholarly and penetrating book to the subject, to which most future discussion is likely to be indebted.²

There can be little doubt that many egalitarians are motivated at least partly by envy, while still others are motivated, not so much by any envy of their own, as by the fear of it in others, and the wish to appease or satisfy it. But the latter effort is bound to be futile. Almost no one is completely satisfied with his status in relation to his fellows.

In the envious the thirst for social advancement is insatiable. As soon as they have risen one rung in the social or economic ladder, their eyes are fixed upon the next. They envy those who are higher up, no matter by how little. In fact, they are more likely to envy their immediate friends or neighbors, who are just a little bit better off, than celebrities or millionaires who are incomparably better off. The position of the latter seems unattainable, but of the neighbor who has just a minimal advantage they are tempted to think: "I might almost be in his place."

Moreover, the envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have. The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: "Yes, madam, everything's going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you'll carry coal."

Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions. As Schoeck writes: "Man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute."³

(We should, of course, always distinguish that merely negative envy which begrudges others their advantage from the positive ambition that leads men to active emulation, competition, and creative effort of their own.)

But the accusation of envy, or even of the fear of others' envy, as the dominant motive for any redistribution proposal is a serious one to make and a difficult if not impossible one to prove. Moreover, the motives for making a proposal, even if ascertainable, are irrelevant to its inherent merits.

We can, nonetheless, apply certain objective tests. Sometimes the motive of appeasing other people's envy is openly avowed. Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to "maldistributed" plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer. An implied and sometimes avowed principle of the British Labour Party leaders after World War II was that "Nobody should have what everybody can't have."

But the main objective test of a social proposal is not merely whether it emphasizes equality more than abundance, but whether it goes further and attempts to promote equality at the expense of abundance. Is the proposed measure intended primarily to help the poor, or to penalize the rich? And would it in fact punish the rich at the cost of also hurting everyone else?

This is the actual effect of steeply progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance taxes. These are not only counterproductive fiscally (bringing in less revenue from the higher brackets than lower rates would have brought), but they discourage or confiscate the capital accumulation and investment that would have increased national productivity and real wages. Most of the confiscated funds are then dissipated by the government in current consumption expenditures. The long-run effect of such tax rates, of course, is to leave the working poor worse off than they would otherwise have been.

How to Bring On a Revolution

There are economists who will admit all this, but will answer that it is nonetheless politically necessary to impose such near-confiscatory taxes, or to enact similar redistributive measures, in order to placate the dissatisfied and the envious — in order, in fact, to prevent actual revolution.

This argument is the reverse of the truth. The effect of trying to appease envy is to provoke more of it.

The most popular theory of the French Revolution is that it came about because the economic condition of the masses was becoming worse and worse, while the king and the aristocracy remained completely blind to it. But de Tocqueville, one of the most penetrating social observers and historians of his or any other time, put forward an exactly opposite explanation. Let me state it first as summarized by an eminent French commentator in 1899:

Here is the theory invented by Tocqueville… The lighter a yoke, the more it seems insupportable; what exasperates is not the crushing burden but the impediment; what inspires to revolt is not oppression but humiliation. The French of 1789 were incensed against the nobles because they were almost the equals of the nobles; it is the slight difference that can be appreciated, and what can be appreciated that counts. The eighteenth-century middle class was rich, in a position to fill almost any employment, almost as powerful as the nobility. It was exasperated by this ''almost" and stimulated by the proximity of its goal; impatience is always provoked by the final strides.⁴

I have quoted this passage because I do not find the theory stated in quite this condensed form by Tocqueville himself. Yet this is essentially the theme of his L'Ancien Régime et la Revolution, and he presented impressive factual documentation to support it. Here is a typical passage:

It is a singular fact that this steadily increasing prosperity, far from tranquilizing the population, everywhere promoted a spirit of unrest. The general public became more and more hostile to every ancient institution, more and more discontented; indeed, it was increasingly obvious that the nation was heading for a revolution…

Thus it was precisely in those parts of France where there had been most improvement that popular discontent ran highest. This may seem illogical — but history is full of such paradoxes. For it is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways. Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated…

In 1780 there could no longer be any talk of France's being on the downgrade; on the contrary, it seemed that no limit could be set to her advance. And it was now that theories of the perfectibility of man and continuous progress came into fashion. Twenty years earlier there had been no hope for the future; in 1780 no anxiety was felt about it. Dazzled by the prospect of a felicity undreamed of hitherto and now within their grasp, people were blind to the very improvement that had taken place and eager to precipitate events.⁵

The expressions of sympathy that came from the privileged class only aggravated the situation:

The very men who had most to fear from the anger of the masses had no qualms about publicly condemning the gross injustice with which they had always been treated. They drew attention to the monstrous vices of the institutions which pressed most heavily on the common people and indulged in highly colored descriptions of the living conditions of the working class and the starvation wages it received. And thus by championing the cause of the underprivileged they made them acutely conscious of their wrongs.⁶

Tocqueville went on to quote at length from the mutual recriminations of the king, the nobles, and the parliament in blaming each other for the miseries of the people. To read them now is to get the uncanny feeling that they are plagiarizing the rhetoric of the limousine liberals of our own day.

All this does not mean that we should hesitate to take any measure truly calculated to relieve hardship and reduce poverty. What it does mean is that we should never take governmental measures merely for the purpose of trying to assuage the envious or appease the agitators, or to buy off a revolution. Such measures, betraying weakness and a guilty conscience, only lead to more far-reaching and even ruinous demands. A government that pays social blackmail will precipitate the very consequences that it fears.

---

Henry Hazlitt served on the board of advisers of the Mises Institute. This article appeared in The Freeman, March 1972. Helmut Schoeck's Envy is available in the Mises Store. Comment on the Blog.

[1] M. de Wolfe Howe, ed., The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Homes and Harold J. Laski, 2 vol., Cambridge, Mass., 1953. From Holmes to Laski, May 12, 1927, p.942.

[2] Helmut Schoeck, Envy, English tr., Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969.

[3] Ibid., p. 303.

[4] Emile Faguet, Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteenth Century, Boston: Little, Brown; 1928, p.93.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955, pp. 175-177.

[6] Ibid., p.180.

from http://www.fiu.edu/~vasquezc/karlownwords.html

Betrayer of the Peasantry

Marx denounced the proposal to give 160 acres of public land to each peasant; he said peasants should be recruited with promises of land, but once a communist society was set up, land had to be collectively held.

from The American Conservative, 2005-Mar-14, by Robert Locke:

Marxism of the Right

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.

There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.

This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.

Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?

Libertarians rightly concede that one’s freedom must end at the point at which it starts to impinge upon another person’s, but they radically underestimate how easily this happens. So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it.

Libertarians in real life rarely live up to their own theory but tend to indulge in the pleasant parts while declining to live up to the difficult portions. They flout the drug laws but continue to collect government benefits they consider illegitimate. This is not just an accidental failing of libertarianism’s believers but an intrinsic temptation of the doctrine that sets it up to fail whenever tried, just like Marxism.

Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

In each of these cases, less freedom today is the price of more tomorrow. Total freedom today would just be a way of running down accumulated social capital and storing up problems for the future. So even if libertarianism is true in some ultimate sense, this does not prove that the libertarian policy choice is the right one today on any particular question.

Furthermore, if limiting freedom today may prolong it tomorrow, then limiting freedom tomorrow may prolong it the day after and so on, so the right amount of freedom may in fact be limited freedom in perpetuity. But if limited freedom is the right choice, then libertarianism, which makes freedom an absolute, is simply wrong. If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties. There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties.

Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.

Libertarians argue that radical permissiveness, like legalizing drugs, would not shred a libertarian society because drug users who caused trouble would be disciplined by the threat of losing their jobs or homes if current laws that make it difficult to fire or evict people were abolished. They claim a “natural order” of reasonable behavior would emerge. But there is no actual empirical proof that this would happen. Furthermore, this means libertarianism is an all-or-nothing proposition: if society continues to protect people from the consequences of their actions in any way, libertarianism regarding specific freedoms is illegitimate. And since society does so protect people, libertarianism is an illegitimate moral position until the Great Libertarian Revolution has occurred.

And is society really wrong to protect people against the negative consequences of some of their free choices? While it is obviously fair to let people enjoy the benefits of their wise choices and suffer the costs of their stupid ones, decent societies set limits on both these outcomes. People are allowed to become millionaires, but they are taxed. They are allowed to go broke, but they are not then forced to starve. They are deprived of the most extreme benefits of freedom in order to spare us the most extreme costs. The libertopian alternative would be perhaps a more glittering society, but also a crueler one.

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.

The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. Libertarianism itself is based on the conviction that it is the one true political philosophy and all others are false. It entails imposing a certain kind of society, with all its attendant pluses and minuses, which the inhabitants thereof will not be free to opt out of except by leaving.

And if libertarians ever do acquire power, we may expect a farrago of bizarre policies. Many support abolition of government-issued money in favor of that minted by private banks. But this has already been tried, in various epochs, and doesn’t lead to any wonderful paradise of freedom but only to an explosion of fraud and currency debasement followed by the concentration of financial power in those few banks that survive the inevitable shaking-out. Many other libertarian schemes similarly founder on the empirical record.

A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.

Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny.

Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

from Commentary, 2007-Sep, by Kay S. Hymowitz:

Freedom Fetishists

More than perhaps any other American political group, libertarians have suffered the blows of caricature. For many people, the term evokes an image of a scraggly misfit living in the woods with his gun collection, a few marijuana plants, some dog-eared Ayn Rand titles, and a battered pick-up truck plastered with bumper stickers reading “Taxes = Theft” and “FDR Was A Pinko.”

The stereotype is not entirely unfair. Even some of those who proudly call themselves libertarians recognize that their philosophy of personal freedom and minimal government can be a powerful magnet for the unhinged. Nor has recent political history done much to rehabilitate libertarianism’s image as an outlier.

The Libertarian party’s paltry membership has never reached much beyond the 250,000 mark, and polling numbers for Ron Paul, the perennial libertarian presidential candidate (now running for the Republican nomination), remain pitiable. Worse, despite Bill Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over,” anti-statist ideas like school vouchers and privatized Social Security accounts continue to be greeted with widespread skepticism, while massive new programs like the Medicare prescription-drug benefit continue to win the support of reelection-minded incumbents. A recent New York Times survey found increasing support for government-run health care, and both parties are showing signs of a populist resurgence, with demands for new economic and trade regulation.

And yet, judging by their output in recent years, libertarians are in a fine mood—and not because they are in denial. However distant the country may be from their laissez-faire ideal, free-market principles now drive the American economy to a degree unimaginable a generation ago. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who as a young economist sat at the knee of the libertarian guru Ayn Rand, presided in the 1990’s over one of the most prosperous stretches in American history, with the support, no less, of a Democratic President. When the avowedly libertarian economist Milton Friedman died last November, he was lauded just about everywhere, and even given respectful treatment in places like the New York Review of Books.

Nor have libertarian victories been limited to the economic arena. Americans are increasingly laissez-faire in their attitudes toward sex, divorce, drugs, and gay marriage. In the personal sphere as in the world of business and finance, freedom has become the guiding principle, especially for the young. As the motto of Reason magazine, the movement’s flagship publication, trumpets: “Free minds and free markets.”

The diverse origins of libertarianism and its recent accomplishments are the subjects, respectively, of two new books by capable advocates of the creed. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement¹ by Brian Doherty is (as its subtitle suggests) an appreciation of even the most gnarled branches of the ideological family tree. Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture² is, by contrast, a broad survey of the social and cultural changes sparked by the free market’s triumph in postwar America. Perhaps because of their differences, however, the two books are neatly complementary. Together they make clear why libertarianism has yet to find a secure place in the American mainstream.

_____________

Anemic though its following has been over the years, libertarianism is a quintessentially American philosophy. As Doherty, a senior editor at Reason, writes in his massive, lively history, “Libertarianism is all in Jefferson. Read your Declaration of Independence.” For Jefferson, citizens are the bearers of inalienable rights, and the purpose of government is to protect those rights. Libertarians see this bargain as the essence of public life—and any departure from it, especially in the name of some grander idea of justice, as a violation of the social compact. Among the many colorful libertarian trailblazers described by Doherty is Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century radical who compared the government to a highwayman pointing a gun at your head and demanding “your money or your life.” Spooner poured his energies into establishing a privately run postal service (a project still dear to many libertarians).

Closer to our own day, the decisive influences on libertarianism were the free-market economists Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and his disciple Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992). Though both were Austrian by birth and education, they eventually landed in America, where they continued to develop their powerful (and now vindicated) critique of socialist economics. As Doherty emphasizes, both thinkers rejected central planning largely on the grounds that human beings are not very good at predicting the future. Socialism was bound to fail, they argued, because it did not take into account the evolving preferences (or “subjective valuations”) of individuals. It was a grossly inefficient, necessarily coercive system for meeting human needs.

Doherty disabuses readers of the idea that libertarianism is exclusively concerned with economics. As he emphasizes, it has a political and moral dimension as well, “a vision of a radical and just future.” According to many of the thinkers he profiles, liberty is essential to the initiative and self-sufficiency that make ethical behavior possible. Doherty devotes considerable attention, for example, to the mid-20th-century anarchist Murray Rothbard, sometimes called “Mr. Libertarian.” Rothbard was one of the first observers to stress the now-familiar point that government action on behalf of the poor and minorities would undermine the responsibility and self-discipline they needed for advancement.

Many of the figures described by Doherty believe that libertarianism is also good for the social fabric. Capitalism may not lead to the fraternité naively dreamed of by more conventional revolutionaries, but it does expand the circle of human trust beyond the traditional limits of family and tribe; social bonds thrive in an atmosphere of freedom. Indeed, several of Doherty’s subjects (particularly Hayek) argue that government meddling positively discourages the human instinct for association. If politicians and bureaucrats would get out of the way, people would more readily cooperate and support one another. As David Friedman (the anarchist son of Milton) concluded in studying the economics of tipping, people are capable of developing their own rules for distributive justice, and will pay for social goods of their own free will.

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For Brink Lindsey, the vice president for research at the Cato Institute, Americans today are the fortunate heirs of Mises and Hayek. Since World War II, he argues in The Age of Abundance, the libertarian principles of competition, free trade, and deregulation have given the United States a level of prosperity that would have astounded our ancestors. For most of human history (and, even now, for much of the developing world), the lot of ordinary people has been scarcity, brutal work, and lives cut short by ill health. No more—thanks to the bounty of modern capitalism.

As Lindsey writes, Americans “live on the far side of a great fault line.” On one (now distant) side, there were polio, diphtheria, outhouses, child labor, candlepower, life expectancy of under 50 years, sweatshops, and the Great Depression. On our blessed, present-day side, there are miracle drugs, hip replacements, peaches from Chile in winter, Russian caviar in the summer, central air-conditioning, 500 TV channels, master bathrooms with whirlpools, and Dow 14,000. Marx predicted that civilization would travel from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom” (the title of Lindsey’s first chapter). About that much, he was right—but the engine has been bourgeois capitalism, not class struggle.

To critics who say that the market is a nasty rogue, supplying the fortunate with mansions and Cristal Brut while condemning the luckless to rags and scraps, Lindsey gives no ground. America’s late-19th-century Gilded Age, frequently described by the economically naive as an example of “unbridled capitalism,” was anything but that. The “robber barons,” he writes, were little more than crony capitalists, insiders who manipulated government to squelch competition and keep themselves flush. By contrast, the more authentic free-market practices of the past several decades, Lindsey argues, have improved the material lives not just of millionaires but of deliverymen, waitresses, and teachers.

As for today’s poor, they are less likely to suffer from hunger than from obesity, and they are able to afford such luxuries as cable television, washers and dryers, microwaves, and cell phones primarily because of deregulated global markets. Instead of laboring in dangerous mines or steel mills, less skilled workers are security guards or restaurant workers. Such jobs are not exactly easy street, but they beat getting black-lung disease or third-degree burns.

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Lindsey goes well beyond most libertarians in his claims for the moral benefits of the creed. In his view, it is not simply freedom that improves morals; it is the prosperity that follows in freedom’s wake. Wealth allows us to transcend “the cruel dilemma of lifeboat ethics,” in which scarcity prevails. Moreover, wealth expands human tolerance and imagination. Drawing upon the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs, Lindsey proposes that once people are confident of their survival and comfort, they feel free to pursue “postmaterialist values.” They have the time, energy, and ease of mind to try to perfect themselves.

As a practical matter, this means that Americans no longer just take jobs to support their families; they look for meaningful work. They do not just marry the girl next door; they search for their soulmates. They do not just sink quietly into flabby middle age; they jog, go on yoga retreats in Costa Rica, and stock their bedrooms with Viagra and vibrators. Playboy, the decline of the Victorian paterfamilias, permissive childrearing, feminism, the sexual revolution, the fitness boom, gay rights, and even the civil-rights revolution—all, in Lindsey’s view, are logical outcomes of the age of abundance. The expanding marketplace has unleashed individual desire from traditional constraints in favor of an “ethos of self-realization and personal fulfillment.”

Is Lindsey, then, just one more defender of everything that falls under the rubric of “the Sixties”? Not exactly. He has read his Max Weber and knows that middle-class norms are the indispensable cultural infrastructure of free-market economics; he appreciates the irony that, without Protestant self-discipline and respectability, Americans would not be enjoying their Napa Chardonnay and Internet porn. He thus condemns “the wild overshooting of the Aquarian Left,” which (in addition to despising capitalism) “trashed . . . legitimate authority and necessary restraints.” Indeed, in his view, the rise of the religious Right was a predictable, and to some extent even salutary, response to the excesses of the 60’s.

Fortunately, by the 1990’s, Lindsey contends, Americans had found a middle ground between the antinomianism of the Aquarian Left and the pinched moralizing of the Moral Majority. As he wrote recently in an online discussion of his book:

It turned out that the American Dream retained its vitality even in an age of abundance, because Americans still wanted more—more comforts, more conveniences, more opportunities, and more challenges, all of which were best provided through continued economic development. The strength of this desire, and not the fading hold of old cultural forms, provided the basis for ongoing commitment to middle-class self-restraint—self-restraint as a means to exuberant self-expression.

Americans, in Lindsey’s view, have reached a noble synthesis. They are tolerant, open-minded, inclusive—and enthusiastic practitioners of free enterprise. “The culture wars are over,” he concludes, “and capitalism won.”

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At a time when many others in the big tent of American conservatism are in the dumps, such upbeat assessments are rare. Doherty and Lindsey are positively Reaganesque in their optimism, and the movement of which they are a part has undoubtedly made a real contribution to the policy debate in recent years. Lindsey’s Cato Institute, the premier think tank of libertarianism, continues to publish its valuable free-market reports and books. Libertarian bloggers have established a substantial readership, and a number of them, like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and the law professors who write the Volokh Conspiracy, have become prominent (and notably sane) voices in the world of on-line political commentary.

More important perhaps, today’s libertarian movement has been open to the sort of internal disagreements that are a sign of a healthy, maturing philosophy. Differences over the Iraq war are a striking example. Historically, libertarians have been programmatically antiwar, in part because of their opposition to coercion in all its forms but also because war increases the power and reach of the state. Today, by contrast, a number of libertarians, including the Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett in a recent Wall Street Journal article, make the case for more flexible thinking about dealing with the threat of Islamism, and some have been supporters of the Bush administration’s efforts in Iraq.

Even on social and cultural questions, where libertarians have often tangled with tradition-minded conservatives, Lindsey is on to something in his talk of a “libertarian synthesis” combining self-expression and self-restraint. If the country was slouching toward Gomorrah for a while, it has at the very least straightened up a bit. Many of the indicators of social meltdown that received alarmed attention in the 1980’s and early 90’s—high crime rates, “children having children,” teen drug use, rampant divorce—have improved lately.

_____________

But they have not improved nearly as much as one might wish—and it is difficult to separate the reasons for our abiding social disarray from the trends that Doherty and Lindsey praise and for which libertarians bear a measure of responsibility. Despite Lindsey’s protestations to the contrary, libertarianism has supported, always implicitly and often with an enthusiastic hurrah, the “Aquarian” excesses that he now decries. Many of the movement’s devotees were deeply involved in the radicalism of the 1960’s.

Nor should this come as a surprise. After all, the libertarian vision of personal morality—described by Doherty as “[P]eople ought to be free to do whatever the hell they want, mostly, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else”—is not far removed from “if it feels good, do it,” the cri de coeur of the Aquarians. To be sure, part of the libertarian entanglement with the radicalism of the 1960’s stemmed from the movement’s opposition to both the Vietnam war and the draft, which Milton Friedman likened to slavery. But libertarians were also drawn to the Left’s revolutionary social posture.

Murray Rothbard, for example, became a fan of Che Guevara and the Black Panther leader H. Rap Brown. Karl Hess, a libertarian/anarchist said to have written Barry Goldwater’s famous lines about “extremism in the defense of liberty,” was an equal-opportunity revolutionary; during the 60’s, he symbolized his move to the New Left by donning a Castro-style beard and jacket. And many young libertarians spent the decade moving back and forth between the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom and the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society.

The point in rehearsing this history is not to play gotcha; many good people did and thought things during those days that they would prefer not to remember (assuming, as the joke has it, they can remember). Rather, it is to suggest that, when one’s moral compass consists of nothing more than doing “whatever the hell you want” and avoiding physical harm to anyone else’s person or property, it is very easy to get lost.

The civil-rights movement is an instructive case. Lindsey includes it in his list of libertarian victories, but it is a perfect example of the inability of libertarians to find a political and moral framework suitable to the big questions of American public life. If people ought to be able to do what they want, then certainly hating blacks—either by oneself or in the company of like-minded souls—is nobody else’s business, including the federal government’s. To the extent that libertarians are remembered at all for their role in the civil-rights era, it is not for marching on Selma but rather for their enthusiastic support of states’ rights and the freedom of white racists to associate with one another.

Libertarianism was complicit, too, in the vociferous attack during the 1960’s on the bourgeois family. After all, blood relationships are involuntary, and parents with any interest in rearing and educating their children are unlikely to look for guidance in Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand was predictably wary of kinship ties and, like radical feminists, saw the family as a soul-killing prison. Rothbard struggled with the vexing question of how to square the biological fact of the dependency of the young with the libertarian devotion to freedom. His conclusion was that parents should not be legally bound to feed or educate their children, and children should have an absolute right to leave home at any time. Today, libertarians support the loosest of divorce laws, and many wonder why the state should be involved in the marriage business at all, a question that has come to the fore in the debate over gay marriage.

As a common-sense moderate, Brink Lindsey implicitly rejects such radical views of personal autonomy while at the same time dismissing their ill effects. “A strong work ethic and belief in personal responsibility, a continued commitment to the two-parent family as the best way of raising children, and a robust patriotism,” he writes, “all survived the Aquarian challenge.” But this assessment is far too sanguine. Today, a record 37 percent of American children are born to single mothers, and the number appears to be on the rise. Most of these children will be either poor or very limited in their ability to move up the economic ladder.

Lindsey must know this, but to dwell on it would cast a shadow over the sunny prospect he describes. Worse, it would compel him to confront what we might call the cultural contradictions of libertarianism.

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On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal. On the other hand, libertarians depend on the family—an institution that, in crucial respects, is unfree—to produce the sort of people best suited to life in a free-market system (not to mention future members of their own movement). The complex, dynamic economy that libertarians have done so much to expand needs highly advanced human capital—that is, individuals of great moral, cognitive, and emotional sophistication. Reams of social-science research prove that these qualities are best produced in traditional families with married parents.

Family breakdown, by contrast, limits the accumulation of such human capital. Worse, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing leave the door wide open for big government. Dysfunctional families create an increased demand for state-funded food, housing, and medical subsidies, which libertarians reject on principle. And in courts all over the country, judges who preside over the manifold disputes occasioned by broken families are forced to be more intrusive than the worst mother-in-law: they decide who should have primary custody, who gets a child on Christmas or summer holidays, whether a child should take piano lessons, go to Hebrew school, move to California, or speak to her grandmother on the phone. It is a libertarian’s worst nightmare.

A libertarian, according to Brian Doherty, “has to believe” that “the instincts and abilities for liberty . . . are innate,” that we possess “an ability to fend for ourselves in the Randian sense and to form spontaneous orders of fellowship and cooperation in the Hayekian sense.” But this view of the relationship between the individual and society is profoundly and demonstrably false, especially when applied to the family.

Children do not come into the world respecting private property. They do not emerge from the womb ready to navigate the economic and moral complexities of an “age of abundance.” The only way they learn such things is through a long process of intensive socialization—a process that we now know, thanks to the failed experiments begun by the Aquarians and implicitly supported by libertarians, usually requires intact families and decent schools.

Libertarianism did not have to take this unfortunate turn. Ludwig von Mises himself warned that the attempt (of socialists) to undermine the family was a ploy to strengthen the state. Hayek, too, grasped the family’s role in upholding the free market. Coming of age in Europe around the time of World War I, he stressed the state’s inefficiency but also warned, more generally, of the limits of human reason. “Hayek’s economics was rooted in man’s ignorance,” Doherty writes; so were his political views, which included both an enthusiasm for freedom and a Burkean respect for customs and institutions.

It is difficult to say why this aspect of libertarianism has faded away, but the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset once provided a partial answer. In Europe and elsewhere, he observed, modern radicals have tended to be of a Marxist, collectivist bent; in America, with its peculiar Lockean legacy and Jeffersonian ideals, radicals have gone to the other extreme, searching for absolute freedom. It is a quest that has left little room for the confining demands of family and other unchosen social bonds.

Libertarians come in many flavors, of course, but they share certain enthusiasms beyond free-market economics. They are often great consumers of science fiction, with an avid interest in space travel. And they have an almost unlimited enthusiasm for biotechnology, especially for advances that might allow us to manipulate our natures and extend our lives. Taken together, these elements constitute what might be called the libertarian dream—the dream of shaping your own meaning, liberated from family, from the past, from tradition, from biology, and perhaps even from the earth itself.

Such utopian ambitions are difficult to satisfy or even contain in the mundane world of American politics. For some time to come, they are likely to make libertarianism the natural home of assorted cranks and crazies, and thus to continue to provide fodder for its at least partly deserved caricature.

About the Author

Kay S. Hymowitz, a contributing editor of City Journal, writes frequently for COMMENTARY on social and cultural issues.

Footnotes

1 Public Affairs, 741 pp., $35.00.

2 Harper Collins, 394 pp., $26.95.

from Versus the Mob, 2007-Mar-4, by Paul E. Zimmerman:

Call It Like It Is: The Libertine Party

While looking over a social networking website that caters to college students recently, I came across the profile of one person who expressed a desire for one Rigoberta Menchu, a darling of the far left despite the fact that her socialist-endearing life story is a fraud, to become the next president of Guatemala. This caught my eye and prompted me to continue looking over this person's profile, which turned out to be a massive wad of socialist/communist propaganda.

But what really got my attention was not these things, but how this person classified her political views: "Libertarian."

For some time now, I've noted an increase in the number of people who endorse clearly socialist political and moral ideals claiming to be Libertarians. Generally, they are indistinguishable from your average socialist, except that they pay more lip service to individual autonomy. The twist, however, is that "individual autonomy" in their lexicon comes to mean "free from the economic and social consequences of being stupid."

Generally, the thinking of these so-called libertarians runs like this: each individual is a sovereign being with hopes, dreams, and goals; it is wrong to initiate force against others (coercion); thwarting an individual's personal aims, if they do not cause harm to others, is a form of coercion and is unjust; a lack of resources will frustrate an individual's goals; if one person has more than enough resources to meet his goals and he does not give the rest to those who do not have enough resources to meet their goals, he is thwarting the hopes and dreams of those other people and thereby acting unjustly; unjust actions justify the use of force to correct the injustice, so it is therefore just to seize the resources of the better-off individual to satisfy the goals of less well-off individuals.

Those who have not before heard of this sort of "libertarianism" may be scratching their heads at this point and wondering how this is different from run-of-the-mill socialism. The fact is, this really isn't very different at all, except for one key detail: instead of justifying the seizure of private property for the benefit of an abstract "society," the violation of private property is justified in the name of "the free individual."

Think about that for a moment and you will understand the insidious nature of this twist of terms. It's easy to attack claims of social good that are aimed at the betterment of "society," because society being an abstract, one can simply ask "whom exactly do you mean?" Someone trying to justify wealth redistribution along these lines then has to name specific people or groups, leaving them open to attack for any number of reasons.

But who can argue with individual liberty? That is the evil twist this philosophy takes. If you agree with the thesis that individual humans are sovereign and should be free to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, and since you cannot argue against the fact that it takes resources to do so, then according to these "libertarians" you cannot argue against wealth redistribution!

This view suffers from the usual logical and moral flaws of socialism, the largest being who it is that gets to decide who has enough to satisfy their personal ends and who does not, which ends are worthy ends, the metric by which such things will be determined, etc. Ultimately, this so-called libertarianism ends up in the same place that collectivism will always go: totalitarianism.

I took a quick look around the 'net at the people who endorse these views and who use the title of libertarian in this way, and soon discovered certain common traits. Basically, every one of these people were pining after comfortable, upper-middle class lifestyles (on average - some wanted far more, but almost none wanted less) completely divorced from the usual means by which millions of people have achieved this vision: hard work and personal discipline. Frequently, I found that the people who endorse these twisted views are engaged in indulgent lifestyles, the types that frequently come with undesirable side effects - drug use, polyamorous sexuality, etc. It is also common amongst the small number of these "libertarians" I read up on to live far outside of their means, often involving them moving to areas where they would like to live alone or as a couple in single family dwellings, but where the cost of living is far beyond their means, "forcing" them to seek roommates, run down housing, etc. Many of these people also were engaged in some sort of social work of dubious benefit that would not provide income for them to live on while continuing their work, but that they clearly derived personal satisfaction from, which they outright demand that the rest of us fund.

Libertarianism, as I and most people who know of it know it to be, is the opposite of this. While there are certain lifestyle choices exhibited by these people that I do not approve of, I leave it to them to make these choices and suffer the consequences - if they value the fleeting pleasures over the permanent damages, it is their right, so long as they do not bring harm to others. That is the essence of true Libertarianism, which is why this other version is a fake: while these people pay lip service to respecting individual choices that do not bring harm to others, they twist the definition of libertarianism around and demand that all of us share in the harms that individuals bring upon themselves. While these "libertarians" clearly would not approve of one person shooting another, if an individual shoots himself, they want all of us to pay for the damages. Regardless of the self-inflicted nature of the harm (whatever form it may come in), these people would make it a harm that we all suffer, albeit indirectly.

Personal responsibility is therefore out the window, which is ultimately what these "libertarians" are after. That is why, for the sake of eliminating confusion and to rescue the otherwise good name of Libertarianism, I am proposing that people of this ilk call themselves the "Libertine Party." It is a name much more suited to the sort of base, childish greed that they have attempted to elevate to the level of a political/moral philosophy. It would also make them a more honest bunch, since a less-acquainted individual would not be unfairly confused by their use of a name that describes a better, truly moral, and practical body of beliefs and ideas [well, as Glenn Beck would say, not so much -- see Robert Locke's essay above. -AMPP Ed.].

from the Weekly Standard, 2008-Sep-15, by Matt Labash:

Among the Paultards
Even they are ashamed of their candidate's supporters.

Minneapolis
While the press often considers the Ron Paul movement to be chock-full of cranks, wackos, and conspiracy theorists, I take a more nuanced view. For me, the Ron Paul Revolution is like a cozy winter fire. From a distance, the crackling flames of individual liberty and freethinking libertarianism take the chill off sterile two-party politics. But get too near the searing embers, and they will cause blistering, profuse sweating, and all-around general discomfort.

I've driven up to the Earle Brown Heritage Center, where leadership training is taking place for the Ron Paultards, as they are often called. The Texas Republican congressman's people have decided that, though the presidential primary is long over, the Paultardiness must go on. And so they have convened in Minneapolis, to conduct a three-day shadow convention, the capstone of which will be an all-day "Rally for the Republic." Though my Mapquest directions are sketchy, it's readily apparent I've arrived at the right place. The bumper stickers are the giveaway, saying things such as "I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it," and "My other car is a UFO."

More than 10,000 have made the Paul pilgrimage, arriving by plane, train, and "Ronvoy" caravans. Some stay in hotels, others under the stars at "Ronstock," which is being held in the middle of a farmer's pasture somewhere on the outskirts of town. (Attendees say it's like Woodstock, but with wi-fi connections instead of free love.) Or else they'll stay out at Camp Iduhapi, which, when I later stop by, I learn is the Lakota word for "campers who have unsafe amounts of political signage in their car windows." It's a testament to Paul's drawing power, considering he's no longer running for anything. To find this many people who've ever been this excited about John McCain, you'd have to go back to his press bus in the year 2000.

In the parking lot, I encounter Caitanya Dasa, a 15-year-old with braces who is getting something out of a van. It's the "Liberty Van," which is painted on the back of the Chevy Venture, along with "Truth is Treason In the Empire of Lies."

"That's a quote from Paul's book, The Revolution: A Manifesto," Dasa helpfully explains. He's in from Oregon after a 36-hour, near-sleepless trek with several people rotating driving duties, including his mom. Along the way, a swarm of gnats infiltrated their van, they were attacked by bees, and they ran over an entire bumper on the interstate. But it was worth the sacrifice. Because Ron Paul is here. "We were standing in the food line! And he comes up to us, and says, 'That looks pretty good!' " a breathless Dasa exclaims. "None of us knew what to say."

Dasa wastes no time in taking me to his leader. Behind the building, on the well-manicured grounds, there is indeed a buffet of bear claws, sticky buns, melon wedges, and fresh-squeezed juices. But Paul is the main attraction, standing there, having snap after snap taken by a photographer with a long line of admirers that he mows down one by one. He's like one of those Shaquille O'Neal cardboard cutouts you can have your picture taken with at the mall. Except Ron Paul is right here, in the flesh, right down to his black referee shoes.

I talk to the Oregon delegation waiting for my audience with Dr. Paul, the former obstetrician. Like most of the Paultards, and unlike most of the mainstream Republicans who are wringing their hands over whether to press on with their convention with Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf states, they are not going to let somebody else's bad weather get in the way of their gathering. "There's suffering all over every single day," one tells me. "So if I skip the sticky bun, the world would be better?"

Paul takes all comers, as he will at a Borders book-signing later that day, where I'm told he signs for no less than a thousand people. As I get a crack at him, he seems bemused by Republican skittishness over Gustav, and smells a rat. "They might've been looking for an excuse not to have the president speak," he says, "but I wouldn't accuse them of that. I've heard people say that."

He generally likes Sarah Palin, though is skeptical of her signing up with such a pro-war team. "When Bill Kristol says he loves her, it makes me wonder," he says. Since he knows my affiliation, I give Paul points for honesty. Then he hits me with a little more: "I wanna get [our interview] over with, because I wanna go eat breakfast." Like Dasa before me, I don't know what to say. "Try the sticky buns," I offer.

After breakfast, I settle into the invitation-only Leadership Summit with Dasa, who's not supposed to be there himself on account of being underage ("The side door works great," he says). The summit is to highlight the particulars of Paul's new permanent organization, the Campaign for Liberty, the mission of which is to promote individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy. As a gentleman in a colonial outfit, complete with tricorn hat, plays "Yankee Doodle" on a fife to call the meeting to order, an organizer named Deb Hopper rushes over and tells me I've got to go, this is a closed meeting.

"We're going to get down to some of the tactics we're going to be using," she says.

"What are they?" I ask.

"Not gonna discuss it," she says.

"Just one tactic?" I plead.

"Not gonna discuss it," she fiercely reiterates, before bouncing me to the sound of fife music, giving me a taste of how the Redcoats felt in the 1700s.

The next day, I attend the "Rally for the Republic" at the Target Center with 12,000 or so Paultards. The rally intends to call "the GOP back to its roots," if by "roots," you mean lots of people in tricorn hats, whose idea of a good time is batting around their favorite economists from the Austrian School. (I'm partial to Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, but then, who isn't?)

My journalistic detachment is dealt a blow, since emceeing the event is my friend and former WEEKLY STANDARD colleague, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. We both like to think of ourselves as conservatives with strong libertarian overtones. We certainly like to do whatever we want, whenever we want, and hate paying taxes, as our libertarian brothers do.

Tucker did a hang-out with Paul piece last year for the New Republic, and I suggest to him that he's gotten too close to the story.

"You can stay on the sidelines with the jackals, or enter the arena, your face marred by dust, sweat, and blood," he says, archly paraphrasing Teddy Roosevelt.

I tell him I've got a good seat at the press table, but that I'll keep an open mind.

"Sure you will," he mocks. "Write the story before you come. Show up, and fill in the blanks. It's like journalistic Mad Libs. I've been there, man."

My high-placed Paultard source gives me all sorts of insider dope. Former Minnesota governor/pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, who is on the speaking docket, is a serious 9/11 denier. So the Paulians have convinced Ventura to button it on the subject, since furthering the cause of liberty and sound money doesn't have much to do with who Ventura thinks may or may not have felled the Twin Towers. Tucker also won't introduce a speaker from the John Birch Society, just as a matter of principle. And though the schedule calls for a 12:30 P.M. opening bell, "the hemp activists have taken over organizing," says Tucker, "so there's not a chance that we start on time."

Though he's a little bit nervous about his uncharacteristic role-"falling off a cliff," he calls it-Tucker opens the ceremonies with a stirring explanation of why he's here: because, although he signs on to no platform and supports no candidate (especially since Paul isn't one, though somebody should tell that to crowd members holding state delegate stanchions as though they're at a nominating convention to make Paul emperor), Ron Paul, unlike most politicians, is a decent, gentle, and kind human being, who has no interest in controlling you. He stands for freedom and therefore will defend your right to do things he doesn't even agree with, taking political hits for people with whom he has nothing in common.

One of the crowd is so moved by this testimony as to yell: "I love you, Tucker!" "I love you too," he shoots back, "And I mean that in a nonerotic, but powerful way." I can't help but think that this sort of interaction is good for the personal growth of the Paultards, as Tucker will introduce them to something they've likely never experienced before: irony.

The slate of speakers move along in a slow-as-molasses fashion. This must be a stroke to their egos, as I suspect there aren't many occasions when people such as Lew Rockwell, the founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, are treated like visiting rock stars complete with foot-stomping and Ron Paul balloons being volleyed around during their speeches. "By the way," Tucker at one point tells the crowd, "if you can't get enough of [constitutional lawyer/lobbyist] Bruce Fein, he will be signing books afterward, so please don't mob him, despite the temptation."

"We're gonna rock tonight!" promises presidential historian Doug Wead. And the speakers do, too. Such as when Conservative Caucus chairman Howard Phillips ticks off a list of his favorite Ron Paul bills complete with their congressional numbers. (Paul's opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor was a particular crowdpleaser.) Or when John McManus of the John Birch Society whips the crowd into a frenzy when asking what we should do about the unsound-moneychangers at the Federal Reserve ("Suck my butt, Fed!" frothed one crowd member).

A friend at the press table notes that "You can't light a match near anybody because there's so much double-knit here, the place would go up like that." I adjourn to an arena snack bar during a Grover Norquist anti-tax speech-actually I'm just guessing what his speech was about, but it feels a safe bet.

Backstage I find Jesse Ventura holding court. In jeans and a Navy SEAL T-shirt under a sports jacket, his large shiny head ringed with long wisps of unkempt hair, he has, since leaving office and moving to Mexico, taken on the demeanor of a deranged homeless man. When I approach, Ventura is talking about his Belgian Malinois attack dog who understands commands in three languages, and who's picking up Spanish as a fourth. "He's the smartest one in the house," he says, making an entirely believable claim.

I decide to bait Ventura, offering that some of the 9/11 Truthers in the crowd are disappointed their viewpoints aren't being represented.

"They will when I get up there," he growls. He says he's been studying the issue "for well over a year and a half," and he feels "very strongly that the truth has not been forthcoming."

When asked what the truth is and whether the government had something to do with it, he says, "I don't know. But I know this, I do have somewhat of a demolition background, being a member of the Navy's underwater demolition team, and I spoke to a few of my teammates a couple weeks ago. We're all in agreement that buildings can't fall at the rate of gravity without being assisted. And that's called physics, that's not an opinion."

Taking the stage, Ventura has the crowd ululating as he hits all the hot buttons, from the evils of the Patriot Act and closed presidential debates to the need to jealously guard our Second Amendment rights. Then, keeping his promise to me (and breaching assurances to convention organizers), he gets down to business, to a little "something called 9/11." It's like lighting a match around the double-knits. They ignite.

Under the impression that there are no stupid questions, Ventura proceeds to ask several: such as why doesn't the FBI website's list of top ten international terrorists include the 9/11 attacks among Osama bin Laden's other crimes? And why hasn't the Justice Department charged Osama bin Laden? Though he doesn't actually accuse the government of participating in the attacks, he doesn't need to, judging from the crowd reaction. "Inside job!" someone chants.

Backstage afterwards, Ventura is further holding court for reporters, after having hinted to the crowd that he might be amenable to a presidential run in 2012 if the Revolution stays on track. "I will be watching!" he threatened.

Tucker hadn't heard the speech, so I break the news to him that Ventura got off his leash. Being a devout believer in the conventional, single-bullet version of the 9/11 attacks (that the terrorists acted alone), Tucker is both alarmed and offended, but doesn't have much time to reflect. He is accosted by some grubby indie-media types who start trying to engage him: "Have you ever heard of the Controlled Demolition Hypothesis. .  .  . Who I believe did it are the ones who control our money systems. .  .  . Have you followed the [National Institute of Standards and Technology] report on the collapse of building seven?"

After a brief sparring match with the nutcakes, Tucker looks ashen. "This is crazy. I've got to get out of here. Let's go get dinner." We slip out the back door of the arena to hail a cab and get some steaks. But Tucker's still supposed to be emceeing the event, and Paul has yet to speak.

"Are you going to tell him you're leaving?" I ask.

"Nahhh," Tucker says. "I really like Ron Paul. I don't want to hurt his feelings."

The beauty of the Ron Paul Revolution is that whatever you miss, you can catch on YouTube. (Number of Paul videos: 150,000 and counting.) The speech is a six-parter, so I don't watch the whole thing, on account of wanting to be present when my young children graduate from college.

Still, Paul sounds some nice notes on personal liberty, not wanting to control others, and the importance of adhering to both moral and constitutional principles, neither of which are in fashion where he works. Government should serve us, not the other way around, and we are not beholden to any government for our rights. "Rights are something that are very precious," he says. "They don't come from the government, they come in a natural way or a God-given way .  .  . as a right to your life and a right to your liberty. .  .  . A true patriot defends liberty."

It's an attractive line. And it's easy to see why people subscribe to the Ron Paul Revolution. Easier still when you're nowhere near it.

Matt Labash is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, 2006-Mar-17, by Todd Seavey:

'A' Is for Anarchy
Anarchism has gone from intellectually complicated and violent to just plain silly.

It might look like just another violent sci-fi film from the ads, but "V for Vendetta," opening in theaters across the country today, is the first superhero movie that's explicitly anarchist. Larry and Andy Wachowski, the producers, also brought us "The Matrix"--which ended, as you'll recall, with Neo's memorable anarchic warning to humanity's captors that he was going to "show them . . . a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries" and spark a revolution. The Wachowskis are now apparently trying something even more radical in adapting this comic-book story.

The "V" film features some delightfully topsy-turvy casting. The man who played the enslaved Winston Smith in "1984" (John Hurt) now plays the fascistic leader of a future London. The man who played authoritarian Agent Smith in "The Matrix" (Hugo Weaving) now portrays a deranged freedom-fighter/terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (Fawkes being the real-life terrorist who tried to blow up the British Parliament 400 years ago). And the actress who was an elected queen in recent "Star Wars" films (Natalie Portman) now plays an oppressed journalist.

But the greatest turnabout, if it actually occurs, will be audiences cheering for the hero of the film, who is a terrorist. Where did the ideas behind this movie come from, and why would we have any sympathy for them? London audiences may be particularly wary, recalling not only last year's jihadist bombings there but also, from the history books, anarchist bomb attacks on the London Underground in 1883 and 1896. The attacks were part of a campaign across Europe near the turn of the century, the inspiration for anarchist villains in novels by G.K. Chesteron, Joseph Conrad and others.

---

America's own collective cultural memory of anarchism generally begins with the killing of eight Chicago police officers by anarchists in the 1886 Haymarket Riot, the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in 1901 and the murders committed by immigrant Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920 (they were indeed guilty, as their own lawyer admitted to a sympathetic Upton Sinclair, who kept the knowledge hidden for years).

Anarchism, the idea that society would be better off without the constraints of government, has a long and often sordid history. What is arguably the first book urging the complete abolition of government, "A Vindication of Natural Society," was written 250 years ago by the man usually credited with founding conservatism, Edmund Burke. The British philosopher and politician, who served in the very Parliament building that Fawkes tried to destroy, argued that the same sort of anti-authoritarian reasoning that was being used in the 18th century to dispel religious belief could be used to undermine earthly political leaders.

Scholars long accepted Burke's assurances later in life--when he had become a conservative member of the (generally liberal) Whig Party--that "Vindication" was merely satire. But 20th-century "anarcho-capitalist" economist Murray Rothbard argued that Burke's views had simply evolved over time and that Burke was embarrassed by his youthful ideological excesses. Indeed, anarchism has often been an attractive notion for young people. Paul Avrich, a historian of anarchism who died a few weeks ago in New York, suggested that James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill were all anarchists early on in their intellectual development.

Regardless of whether Burke's book was a satire, it was an inspiration to the man who first developed a full anarchist philosophy, William Godwin. He combined conservative religious sensibilities with Whig-inspired political arguments and communist-anarchist solutions to conclude that God-given goodness and the rational nature of human beings meant that the best outcomes would occur in the absence of force, thereby alleviating the need for both government and property. The utopian oddness of this view, whatever the sophistication of its argument, is a hallmark of anarchist reasoning.

In the 19th century, anarchist radicals who, from our perspective, seem to have diametrically opposed views often thought of themselves as a united front, aligned against the political establishment. Many anarchists believed, then as now, that government and the free market should both wither away and allied themselves with Marxists. But there were also ardently capitalist anarchists, such as Lysander Spooner, who started his own profit-making postal service to compete with the U.S. government's lazy monopoly.

Marxists found more in common with French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who famously declared that "property is theft!" Russian anarchists and communists found figures they could both admire in Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, who praised "mutual aid" as an alternative to top-down government. (One sees hints of Kropotkin's thought in things like the medical center quickly set up in New Orleans by the anarchist group Common Ground while the government floundered in the wake of Katrina.)

---

Russia's most famous anarchist, though, was Leo Tolstoy, who said: "There are no crimes so revolting that they would not readily be committed by men who form part of a government." But Tolstoy, in stark contrast to the likes of the Haymarket murderers, appealed in the name of Christianity for an end to violence by soldiers and anarchists alike. (His countryman Dostoevsky was unconvinced and depicted anarchists as both dangerous and self-destructive in "The Devils.")

For most of the 20th century, it must be acknowledged, anarchism functioned as little more than an adjunct to other, more popular, political movements: labor in the case of "anarcho-syndicalists" and left-anarchists such as Emma Goldman; capitalism in the case of anarchist libertarians like Rothbard; and hippie culture in the case of prankster chaos-worshippers like authors Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey.

As anarchism has aged and largely eschewed violence (fantasies like "V for Vendetta" notwithstanding), its members seem to have gone one of two routes, either becoming fringe figures who produce manifestoes and performance art of no great political impact or, ironically, choosing to replace the chaotic violence of old with allegiance to the more predictable, systematic coercion of laws and government. The ideal of the ending of all political control has gradually, perhaps inevitably, been pushed aside by the more familiar one of shaping political control to suit one's own agenda.

In fact, modern so-called anarchists are usually working to increase government power. They form an important faction of the antiglobalization movement, agitating for stricter regulations on international trade. To judge by the sometimes violent protests at World Trade Organization conferences, the latest anarchists are usually grungy kids with strange hair and piercings; it is hard to say for certain, but they have probably spent more time listening to Rage Against the Machine and the Clash than reading Godwin or Proudhon.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that there is little intellectual heft left in the anarchist movement is the occasional protests in Albany, N.Y., where self-proclaimed anarchists turn up to protest budget cuts at state-run schools. It's a satire Burke never could have dreamed of.

Mr. Seavey edits HealthFactsAndFears.com (now part of the OpinionJournal Federation of sites).

from TPDL 2000-Mar-14, from the Orlando Sentinel, by Charley Reese:

Is it fair for hard-working folks to pay for those who aren't?

A welfare state is a slave state. The slaves are the productive citizens whose taxes are used to support the unproductive. The beneficiaries are simply the politicians who take the money from the productive people and use it to buy the votes of the unproductive.

Stripped of all the folderol, I believe that is a fair description.

The first step in persuading people to accept this form of slavery is to blur the distinction between charity and government programs. Charity is voluntary. Government programs are coercive.

If you wish, as an act of kindness, to pay for someone else's child care that is charity. When the government taxes you to pay for someone else's child care that is coercion. You are given no choice (except, of course, to pay your taxes or go to jail).

More people should ask themselves if it is fair that they should be penalized for working hard and providing for themselves and their families. Is it fair for a person who works hard to provide health insurance for their family to be forced to provide free health care for others whose only qualification is that they don't work so hard? Is it fair to a single mom working hard to pay for her child's day care to take part of her earnings to pay for the day care of other people's children? Is it fair for families who struggle and save to finance their children's education to be taxed to provide free education to others?

The answer is no.

A welfare state is not fair or just. It is frankly robbing the productive to provide the money to buy the votes of the unproductive. That's why the original founders of this country did not consider that government had any role at all to play in charity. You can read the Constitution from start to finish and you will find not one word that authorizes Congress or the president to take money from the American people and give it to people the politicians wish to benefit, either domestic or foreign.

It may even surprise you to know that for most of the nation's history, the government did not do so. Social needs were left to the families and the churches. It was Franklin Roosevelt who first blurred the distinction between rights and economic benefits. No one has a "right" to any economic benefit provided at another's expense.

Today when you hear politicians and journalists talk about filling or meeting "needs," you should immediately ask the question: whose needs and at whose expense shall these needs be met? Don't make the mistake of saying, "at the government's expense." The government has no money at all except that which it takes from its productive citizens in the form of taxes.

When these socialist mugs say the "government should," just automatically translate that in your mind as "the government will force me to" do whatever. The government does not pay for any of these public benefits. You do. And you are made the poorer because income you have earned with your labor is taken away from you and your family and spent by others on others.

Former Congressman Jack Kemp used to make a good point. Whatever you tax you discourage, and whatever you subsidize you encourage. And the government taxes work, savings and investments, and subsidizes unemployment, indigency and improvidence.

Another important difference between charity and government welfare is that recipients of charity know that they are being done a favor and are usually grateful. Recipients of government welfare quickly come to view it as an entitlement and are forever disgruntled. I've seen America go from a minimal welfare state to a maximum welfare state. It has not been an improvement.

from The Telegraph, 1999-Nov-13, by Alex Spillius in Bangkok:

Hungry monkeys on rampage

A THOUSAND hungry monkeys have gone on the rampage through houses, shops and restaurants in northern Thailand after the recession-hit district council ran out of funds for their customary food handouts.

Villagers have been woken at night by whole families of monkeys turning over their kitchens, while diners have seen their food stolen from their plates.

Following a drought, there has been no extra rice for the macaque monkeys, which had grown dependent on regular supplies from villagers. The Rasi Salai council told a delegation of the monkeys' victims that it could not afford to buy extra rice from outside.

from the Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times, 2007-Mar-4:

Danish squatter riots swell
Scores of the 500 arrested are foreigners. European neighbors hold sympathy protests.

COPENHAGEN — Protesters from across northern Europe flocked to the Danish capital Saturday to join riots sparked Thursday by the eviction of squatters from an abandoned building that had been a center for young leftists and punk rockers.

More than 500 people, scores of them foreigners, have been arrested in the riots. Authorities said more than 200 were arrested early Saturday after overnight clashes in which demonstrators pelted police with cobblestones and set fire to cars.

As news of the riots spread, sympathizers around Europe rallied support for the protesters. Police said activists from Sweden, Norway and Germany had joined hundreds of Danish youths in the protests. The Danes warned like-minded foreigners Saturday that the borders were tightening after two nights of clashes had turned the normally quiet streets of Copenhagen into a battle zone.

Sympathy protests were held in Germany, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

A school was vandalized and several buildings damaged by fire early Saturday. One protester was reportedly wounded in the violence, and 25 were injured the night before in what police have called Denmark's worst riots in a decade.

More scuffles were reported in various parts of the city Saturday night. Dozens of police vans patrolled the streets and broke up gatherings of protesters to prevent larger mobs from forming. Police said several of those arrested had Molotov cocktails.

The riots were sparked when an anti-terrorism squad on Thursday evicted the squatters from the red brick building that had been used by squatters since the 1980s. Built in 1897, it was a community theater for the labor movement and a culture and conference center; Vladimir I. Lenin was among its visitors. In recent years, it has hosted concerts with performers including Australian Nick Cave and Icelandic singer Bjork.

The eviction had been planned since last year, when courts ordered the squatters to hand the building over to a Christian congregation that bought it six years ago. The squatters said the city had no right to sell the building, and they demanded another building for free as a replacement.

Copenhagen's famed Little Mermaid statue was covered with pink paint, but police could not say whether it was linked to the riots.

from The American Partisan, 1999-Sep-24, by Ian Foster (column "Under the Bench"):

Impute This!

The basic tax structure of the Internal Revenue Code is relatively easy to understand. The Code first imposes a tax on "gross income." Then it lists hundreds of specific deductions and exclusions to determine exactly how much "income" should be taxed in a given year.

Okay-I already hear the passionate cries from those of you who believe the 16th Amendment was never ratified and the IRS is an illegal organization with no constitutional authority. I'll take a brief detour to dispose of this subject: You may be right. But if the Supreme Court won't back you up then your arguments are a waste of time. So if you want to go to jail for tax evasion that's your business-just don't ask me to do the same.

Today I want to discuss a horrifying policy debate over what should be included in "gross income." Most exclusions are the result of spirited lobbying efforts by powerful special interests, such as the health insurance industry, and the debates center around forms of compensation, like employer-provided medical insurance.

Many liberal economists, however, want to tax you on benefits that you provide to yourself. This most appalling suggestion is that we should tax something known as "imputed income."

"Imputed?" you ask. I was confused when I first heard of this, too. Imputed income generally refers to benefits you provide to yourself that you otherwise would have to pay for. It isn't simple "income" because it isn't received as compensation for goods or services. Thus it is "imputed"-economists will view it as though it were income.

The classic example is living in your own house. If you own a house unencumbered by a mortgage and use it as your primary residence, then you don't pay any rent. You have the benefit of living in a house without the expense of paying rent. So you have imputed income equal to the fair market rental value of your house. There are those who would tax you on that benefit! They point out that employees who are given rent-free off-premises housing by their employers must pay tax on that benefit, and renters must pay tax on the income used to pay rent. It would only be fair, they argue, to tax you on the benefit of living rent-free in your own house!

To most of us the idea is patently absurd. I will admit, however, that the justification for taxing imputed income is a little clearer when numbers are involved. Let's say, for example, that A and B each inherit $100,000. A buys a house with the money, which could be rented for $8,000 per year, but instead he chooses to live in the house. B invests her money in the stock market, earning 8% per year. B then rents a house with the $8,000 she earns every year. Each lives in a house worth $8,000 in rental value. Yet B has $8,000 per year in taxable income, while A pays no income tax!

Still not convinced we should tax people for living in their own homes? Neither am I. The example fails to mention that both taxpayers made their choices with full knowledge of the tax consequences, or that A is now stuck with a house he may or may not be able to sell, while B can likely withdraw her 100 grand from the stock market at any time and do anything she pleases with it .

Two practical problems with taxing imputed income stand out like Bill Clinton's thick Bible. First, how do we measure it? How do we gain an accurate understanding of the rental value of a home unless we try to rent it, or unless lots of similar homes in that neighborhood are up for rent? Second, and most importantly, where does it stop? It's bad enough to say we should tax the poor sap who chose to buy a house and live in it. But what about services? As a lawyer, should I be taxed on the imputed value of will-drafting when I draft my own will? Should a gardener be taxed when he mows his own lawn, or should we tax the painter on the imputed value of house painting when he paints his own house?

For any sane person, the answer is no. Some economists justify this taxation by saying we need it to prevent economic distortion and, in a very theoretical sense, they may be right. But if we take the distortion-preventing taxation of imputed income to its logical conclusion, we will have to pay taxes on every good and service we provide to ourselves, right down to cooking our own dinners and knitting our own sweaters.

So to those economists who would tax me on the imputed income from boiling my own spaghetti I say: "Impute this!"

from Slate, 1997-Aug-3, by Steven E. Landsburg:

Property Is Theft

When your neighbor installs a burglar alarm, thoughtful burglars are encouraged to choose a different target--like your house, for example. It's rather as if your neighbor had hired an exterminator to drive all the vermin next door. On the other hand, if your neighbor installs video cameras that monitor the street in front of both your houses, he might be doing you a favor. So the spillover effects of self-protection can be either good or bad.

Consider the different ways that people self-protect against car theft. Devices like alarm systems and the "Club" have a social upside: Their proliferation might make car theft so unprofitable that potential thieves would decide to seek more useful employment (though, on the other hand, it's possible that they'll seek employment as, say, arsonists or killers for hire). But those same devices have a social downside: They encourage thieves to prey more heavily on those who haven't bought one. From a social viewpoint, if the total number of thefts does not change, then the expenditure on alarm systems is pure waste.

For a much lower cost, you can install "fake" self-protection--say, a little blinking red light that looks like it's attached to an alarm system, or a cheap piece of foam rubber that looks from a distance like the heavy metal Club. Here again you're imposing a cost on your neighbors: If these devices become common, the value of the real thing is diluted.

That point was driven home to me the last time I shopped for a car. Acura offered a security system as mandatory equipment. Toyota allowed you to buy a car without a security system. You could then go out and install your own system for considerably less than what Acura was (implicitly) charging.

But I decided that Acura's system--even at a much higher price--was the better deal. Professional car thieves know that the security system is mandatory on an Acura, and therefore know that my blinking red light is for real. With the Toyota, even if I do install a real security system, thieves might suspect me of trying to fool them and smash my windows to find out.

There's another kind of security system, available only in a few cities. The "Lojack" is a hidden radio transmitter that can be activated after your car is stolen, to lead police to the thief (or, better yet, to the chop shop that employs the thief). The transmitter is hidden randomly within the car, so thieves cannot easily find it and deactivate it.

The Lojack is completely hidden. There's no way to look at a car and know whether it has a Lojack installed. So unlike, say, the Club, a Lojack will never prevent any particular car from being stolen; it will only increase the chance of its being recovered. But from a social point of view, the Lojack has the huge advantage of helping your neighbors rather than hurting them. The Club convinces thieves to steal someone else's car instead; the Lojack convinces thieves not to steal.

And it does so with remarkable effectiveness. Economists Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt have examined the effects of the Lojack in about a dozen cities over the past 10 years (its first introduction was in Boston in 1986). Their task wasn't easy, because just as the prevalence of the Lojack affects auto-theft rates, so auto-theft rates affect the prevalence of the Lojack--first because consumers buy more security equipment when theft rates are high, and second because regulators behave differently when thefts are high.

But after sorting all this out, Ayres and Levitt found that the Lojack has an astoundingly large effect on auto-theft rates. It turns out that a 1 percent increase in Lojack sales can reduce auto-theft rates by 20 percent or more. What's happening to all those car thieves? Are they moving to other cities, or are they becoming house burglars, or are they turning into socially useful citizens? Ayres and Levitt examined these difficult questions also, and their bottom-line conclusion is that the Lojack really does prevent a lot of crime, rather than just moving it to other venues.

In fact, although it costs only about $100 a year to have a Lojack, Ayres and Levitt estimate that each individual Lojack prevents about $1,500 a year in losses due to theft. In most cases, that $1,500 benefit accrues not to the Lojack owner, but to strangers.

By the criteria that economists usually employ, this suggests that Lojacks should be heavily subsidized, just as visible security systems--like my neighbor's home burglar alarm or the Club--should be taxed. When you're doing something that makes strangers better off, you should be encouraged to do more of it.

If we all used the same insurance company, you might expect that company to supply the appropriate subsidy. As long as your Lojack reduces the number of insurance claims, the company should be willing to pay you to install it. But with multiple insurance companies, that doesn't work so well: A company that insures only 10 percent of the populace will reap only 10 percent of the Lojack's benefits, and so will undersubsidize them. Worse yet, large insurance discounts are illegal in many states.

The media have recently paid a lot of attention to research on other kinds of self-protection, most notably the work of John Lott and David Mustard on concealed handguns. But the Lojack research is in many ways more informative, because the authors were able to do a thorough job of distinguishing between benefits to the purchaser of a Lojack and benefits to the community at large. That discrepancy is the sort of thing that leads markets to fail--in this case by providing too many Clubs and not enough Lojacks.

Steven E. Landsburg, author of The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life, is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. You can e-mail him at

from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2005-Nov-22, by D.W. MacKenzie:

Is Crime Prevention Wasteful? Should It Be Taxed?

If you protect your property from thieves, are you part of the problem rather than the solution? The answer might seem obvious, but Steve Landsburg's 1997 article on Slate stirs the pot. He makes some specific claims regarding theft prevention devices. Some theft prevention devices deter criminals only from preying on the person who employs them, causing them to move on to other victims. If this merely alters the composition of victims without reducing their total number, he says, then the expenditure on theft prevention devices is socially wasteful.

For example, if a criminal avoids my property because I have a visible security system (e.g., a steering wheel Club) then I am imposing an externality on the person whom he victimizes in my place. Yet if I use some invisible device that imposes costs on criminals (e.g., a LoJack), this provides a positive externality by deterring crime for everyone, except for myself. Socially wasteful devices that shift the incidence of crime should be taxed, he says, and socially productive devices that reduce the total amount of crime should be subsidized.

There are three general problems with this argument. First, its internal logic is faulty. In order for taxation and subsidization of crime prevention devices to result in higher "social welfare" the political process by which taxes and subsidies get established must be efficient. If people can bargain over public policies at zero cost, then we can arrive at efficient subsidies and taxes without any social waste from politics.

In reality, political activism consumes time and various goods — both of which could be put to making consumer goods and services. There is a real cost to creating efficient taxes and subsidies. Also, taxes and subsidies may be used to transfer income from the politically weak to the politically influential. The fiscal powers of government can and often are used to transfer income rather than for optimal social policy.

Such use of governmental powers is in fact a kind of theft. If I use the government to take some of your income, simply because I have the power to do so, this is really no different than a situation where I used my ability to pick your pocket or crack your safe to gain at your expense.

Landsburg has committed the Nirvana Fallacy. The idea that subsidies and taxes necessarily lead to economic efficiency derives from a false comparison between an imperfect private sector and a perfect public sector. If my security system causes criminals to attack my neighbor, he could lobby the government for corrective taxes and subsidies, or he could negotiate some agreement with me. (Or he could just buy himself a security system!)

The cost of negotiation could make a contract between us impossible. Costless bargaining with politicians would solve the "problem," but politics is not costless. In fact, the imperfections of the public sector can easily outweigh the imperfections of the private sector. They often do.

Also, externalities do not necessarily matter. Externalities only matter if they are relevant at the margin of production. It could be that the people who buy LoJacks for their cars already provide enough "positive externalities" to cover the social benefits. The conclusions of his article are unfounded.

Second, Landsburg aims at improving "social welfare." While there is nothing wrong with the intention of making the world better for all, there are serious problems with knowing when you have done so. It is quite certain that some theft devices merely shift the incidence of crime. Knowing when this is the case is rather difficult. Landsburg admits this.

Yet, there is more to this matter. Even if we know when there has been a shift in the incidence of crime we do not know the value of the crime to the persons involved. The one who bought a security device has given us some indication of the value of being free from crime. This is shown by the money he or she spent on the device. The one who gets robbed instead has indicated that it was not worth spending the money on such a device. Has social welfare been harmed? Perhaps it would be socially wasteful to subsidize security devices for people who value them so little that they refuse to spend money on them.

Landsburg might reply that there are externalities involved. Externalities derive from unexpressed preferences. We do not know their magnitude. If we assume that the value of avoiding theft is the same for everyone, then we could reach his conclusions.

This is most unlikely. The people who spend the most on security are likely the ones who have the most to lose from crime. There is no way of proving this, but it seems most likely. His scenario where people fail to protect their property even though it is just as important to them is rather unlikely.

Externalities may or may not be relevant at the margin. They may or may not be large relevant to the social waste that results from government efforts to deal with them. Since they are unseen (other than on Professor Landsburg's blackboard) we have no reliable method of measuring them. We could only hope that the political process that determines taxes and subsidies is efficient enough to address significant externality problems in an efficient manner. There is good reason to lack such faith.

Third, Landsburg seems to think that we are somehow obligated to promote social welfare instead of our own. Now, I don't want criminals to prey upon my neighbors, but I am not responsible for the failure of others to protect their own property. The fact that we each have property rights means that we have a responsibility to maintain and protect our own property with useful anti-theft devices.

The idea that I should be forced to pay for theft prevention devices for someone else's property is a step towards collectivism. Of course, we already pay taxes for police and courts. But Landsburg is arguing for additional extension of the public sector into the provision of theft prevention devices. Most people think of the police and courts as a basic function of government, as something that we are automatically entitled to as citizens in civil society.

Should devices that are specific to the protection of one person's property be financed in the same way as courts? Landsburg is thinking strictly in terms of utilitarianism. Ironically, he is discussing the protection of private property rights without any notion of the right of individuals to own property. Property then becomes merely a utilitarian tool for promoting social welfare. Every imperfection that leads to social waste then justifies government infringement upon property rights to protect them.

Private expenditures on alarms and other theft prevention devices do much to prevent crime. While there are certainly some externalities, they are not necessarily serious and they do not necessarily need to be addressed. As a practical matter, they are impossible to measure.

Government has its own imperfections that damage the case for corrective taxes and subsidies. The efficiency, or utilitarian, case Landsburg makes is far from proven. The idea of individual rights provides a far more clear basis for property rights. The taxes and subsidies that Dr Landsburg suggests lack both utilitarian and ethical justification.

D.W. MacKenzie teaches economics at Ramapo College. Send him MAIL and see his Mises.org Daily Articles Archive. Comment on the blog.

from TPD 1999-Oct-21, from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, by Nicholas Kyriazi:

Government: As 'head' or 'hand'?

From funding the arts in the United States to forbidding women to expose their faces in Afghanistan, government is often the unseen instigator.

Perhaps western civilization can be excused for envisioning society as a human body with government as the head and the population as the body, controlled by the head. This is certainly not what our Founding Fathers had in mind, however, and this way of constituting society has created many problems which, if not altered, will continue the decline of western civilization.

The proper constitution for a free society, which has no natural analogy, is one in which government serves as a hand controlled by many heads. Since multiple heads can rarely agree on things, however, the number of issues brought before them to decide is best kept to a minimum.

Two things that most everyone can agree upon are that no one has the right to initiate force against someone else, and that people should honor their commitments. Government should limit its role to these two areas. No more than that. Because any more than that and, instead of being a guard dog or neutral arbiter, government begins to do things that favor one citizen, or group of citizens, over the others. And that is the root cause of most of society's current problems, because no one wants to be forced to support a government that picks favorites, unless it's them.

FAVORITISM

Government favoritism is impossible to avoid when it strays from being protector and enforcer. From funding the arts in the United States (taking money from those who do not patronize the arts and giving it to those who do, or favoring one artist over another), giving government jobs to Protestants instead of Catholics in Northern Ireland, or to Serbs instead of Croats or Muslims in Yugoslavia, to forbidding women to expose their faces in Afghanistan, government is the unseen instigator in many conflicts throughout the world.

And, instead of attempting to end the favoritism by withdrawing government from such areas of intervention, people fight for control of government. This is certainly understandable, since the bearer of gifts (stolen or not) is popular and powerful, and forcing others to behave as you wish is a powerful lure. But the solution to our problems is not wresting control of government from those who oppress us so that we can oppress them. The solution is to reduce government to its most basic role: protecting its citizens.

This philosophy is called Libertarianism.

In a libertarian society, you would not care what country you were in because it wouldn't affect you in any material way. Jews and Arabs (or Catholics and Protestants, or Serbs, Croats, and Muslims) would not be fighting for control of land to guarantee that they were not unfavorably treated by those in control of government.

In the U.S. where we don't usually have such life-threatening favoritism by government, the situation is more one of forcing everyone to pay for something used by only a few. Whether it is welfare for the poor or the rich; grants to orchestras or sports teams; subsidies for farmers of peanuts, sugar, cattle, or tobacco; government-subsidized insurance or repeated disaster assistance for earthquake-, tornado-, hurricane-, mudslide-, or brushfire-prone areas; government has no authority - constitutional, moral, or divine - to intervene.

However, government has for so long exceeded its authority, and to such an egregious extent, that few people even think to question it. Perhaps when the police walk into your house some night and tell you to turn off the TV and go to bed because it's late and you need to be rested for work tomorrow, then we will rebel.

Or perhaps we will go to bed.

GOVERNMENT EXPANSION

It's not difficult to understand how government has gone from being our servant to our master: ``government'' is such a nebulous term that its duties are not well defined in anyone's mind. The duties have become whatever an office-holder decides them to be. Perhaps, instead of a general city government, we should have a separate police agency, a fire brigade, a road-maintenance administration, a park system, a zoning board, and water and sewerage authorities. Constituted in such a way, we reduce the likelihood that agency heads will stray very far from their authorized roles. The heads of these agencies would be directly elected by us and would be judged by how well they used our tax dollars to perform the services for which they were hired. No more eminent domain or stadiums monkey business. [Actually, if you constitute the functional components of the local state infrastructure in such a disconnected way, each component is even more likely to expand beyond its chartered role. The key is stringent chartering and Constitutional constraint on a unified, coordinated, and accountable federal state. -Ed.]

Over the past 200 years, we have given government an inch and it has taken a mile. This is also not difficult to understand. Imagine that you have authorized your bank to permit utility companies to directly withdraw payments from your checking account. Now imagine that the bank is approached by a local day-care center which is seeking funding to pay for puppet shows for the children in its daily care.

The bank president thinks that this is a good idea and you get a notice in the mail that the bank is now deducting $5 a month from your account. If you complain, you are reprimanded - ``You support the children, don't you?'' If you have children in that day-care center, you may not mind that others are paying for their entertainment. Or if you work for the puppet show company, you would certainly support it. If the government robs Peter to pay Paul, it can always count on Paul's support.

What the liberals fail to consider, however, is that, if it's not voluntary, it's not charity - it's theft.

This type of situation, multiplied many times over, in many different ways, whereby enough people think that they are getting some benefit from such theft, reveals how we got to our current state. Everyone is forced to throw money into a big pot, and then everyone tries to get out more than they put in.

Libertarians, however, see through the charade and believe that everyone should directly pay for what they use. It's simpler, you get exactly what you want for a competitive price, and the politicians don't take a cut for deciding how to spend your money. A libertarian society may not be a utopia, but it's probably the closest we can get, given that human beings are involved.

from the Washington Post, 2005-Nov-20, p.B7, by George F. Will:

IPod's Missed Manners

Let's be good cosmopolitans and offer sociological explanations rather than moral judgments about students having sex during the day in high schools, as The Post reported. Sociology discerns connections, and there may be one between the fact that teenagers are relaxing from academic rigors by enjoying sex in the school auditorium and the fact that Americans soon will be able to watch pornography and prime-time television programs such as "Desperate Housewives" -- and, for the high-minded, C-SPAN -- on their cell phones and video iPods in public.

The connection is this: Many people have no notion of propriety when in the presence of other people, because they are not actually in the presence of other people, even when they are in public.

With everyone chatting on cell phones when not floating in iPod-land, "this is an age of social autism, in which people just can't see the value of imagining their impact on others." We are entertaining ourselves into inanition. (There are Web sites for people with Internet addiction. Think about that.) And multiplying technologies of portable entertainments will enable "limitless self-absorption," which will make people solipsistic, inconsiderate and antisocial. Hence manners are becoming unmannerly in this "age of lazy moral relativism combined with aggressive social insolence."

So says Lynne Truss in her latest trumpet-blast of a book, "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door." Her previous wail of despair was "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," which established her as -- depending on your sensibility -- a comma and apostrophe fascist (the liberal sensibility) or a plucky constable combating anarchy (the conservative sensibility).

Good punctuation, she says, is analogous to good manners because it treats readers with respect. "All the important rules," she writes, "surely boil down to one: remember you are with other people; show some consideration ." Manners, which have been called "quotidian ethics," arise from real or -- this, too, is important in lubricating social frictions -- feigned empathy.

"People," says Truss, "are happier when they have some idea of where they stand and what the rules are." But today's entitlement mentality, which is both a cause and a consequence of the welfare state, manifests itself in the attitude that it is all right to do whatever one has a right to do. Which is why acrimony has enveloped a coffee shop on Chicago's affluent North Side, where the proprietor posted a notice that children must "behave and use their indoor voices." The proprietor, battling what he calls an "epidemic" of antisocial behavior, told the New York Times that parents protesting his notice "have a very strong sense of entitlement."

A thoroughly modern parent, believing that children must be protected from feelings injurious to self-esteem, says: "Johnny, the fact that you did something bad does not mean you are bad for doing it." We have, Truss thinks, "created people who will not stand to be corrected in any way." Furthermore, it is a brave, or foolhardy, man who shows traditional manners toward women. In today's world of "hair-trigger sensitivity," to open a door for a woman is to play what Truss calls Gallantry Russian Roulette: You risk a high-decibel lecture on gender politics.

One writer on manners has argued that a nation's greatness is measured not only by obedience of laws but also by "obedience to the unenforceable." But enforcement of manners can be necessary. The well-named David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, recently decreed a dress code for players. It is politeness to the league's customers who, weary of seeing players dressed in "edgy" hip-hop "street" or "gangsta" styles, want to be able to distinguish the Bucks and Knicks from the Bloods and Crips. Stern also understands that players who wear "in your face" clothes of a kind, and in a manner, that evokes Sing Sing more than Brooks Brothers might be more inclined to fight on the floor and to allow fights to migrate to the stands, as happened last year.

Because manners are means of extending respect, especially to strangers, this question arises: Do manners and virtue go together? Truss thinks so, in spite of the possibility of "blood-stained dictators who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phones in a crowded train compartment to order mass executions."

Actually, manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related -- as a foundation is related to a house -- to the word civilization.

Here a British socialist makes his argument for institutionalization of Benthamic hedonism. He neatly rationalizes radically progressive income taxation, and characterizes a person working hard to get ahead as “pollution”. He neatly vindicates Winston Churchill's description of socialism as the “gospel of envy”. For Layard, happiness is the highest goal of mankind, and he is, well, happy to say so.

from Prospect Magazine, 2005-Mar, by Richard Layard:

Happiness is back

Growing incomes in western societies no longer make us happier, and more individualistic, competitive societies make some of us positively unhappy. Public policy should take its cue once more from Bentham's utilitarianism, unfashionable for many decades but now vindicated by modern neuroscience

Over the last 50 years, we in the west have enjoyed unparalleled economic growth. We have better homes, cars, holidays, jobs, education and above all health. According to standard economic theory, this should have made us happier. But surveys show otherwise. When Britons or Americans are asked how happy they are, they report no improvement over the last 50 years. More people suffer from depression, and crime—another indicator of dissatisfaction—is also much higher.

These facts challenge many of the priorities we have set ourselves both as societies and as individuals. The truth is that we are in a situation previously unknown to man. When most people exist near the breadline, material progress does indeed make them happier. People in the rich world (above, say, $20,000 a head per year) are happier than people in poorer countries, and people in poor countries do become happier as they become richer. But when material discomfort has been banished, extra income becomes much less important than our relationships with each other: with family, with friends and in the community. The danger is that we sacrifice relationships too much in pursuit of higher income.

The desire to be happy is central to our nature. And, following the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, I want a society in which people are as happy as possible and in which each person's happiness counts equally. That should be the philosophy for our age, the guide for public policy and for individual action. And it should come to replace the intense individualism which has failed to make us happier.

Utilitarianism has, however, been out of fashion for several generations, partly because of the belief that happiness was too unfathomable. In recent years, that has begun to change. The "science" of happiness, which has emerged in the US in the last 20 years, supports the idea that happiness is an objective dimension of experience. (One of its fathers, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics.) At every instant we feel good or bad, on a scale that runs from misery to bliss. Our feeling good or bad is affected by many factors, running from physical comfort to our inner sense of meaning. What matters is the totality of our happiness over months and years, not just passing pleasures. The new science may enable us to measure this and try to explain it.

To measure happiness, we can ask a person how happy he is, or we can ask his friends or independent investigators. These reports yield similar results. The breakthrough has been in neuroscience. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has identified an area in the left front of the brain where good feelings are experienced, and another in the right front where bad feelings are experienced. Activity in these brain areas alters sharply when people have good or bad experiences. Those who describe themselves as happy are more active on the left side than unhappy people, and less active on the right side. So the old behaviourist idea that we cannot know how other people feel is now under attack.

The challenge is to work out what this means for political priorities in free societies like ours. If we accept that governments can and should aim to maximise happiness, rather than simply income, how might this affect specific choices in public policy?

W e must start by establishing the key factors affecting a person's happiness. Family and personal life come top in every study, and work and community life rank high. Health and freedom are also crucial, and money counts too, but in a very specific way.

I will start with money—or more specifically with income tax policy. In any society, richer people are happier than poor people. Yet as a western country becomes richer, its people overall do not become happier. The reason for this is that over time our standards and expectations rise to meet our income. A Gallup poll has asked Americans each year: "What is the smallest amount of money a family of four needs to get along in this community?" The sums mentioned rise in line with average incomes. Since people are always comparing their incomes with what others have, or with what they are used to, they only feel better off if they move up relative to the norm.

This process can have counterproductive effects. I have an incentive to work and earn more: it will make me happier. So do other members of society, who also care about their relative standard of life. Since society as a whole cannot raise its position relative to itself, the effort which its members devote to that end could be said to be a waste—the balance between leisure and work has been shifted "inefficiently" towards work.

To reinforce the case, let me recast it in terms of status, which may derive as much from the earning of income as the spending of it. People work, in part at least, to improve their status. But status is a system of ranking: one, two, three and so on. So if one person improves his status, someone else loses an equal amount. It is a zero-sum game: private life sacrificed in order to increase status is a waste from the point of view of society as a whole. That is why the rat race is so destructive: we lose family life and peace of mind in pursuing something whose total cannot be altered.

Or so we would—if we had no income taxes. But income taxes discourage work. Most economists consider this a disadvantage. They say that when someone pays £100 in taxes, it hurts more than that—it has an "excess burden"—because of the distortion away from work. But without taxes there would be an inefficient distortion towards work. So taxes up to a certain level can help to improve the work-life balance of citizens and thus increase the overall sense of wellbeing in a society. They operate like a tax on pollution. When I earn more and adopt a more expensive lifestyle, this puts pressure on others to keep up—my action raises the norm and makes them less satisfied with what they have. I am like the factory owner who pours out his soot on to the neighbours' laundry. And the classic economic remedy for pollution is to make the polluter pay.

People sometimes object to this argument on the grounds that it is pandering to envy or preventing self-improvement. It is true that such measures do reduce some kinds of freedom. But we cannot just wish away the pervasiveness of status comparisons; the desire for status is wired into our genes. Studies of monkeys show how it works: when a male monkey is moved from a group where he is top into a group where his status is lower, his brain experiences a sharp fall in serotonin—the neurotransmitter most clearly associated with happiness. So if the human status race is dysfunctional—from the point of view of the overall happiness in society—it makes sense to reduce freedom a small amount through taxation policy.

Those who want to cut taxes should explain why they think we should work harder and sacrifice our family and community life in pursuit of a zero-sum status race. They may say that hard work is good for the consumer. But workers are the same people as consumers. There is no point killing ourselves at work in the interest of ourselves as consumers.

And there is another consideration: if we work harder and raise our standard of living, we first appreciate it but then we get used to it. Research shows that people do not adequately foresee this process of habituation, or fully realise that once they have experienced a superior lifestyle they will feel they have to continue it. They will in effect become addicted to it. Once again, the standard economic approach to addictive spending is to tax it.

These are arguments for taxation not as a way to raise money, but in order to restrain activity which is polluting and addictive, and to help to maintain a sensible work-life balance. This should become part of the social democratic case against income tax cuts. There is also the issue of equity. The main argument for redistribution has always been that an extra pound gives less extra happiness to a rich person than a poor person. Until recently this was pure speculation; survey evidence now confirms its truth.

How else can we dampen the impact of the rat race? We have to start from human nature as it is, but we can also affect values and behaviour through the signals our institutions send out. An explicit focus on happiness would change attitudes to many aspects of policy, including in education and training, regional policy and performance-related pay.

In one sense, what people most want is respect. They seek economic status because it brings respect. But we can increase or decrease the weight we give to status. In an increasingly competitive, meritocratic society, life will become tougher for people in the bottom half of the ability range unless we develop broader criteria for respect. We should respect people who co-operate with others at no gain to themselves, and who show skill and effort at whatever level. That is why it is so important to enable everyone to develop a skill. In Britain, this means ensuring that all young people can take up an apprenticeship if they wish, so that those who have not enjoyed academic success at school can experience professional pride and avoid starting adult life believing themselves to be failures.

Equally, we should be sceptical of institutions which give greater weight to rank, such as performance-related pay (PRP). The idea of PRP is that by paying people for what they achieve, we provide the best possible system of incentives. Where we can measure people's achievement accurately, we should pay them for it—people like travelling salesmen, foreign exchange dealers, or racehorse jockeys. And where achievement depends on a team effort, we should reward the team, provided their performance can be unambiguously measured.

But management gurus are often after something more: they want a year by year alignment between individual pay and individual performance. The problem is that in most jobs there is no objective measure of individual performance, so people must in effect be evaluated against their peers. Even if the scores purport to be objective rather than relative, most people know how many are in each grade. The effect is to put them into a ranking. If everybody agreed about the rankings, it would not be that bad. But studies have shown quite low correlations between one evaluator's rankings and another's. So a lot of self-respect (and often very little pay) is being attached to an uncertain ranking process that fundamentally alters the relationship of co-operation between an employee and his boss, and between an employee and his peers.

Some comparisons between people are inevitable, since hierarchy is necessary and unavoidable. Some people get promoted and others do not. Moreover, those who get promoted must be paid more, since they are talented and the employer wishes to attract talent. So pay is important at key moments as a way of affecting people's decisions about occupations or in choosing between employers. Fortunately, promotions and moves between employers are still relatively infrequent for most people. In everyday working life, relative pay rates are not usually uppermost in their thoughts. PRP changes all that.

Economists and politicians tend to assume that when financial motives for performance are increased, other motives remain the same. But that is not so, as this example shows. At a childcare centre in Israel, parents were often late to pick up their children, so fines were introduced for lateness. The result was a surprise: more people were late. They now saw being late as something they were entitled to do as long as they paid for it; the fine became a price.

The professional ethic should be cherished. If we do not cultivate it, we may not even improve performance, let alone produce workers who enjoy their work. Financial incentives have useful effects on the careers people choose, and the employers they choose to work for. But once someone has joined an organisation, peer respect is also a powerful motivator. We should exploit this motivation. Instead, government over the last 30 years has demoralised workers by constantly appealing to motives which they consider to be "lower."

If we want a happier society, we should focus most on the experiences which people value for their intrinsic worth and not because other people have them—above all, on relationships in the family, at work and in the community. It seems likely that the extra comforts we now enjoy have increased our happiness somewhat, but that deteriorating relationships have made us less happy. What should social policy try to achieve, notwithstanding its limited leverage over private life? Here are some examples.

Divorce and broken homes are ever more common. Research shows that the children of broken homes are more prone to depression in adulthood. To protect children, the state should act to try to make family life more manageable, through better school hours, flexible hours at work, means-tested childcare, and maternity and paternity leave. Parenting classes should also be compulsory in the school curriculum and an automatic part of antenatal care.

Unemployment is as bad an experience as divorce, as research shows. It offends our need to be needed. So low unemployment should be a major objective. Our government has done well, through sensible policies of welfare to work which have avoided generating inflationary pressures. Good policy has also halved unemployment in Denmark and Holland. But Germany and, above all, France, have been slow to adopt these policies. Poor policies towards the unemployed and bad wage policies are causing high European unemployment. Job security is not the main issue.

Job security is something people want, and reasonable protection is something a rich society can afford to provide. The same is true of good working conditions, if stress is not to drive many weaker souls into inactivity and dependence on the state. It is absurd to argue that globalisation has reduced our ability to provide a civilised life for our workers. On the contrary, it has increased it—provided that pay rises only in line with productivity.

The rise in crime between 1950 and 1980 is the most striking demonstration that economic growth does not automatically increase social harmony. This rise occurred in every advanced country except Japan, and its causes are not completely understood.

One cause is anonymity. Crime rates are high when there is geographical mobility. Indeed, the best predictor of crime in a community is the number of people each person knows within 15 minutes of their home: the more they know, the lower the crime rate. So we should try to sustain communities and not rely on "getting on your bike" or international migration to solve our problems, as free-market economists often urge. The case for regional support to help communities prosper is much stronger when you focus on happiness than when GDP alone is the goal.

A focus on happiness might also help us to rethink priorities in healthcare. One of the oldest problems afflicting humanity is mental illness. A third of us will become mentally ill at some time in our lives, and at least half of us will have to cope with mental illness in the family. Of the most unhappy 5 per cent in our society, 20 per cent are poor (in the bottom fifth of the income scale) but 40 per cent are mentally ill. So if we want to produce a happier society, the priority for the NHS should be to spend a lot more on mental health.

Only 15 per cent of people with clinical depression see a specialist (a psychiatrist or psychologist). For the rest, it is ten minutes with a GP and some pills. Most depressed people want psychotherapy in order to understand what is going on inside them. Clinical trials show that the right therapy is as effective as drugs, and lasts longer. But in most areas, therapy is simply not available on the NHS, or involves an intolerable wait. If we want to reduce misery, the NHS should offer therapy to the mentally ill and then help in getting back to work.

Finally, there is the ethos in which our children grow up. One of the most depressing surveys in recent years was conducted for the World Health Organisation. As part of it, 11-15 year olds were asked whether they agreed that "most of the students in my class(es) are kind and helpful." The proportion saying "yes" was over 75 per cent in Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany, 53 per cent in the US and under 46 per cent in Russia and England.

These findings are in line with surveys in which adults are asked about trust. The question often asked is: "Would you say that most people can be trusted—or would you say that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?" In Britain and the US, those who say: "Yes, most people can be trusted" has fallen from 55 per cent in 1960 to under 35 per cent today.

Since the dawn of man, older people have lamented a supposed decline of morals. But there is some evidence that it is actually happening now. At various times, samples of Americans have been asked whether they believe people lead "as good lives—moral and honest—as they used to." In 1952, as many said "yes" as said "no." By 1998, three times as many said "no."

We live in an age of unprecedented individualism. The highest obligation many people feel is to make the most of themselves, to realise their potential. This is a terrifying and lonely objective. Of course they feel obligations to other people too, but these are not based on any clear set of ideas. The old religious worldview is gone; so too is the postwar religion of social and national solidarity. We are left with no concept of the common good or collective meaning.

Contemporary common sense provides two dominant ideas—derived (erroneously) from Charles Darwin and Adam Smith. From Darwin's theory of evolution is taken the idea that unless you look after your own interests, no one will. From Smith's analysis of the market comes the idea that selfishness is not so destructive because through voluntary exchange we shall all become as well off as is possible, given our resources, technology and tastes.

But our tastes are not given, and every successful society has always concerned itself with the tastes of its members. It has encouraged community feelings and offered a concept of the common good.

So what should be our concept of the common good? During the 18th-century Enlightenment, Bentham and others argued that a good society was one where its members were as happy as possible. So public policy should aim at producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and private decisions likewise should aim at the greatest happiness of all those affected. In the 19th century, this ideal inspired many social reforms. But in the 20th century it came under attack from two quarters.

The first questioned the possibility of knowing what other people felt. According to this "behaviourism," all we can do is to observe people's behaviour. We can make no inference about their inner states. This inhuman idea started in psychology with John Watson and Pavlov, and percolated into economics through Lionel Robbins, John Hicks and others. If we accept this approach, we can no longer think of happiness as the goal. All that can be said about a person is what opportunities are open to him. If he has lost the facility for enjoying them, that is irrelevant. From this it is a short step to defining individual welfare in terms of purchasing power, and national welfare in terms of leisure-adjusted GDP. We desperately need to replace GDP, however adjusted, by more subtle measures of national wellbeing.

Fortunately, the tide in psychology has turned, and common sense has returned. We could never have lived together if we had had no idea what others felt. And now our idea is confirmed by solid psychology and neuroscience. So the Benthamite rule provides an increasingly practical yardstick for public policy and for private ethics. I would modify it in one way only—to give extra weight to improving the happiness of those who are least happy, thus ruling out the oppression of minorities. (This also deals with the superficial objection to utilitarianism that it would vindicate the brutal abuse of a small minority if such abuse made the majority happier.)

The second line of attack on the greatest happiness rule was philosophical. From the beginning it had its critics, and an alternative philosophy based on individual rights became fashionable. But this has two drawbacks. First, it is difficult to resolve the dilemma when rights conflict. And second, the philosophy is highly individualistic. It tells you what you are entitled to expect, and what you should not do. But it provides little guidance on what you should do—what career you should adopt, or how you should behave when your marriage goes sour.

The Benthamite rule provides a framework for thinking about these issues. The philosophy of rights does not: its vision of the common good is too limited to guide us in working for the good of others. But is the Benthamite rule itself solid, and can it include the concept of rights? Let us consider two big objections.

First, what is so special about happiness? Why the greatest possible happiness? Why not the greatest possible health, autonomy, accomplishment, freedom and so on? If I ask you why health is good, you can give reasons: people should not feel pain. On autonomy: people feel better when they can control their lives. And so on. But if I ask you why happiness is good, you will say that it is self-evident. And the reason for this is deep in our biology. We are programmed to enjoy experiences that are good for our survival, which is why we have survived.

We have also been programmed in part to have a sense of fairness. If a meal has to be divided, most of us accept (sometimes grudgingly) that it should be divided 50:50—on the basis that, in principle, others count as much as we do.

If you put this idea together with the fact that each of us wants to be happy, you arrive at the Benthamite principle. It is both idealistic and realistic. It puts others on an equal footing with ourselves, where they should be, but, unlike some moral systems, it also allows us to take our own happiness into account.

The second objection is that the rule encourages expediency. Not so. We all know we cannot evaluate every action moment by moment against the overall Benthamite principle. That is why we have to have sub-rules, like honesty, promise-keeping, kindness and so on, which we normally follow as a matter of course. And that is also why we need clearly defined rights embedded in a constitution. But when moral rules or legal rights conflict with each other, we need an overarching principle to guide us, which is what Bentham provides.

The rule is also criticised for putting ends before means, for taking only the consequences of actions to be worthy of moral consideration and not the nature of actions themselves. But this is wrong. For the consequences of a decision include the action, and not only what happens as a result of it. A horrible action—imprisoning an innocent in order to save lives, say—would require extraordinarily good and certain outcomes to justify it. The direct effects of an action should be considered when weighing up its morality, just as the results of it are.

To become happier, we have to change our inner attitudes as much as our outward circumstances. I am talking of the perennial philosophy which enables us to find the positive force in ourselves, and to see the positive side in others. Such compassion, to ourselves and others, can be learned. It has been well described in Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence, and it ought to be taught in schools. Every city should have a policy for promoting a healthier philosophy of life in its youngsters and for helping them to distinguish between a hedonistic addiction to superficial pleasures and real happiness.

So my hope is that in this new century we can finally adopt the greatest happiness of humankind as our concept of the common good. This would have two results. It would serve as a clear guide to policy. But, even more important, it would inspire us in our daily lives to take more pleasure in the happiness of others, and to promote it. In this way we might all become less self-absorbed and more happy.

Richard Layard has been a long-standing adviser to the Labour party on labour market matters, and is a Labour peer. His book "Happiness: Lessons from a new science" (£17.99) is published by Allen Lane on 3rd March

from Prospect Magazine via The Guardian, 2004-Feb-24, by David Goodhart:

Discomfort of strangers

David Goodhart's essay challenging liberals to rethink their attitudes to diversity and the welfare state has provoked a bitter debate among progressive thinkers. Here, for the first time in a national newspaper, we publish it in full. [The original title was “Too Diverse?”, published in Prospect 2004-Feb. Goodhart founded Prospect in 1995 and is its editor. -AMPP Ed.]

Britain in the 50s was a country stratified by class and region. But in most of its cities, suburbs, towns and villages there was a good chance of predicting the attitudes, even the behaviour, of the people living in your immediate neighbourhood.

In many parts of Britain today that is no longer true. The country has long since ceased to be Orwell's "family" (albeit with the wrong members in charge).

To some people this is a cause of regret and disorientation - a change that they associate with the growing incivility of modern urban life. To others it is a sign of the inevitable, and welcome, march of modernity. After three centuries of homogenisation through industrialisation, urbanisation, nation-building and war, the British have become freer and more varied. Fifty years of peace, wealth and mobility have allowed a greater diversity in lifestyles and values. To this "value diversity" has been added ethnic diversity through two big waves of immigration: the mainly Commonwealth immigration from the West Indies and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by asylum-driven migrants from Europe, Africa and the greater Middle East in the late 1990s.

The diversity, individualism and mobility that characterise developed economies - especially in the era of globalisation - mean that more of our lives is spent among strangers. Ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, humans have been used to dealing with people from beyond their own extended kin groups. The difference now in a developed country such as Britain is that we not only live among stranger citizens but we must share with them. We share public services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes, and we share in a democratic conversation - filtered by the media - about the collective choices we wish to make. All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture is being eroded.

And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity (high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system) and diversity (equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life). The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left's recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.

It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the "progressive dilemma". Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: "The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn't do?' This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."

These words alerted me to how the progressive dilemma lurks beneath many aspects of current politics: national tax and redistribution policies; the asylum and immigration debate; development aid budgets; European Union integration and spending on the poorer southern and east European states; and even the tensions between America (built on political ideals and mass immigration) and Europe (based on nation states with core ethnic-linguistic solidarities).

Thinking about the conflict between solidarity and diversity is another way of asking a question as old as human society itself: who is my brother, with whom do I share mutual obligations? The traditional conservative, Burkean view is that our affinities ripple out from our families and localities to the nation, and not very far beyond. That view is pitted against a liberal universalist one that sees us in some sense equally obligated to all human beings, from Bolton to Burundi - an idea that is associated with the universalist aspects of Christianity and Islam, with Kantian universalism and with left-wing internationalism. Science is neutral in this dispute, or rather it stands on both sides of the argument. Evolutionary psychology stresses both the universality of most human traits and - through the notion of kin selection and reciprocal altruism - the instinct to favour our own. Social psychologists also argue that the tendency to perceive in-groups and out-groups, however ephemeral, is innate. In any case, Burkeans claim to have common sense on their side. They argue that we feel more comfortable with, and are readier to share with and sacrifice for, those with whom we have shared histories and similar values. To put it bluntly - most of us prefer our own kind.

The category "own kind", or in-group, will set alarm bells ringing in the minds of many readers. So it is worth stressing what preferring our own kind does not mean, even for a Burkean. It does not mean that we are necessarily hostile to other kinds or that we cannot empathise with outsiders. (There are those who do dislike other kinds, but in Britain they seem to be quite a small minority.) In complex societies, most of us belong simultaneously to many in-groups - family, profession, class, hobby, locality, nation - and an ability to move with ease between groups is a sign of maturity. An in-group is not, except in the case of families, a natural or biological category and the people who are deemed to belong to it can change quickly, as we saw so disastrously in Bosnia. Certainly, those we include in our in-group could be a pretty diverse crowd, especially in a city such as London.

Moreover, modern liberal societies cannot be based on a simple assertion of group identity - the very idea of the rule of law, of equal legal treatment for everyone regardless of religion, wealth, gender or ethnicity, conflicts with it. On the other hand, if you deny the assumption that humans are social, group-based primates with constraints, however imprecise, on their willingness to share, you find yourself having to defend some implausible positions: for example, that we should spend as much on development aid as on the NHS, or that Britain should have no immigration controls at all. The implicit "calculus of affinity" in media reporting of disasters is easily mocked - two dead Britons will get the same space as 200 Spaniards or 2,000 Somalis. Yet every day we make similar calculations in the distribution of our own resources. Even a well-off, liberal-minded Briton who already donates to charities will spend, say, £200 on a child's birthday party, knowing that such money could, in the right hands, save the life of a child in the third world. The extent of our obligation to those to whom we are not connected through either kinship or citizenship is in part a purely private, charitable decision. But it also has policy implications, and not just in the field of development aid. For example, significant NHS resources are spent each year on foreign visitors, especially in London. Many of us might agree in theory that the needs of desperate outsiders are often greater than our own. But we would object if our own parent or child received inferior treatment because of resources consumed by non-citizens.

Is it possible to reconcile these observations about human preferences with our increasingly open, fluid and value-diverse societies? At one level, yes. Our liberal democracies still work fairly well; indeed it is one of the achievements of modernity that people have learned to tolerate and share with people very unlike themselves. (Until the 20th century, today's welfare state would have been considered contrary to human nature.) On the other hand, the logic of solidarity, with its tendency to draw boundaries, and the logic of diversity, with its tendency to cross them, do at times pull apart. Thanks to the erosion of collective norms and identities, in particular of class and nation, and the recent surge of immigration into Europe, this may be such a time.

The modern idea of citizenship goes some way to accommodating the tension between solidarity and diversity. Citizenship is not an ethnic, blood-and-soil concept, but a more abstract political idea - implying equal legal, political and social rights (and duties) for people inhabiting a given national space. But citizenship is not just an abstract idea about rights and duties; for most of us it is something we do not choose but are born into - it arises out of a shared history, shared experiences and, often, shared suffering; as the American writer Alan Wolfe puts it: "Behind every citizen lies a graveyard."

Both aspects of citizenship imply a notion of mutual obligation. Critics have argued that this idea of national community is anachronistic - swept away by globalisation, individualism and migration - but it still has political resonance. When politicians talk about the "British people" they refer not just to a set of individuals with specific rights and duties, but to a group of people with a special commitment to one another. Membership of such a community implies acceptance of moral rules, however fuzzy, that underpin the laws and welfare systems of the state.

In the rhetoric of the modern liberal state, the glue of ethnicity ("people who look and talk like us") has been replaced with the glue of values ("people who think and behave like us"). But British values grow, in part, out of a specific history and even geography. Too rapid a change in the make-up of a community not only changes the present, it also, potentially, changes our link with the past. As Bob Rowthorn wrotein Prospect in February 2003, we may lose a sense of responsibility for our own history - the good things as well as the shameful things in it - if too many citizens no longer identify with it.

Is this a problem? Surely Britain in 2004 has become too diverse and complex to give expression to a common culture in the present, let alone the past. Diversity in this context is usually code for ethnic difference. But that is only one part of the diversity story, albeit the easiest to quantify and most emotionally charged. The progressive dilemma is also revealed in the value and generational rifts that emerged with such force in the 1960s. At the Prospect roundtable mentioned above, Patricia Hewitt, now secretary of state for trade and industry, recalled an example of generational conflict from her Leicester constituency. She was canvassing on a council estate when an elderly white couple saw her Labour rosette and one of them said: "We're not voting Labour - you hand taxpayers' money to our daughter." She apparently lived on a nearby estate, with three children all by different fathers, and her parents had cut her off (evidence that even close genetic ties do not always produce solidarity).

Greater diversity can produce real conflicts of values and interests, but it also generates unjustified fears. Exposure to a wider spread of lifestyles, plus more mobility and better education, has helped to combat some of those fears - a trend reinforced by popular culture and the expansion of higher education (graduates are notably more tolerant than non-graduates). There is less overt homophobia, sexism or racism (and much more racial intermarriage) in Britain than 30 years ago and racial discrimination is the most politically sensitive form of unfairness. But 31% of people still admit to being racially prejudiced. Researchers such as Isaac Marks at London's Institute of Psychiatry warn that it is not possible to neatly divide the population between a small group of xenophobes and the rest. Feelings of suspicion and hostility towards outsiders are latent in most of us.

The visibility of ethnic difference means that it often overshadows other forms of diversity. Changes in the ethnic composition of a city or neighbourhood can come to stand for the wider changes of modern life. Some expressions of racism, especially by old people, can be read as declarations of dismay at the passing of old ways of life (though this makes it no less unpleasant to be on the receiving end). The different appearance of many immigrants is an outward reminder that they are, at least initially, strangers. If welfare states demand that we pay into a common fund on which we can all draw at times of need, it is important that we feel that most people have made the same effort to be self-supporting and will not take advantage. We need to be reassured that strangers, especially those from other countries, have the same idea of reciprocity as we do. Absorbing outsiders into a community that is worthy of the name takes time.

Negotiating the tension between solidarity and diversity is at the heart of politics. But both left and right have, for different reasons, downplayed the issue. The left is reluctant to acknowledge a conflict between values it cherishes; it is ready to stress the erosion of community from "bad" forms of diversity, such as market individualism, but not from "good" forms of diversity, such as sexual freedom and immigration. And the right, in Britain at least, has sidestepped the conflict, partly because it is less interested in solidarity than the left, but also because it is still trying to prove that it is comfortable with diversity.

But is there any hard evidence that the progressive dilemma actually exists in the real world of political and social choices? In most EU states the percentage of GDP taken in tax is still at historically high levels, despite the increase in diversity of all kinds. Yet it is also true that Scandinavian countries with the biggest welfare states have been the most socially and ethnically homogeneous states in the west. By the same token, the welfare state has always been weaker in the individualistic, ethnically divided US compared with more homogeneous Europe. And the three bursts of welfarist legislation that the US did see - Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society - came during the long pause in mass immigration between the first world war and 1968. (They were also, clearly, a response to the depression and to two world wars.)

In their 2001 Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper "Why Doesn't the US Have a European-style Welfare State?", Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote argue that the answer is that too many people at the bottom of the pile in the US are black or Hispanic. Across the US as a whole, 70% of the population are non-Hispanic whites - but of those in poverty only 46% are non-Hispanic whites. So a disproportionate amount of tax income spent on welfare is going to minorities. The paper also finds that US states that are more ethnically fragmented than average spend less on social services. The authors conclude that Americans think of the poor as members of a different group, whereas Europeans still think of the poor as members of the same group. Robert Putnam, the analyst of social capital, has also found a link between high ethnic mix and low trust in the US. There is some British evidence supporting this link, too. Researchers at Mori found that the average level of satisfaction with local authorities declines steeply as the extent of ethnic fragmentation increases. Even allowing for the fact that areas of high ethnic mix tend to be poorer, Mori found that ethnic fractionalisation still had a substantial negative impact on attitudes to local government.

Finally, Sweden and Denmark may provide a social laboratory for the solidarity/diversity trade-off in the coming years. Starting from similar positions as homogeneous countries with high levels of redistribution, they have taken rather different approaches to immigration over the past few years. Although both countries place great stress on integrating outsiders, Sweden has adopted a moderately multicultural outlook. It has also adapted its economy somewhat, reducing job protection for older native males in order to create more low-wage jobs for immigrants in the public sector. About 12% of Swedes are now foreign-born, and it is expected that by 2015 about 25% of under-18s will be either foreign-born or the children of the foreign-born. This is a radical change and Sweden is adapting to it rather well. (The first clips of mourning Swedes after the murder of the foreign minister Anna Lindh were of crying immigrants expressing their sorrow in perfect Swedish.) But not all Swedes are happy about it.

Denmark has a more restrictive and "nativist" approach to immigration. Only 6% of the population is foreign-born, and native Danes enjoy superior welfare benefits to incomers. If the solidarity/diversity trade-off is a real one and current trends continue, then one would expect in, say, 20 years that Sweden will have a less redistributive welfare state than Denmark; or rather that Denmark will have a more developed two-tier welfare state with higher benefits for insiders, while Sweden will have a universal but less generous system.

What are the main objections, at least from the left, to this argument about solidarity and diversity? Multiculturalists stress Britain's multiple diversities, of class and region, that preceded recent waves of immigration. They also argue that all humans share similar needs and a common interest in ensuring that they are met with minimum conflict; this, they say, can now be done through human rights laws. And hostility to diversity, they conclude, is usually a form of "false consciousness".

Critics of the dilemma also say, rightly, that the moral norms underpinning a community need not be hard for outsiders to comply with: broad common standards of right and wrong, some agreement on the nature of marriage and the family, respect for law and some consensus about the role of religion in public life. Moreover, they add, there are places such as Canada (even Australia) that are happily combining European-style welfare with an officially multicultural politics. London, too, has American levels of ethnic diversity but is the most leftwing part of Britain.

In the autumn 2003 issue of the US magazine Dissent, two academics, Keith Banting and Will Kymlicka, show that there is no link between the adoption of multiculturalist policies in countries such as Canada, Sweden and Britain and the erosion of the welfare state.

But many of the policies they describe are either too technical (allowing dual citizenship) or too anodyne (the existence of a government body to consult minorities) to stimulate serious tax resistance. They also assume too swift a reaction to growing diversity - these are forces that take effect over decades, if not over generations.

Similarly, two British academics, Bhikhu Parekh and Ali Rattansi, have offered a critique of the solidarity v diversity thesis (partly in response to Prospect articles) that also assumes an implausibly rapid connection between social cause and effect. They argue that because the expansion of Britain's welfare state in the late 40s coincided with the first big wave of non-white immigration into Britain, ethnic diversity cannot be a drag on social solidarity. But the post-1945 welfare state was the result of at least 100 years of experience and agitation. The arrival of a small number of immigrants in the 40s and 50s was unlikely to have much bearing on that history. Parekh, Kymlicka and others also argue that labour movement strength, not ethnic homogeneity, is the best indicator of the size of a welfare state. But labour movements themselves are stronger where there are no significant religious or ethnic divisions. In any case, we are not concerned here with the formation of welfare states so much as with their continued flourishing today.

A further point made by the multiculturalists is more telling. They argue that a single national story is not a sound base for a common culture because it has always been contested by class, region and religion. In Britain, the left traces democracy back to the peasants' revolt, the right back to Magna Carta, and so on. But while that is true, it is also the case that these different stories refer to a shared history. This does not imply a single narrative or national identity any more than a husband and wife will describe their married life together in the same way. Nor does it mean that the stress on the binding force of a shared history (or historical institutions such as parliament) condemns immigrants to a second-class citizenship. Newcomers can and should adopt the history of their new country as well as, over time, contributing to it - moving from immigrant "them" to citizen "us". Helpfully, Britain's story includes, through empire, the story of many of our immigrant groups - empire soldiers, for example, fought in many of the wars that created modern Britain.

I would add a further qualification to the progressive dilemma. Attitudes to welfare have, for many people, become more instrumental: I pay so much in, the state gives me this in return. As we grow richer, the ties that used to bind workers together in a risk-pooling welfare state (first locally, later nationally) have loosened - "generosity" is more abstract and compulsory, a matter of enlightened self-interest rather than mutual obligation. Moreover, welfare is less redistributive than most people imagine - most of the tax paid out by citizens comes back to them in one form or another so the amount of the average person's income going to someone they might consider undeserving is small. This, however, does little to allay anxieties based on perceptions rather than fiscal truths. And poor whites, who have relatively little, are more likely to resent even small transfers compared with those on higher incomes.

Despite these qualifications, it still seems to me that those who value solidarity should take care that it is not eroded by a refusal to acknowledge the constraints upon it. The politician who has recently laid most stress on those constraints, especially in relation to immigration, is the home secretary, David Blunkett. He has spoken about the need for more integration of some immigrant communities - especially Muslim ones - while continuing to welcome high levels of net immigration into Britain of over 150,000 a year.

Supporters of large-scale immigration now focus on the quantifiable economic benefits, appealing to the self-interest rather than the idealism of the host population. While it is true that some immigration is beneficial - neither the NHS nor the building industry could survive without it - many of the claimed benefits of mass immigration are challenged by economists such as Adair Turner and Richard Layard. It is clear, for example, that immigration is no long-term solution to an ageing population for the simple reason that immigrants grow old, too. Keeping the current age structure constant over the next 50 years, and assuming today's birth rate, would require 60m immigrants. Managing an ageing society requires a package of later retirement, rising productivity and limited immigration. Large-scale immigration of unskilled workers does allow native workers to bypass the dirtiest and least rewarding jobs but it also increases inequality, does little for per capita growth, and skews benefits in the host population to employers and the better-off.

But large-scale immigration, especially if it happens rapidly, is not just about economics; it is about those less tangible things to do with identity and mutual obligation - which have been eroded from other directions, too. It can also create real - as opposed to just imagined - conflicts of interest. One example is the immigration-related struggles over public housing in many of Britain's big cities in the 1970s and 1980s. In places such as London's East End, the right to a decent council house had always been regarded as part of the inheritance of the respectable working class.

When immigrants began to arrive in the 1960s they did not have the contacts to get on the housing list and so often ended up in low-quality private housing. Many people saw the injustice of this and decided to change the rules: henceforth the criterion of universal need came to supplant good contacts. So if a Bangladeshi couple with children were in poor accommodation they would qualify for a certain number of housing points, allowing them to jump ahead of young local white couples who had been on the list for years. This was, of course, unpopular with many whites. Similar clashes between group-based notions of justice and universally applied human rights are unavoidable in welfare states with increasingly diverse people.

The "thickest" solidarities are now often found among ethnic minority groups themselves in response to real or perceived discrimination. This can be another source of resentment for poor whites who look on enviously from their own fragmented neighbourhoods as minorities recreate some of the mutual support and sense of community that was once a feature of British working-class life. Paradoxically, it may be this erosion of feelings of mutuality among the white majority in Britain that has made it easier to absorb minorities. The degree of antagonism between groups is proportional to the degree of cooperation within groups. Relative to the other big European nations, the British sense of national culture and solidarity has arguably been rather weak - diluted by class, empire, the four different nations within the state, the north-south divide, and even the long shadow of American culture. That weakness of national solidarity, exemplified by the "stand-offishness" of suburban England, may have created a bulwark against extreme nationalism. We are more tolerant than, say, France because we don't care enough about each other to resent the arrival of the other.

When solidarity and diversity pull against each other, which side should public policy favour? Diversity can increasingly look after itself - the underlying drift of social and economic development favours it. Solidarity, on the other hand, thrives at times of adversity, hence its high point just after the second world war and its steady decline ever since as affluence, mobility, value diversity and (in some areas) immigration have loosened the ties of a common culture. Public policy should therefore tend to favour solidarity in four broad areas.

Immigration and asylum: about 9% of British residents are now from ethnic minorities, rising to almost one-third in London. On current trends about one-fifth of the population will come from an ethnic minority by 2050, albeit many of them fourth or fifth generation. Thanks to the race riots in northern English towns in 2001, the fear of radical Islam after 9/11, and anxieties about the rise in asylum-led immigration from the mid-1990s (exacerbated by the popular press), immigration has shot up the list of voter concerns, and according to Mori 56% of people (including 90% of poor whites and even a large minority of immigrants) now believe there are too many immigrants in Britain. This is thanks partly to the overburdened asylum system, which forces refugees onto welfare and prevents them from working legally for at least two years - a system calculated to provoke maximum hostility from ordinary Britons with their acute sensitivity to free riding. As soon as the system is under control and undeserving applicants are swiftly removed or redirected to legitimate migration channels, the ban on working should be reduced to six months or abolished. A properly managed asylum system will sharply reduce the heat in the whole race and immigration debate.

Immigrants come in all shapes and sizes. From the American banker or Indian software engineer to the Somali asylum seeker - from the most desirable to the most burdensome, at least in the short term. Immigrants who plan to stay should be encouraged to become Britons as far as that is compatible with holding on to some core aspects of their own culture. In return for learning the language, getting a job and paying taxes, and abiding by the laws and norms of the host society, immigrants must be given a stake in the system and incentives to become good citizens. (While it is desirable to increase minority participation at the higher end of the labour market, the use of quotas and affirmative action seems to have been counter-productive in the US.) Immigrants from the same place are bound to want to congregate together, but policy should try to prevent that consolidating into segregation across all the main areas of life: residence, school, workplace, church. In any case, the laissez faire approach of the postwar period in which ethnic minority citizens were not encouraged to join the common culture (although many did) should be buried. Citizenship ceremonies, language lessons and the mentoring of new citizens should help to create a British version of the old US melting pot. This third way on identity can be distinguished from the coercive assimilationism of the nationalist right, which rejects any element of foreign culture, and from multiculturalism, which rejects a common culture.

Is there a "tipping point" somewhere between Britain's 9% ethnic minority population and America's 30%, which creates a wholly different US-style society - with sharp ethnic divisions, a weak welfare state and low political participation? No one knows, but it is a plausible assumption. And for that tipping point to be avoided and for feelings of solidarity towards incomers not to be overstretched, it is important to reassure the majority that the system of entering the country and becoming a citizen is under control and that there is an honest debate about the scale, speed and kind of immigration. It is one thing to welcome smart, aspiring Indians or east Asians. However, it is not clear to many people why it is such a good idea to welcome people from poor parts of the developing world who have little experience of urbanisation, secularism or western values.

Welfare policy: a generous welfare state is not compatible with open borders and possibly not even with US-style mass immigration. Europe is not America. One of the reasons for the fragmentation and individualism of American life is that it is a vast country. In Europe, with its much higher population density and planning controls, the rules have to be different. We are condemned to share - the rich cannot ignore the poor, the indigenous cannot ignore the immigrant - but that does not mean people are always happy to share.

A universal, human rights-based approach to welfare ignores the fact that the rights claimed by one group do not automatically generate the obligation to accept them, or pay for them, on the part of another group - as we saw with the elderly couple in Leicester. If we want high tax and redistribution, especially with the especially with the extra welfare demands of an ageing population, then in a world of stranger citizens taxpayers need reassurance that their money is being spent on people for whose circumstances they would have some sympathy. For that reason, welfare should become more overtly conditional. The rules must be transparent and blind to ethnicity, religion, sexuality and so on, but not blind to behaviour. People who consistently break the rules of civilised behaviour should not receive unconditional benefits.

The "localisation" of more tax and redistribution would make it possible to see how and on whom our taxes are spent. More controversially, there is also a case - as Meghnad Desai has argued - for introducing a two-tier welfare system.

Purely economic migrants or certain kinds of refugees could be allowed temporary residence and the right to work (but not to vote) and be given access to only limited parts of the welfare state, while permanent migrants who make the effort to become citizens would get full access to welfare. A two-tier welfare state might reduce pressure on the asylum system and also help to deracialise citizenship - white middle-class bankers and Asian shopkeepers would have full British citizenship, while white Slovenian temporary workers would not. Such a two-tier system is emerging in Denmark.

Indeed, it already applies to some extent in Britain: migrants on work permits and spouses during the two-year probationary period cannot get most benefits. If we want to combine social solidarity with relatively high immigration, there is also a strong case for ID cards both on logistical grounds and as a badge of citizenship that transcends narrower group and ethnic loyalties.

Culture: good societies need places such as London and New York as well as the more homogeneous, stable, small and medium-size towns of middle Britain or the American midwest. But the emphasis, in culture and the media, should be on maintaining a single national conversation at a time when the viewing and listening public is becoming more fragmented. In Britain, that means strong support for the "social glue" role of the BBC. (The glue once provided by religion no longer works, and in any case cannot include immigrants of different faiths.) The teaching of multi-ethnic citizenship in schools is a welcome step.

But too many children leave school with no sense of the broad sweep of their national history. The teaching of British history, and in particular the history of the empire and of subsequent immigration into Britain, should be a central part of the school curriculum. At the same time, immigrants should be encouraged to become part of the British "we", even while bringing their own very different perspective on its formation.

Politics and language: multiculturalists argue that the binding power of the liberal nation state has been eroded from within by value diversity and from without by the arrival of immigrant communities with other loyalties. But the nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation, and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures, it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values. The US has tried to resolve the tension between liberalism and pluralism by developing a powerful national myth. Even if this were desirable in Britain, it is probably not possible to emulate. Indeed, the idea of fostering a common culture, in any strong sense, may no longer be possible either. One only has to try listing what the elements of a common culture might be to realise how hard it would be to legislate for. That does not mean that the idea must be abandoned; rather, it should inform public policy as an underlying assumption rather than a set of policies.

Immigration and welfare policies, for example, should be designed to reduce the fear of free riding, and the symbolic aspects of citizenship should be reinforced; they matter more in a society when tacit understandings and solidarities can no longer be taken for granted. Why not, for example, a British national holiday or a British state of the union address?

Lifestyle diversity and high immigration bring cultural and economic dynamism, but they can erode feelings of mutual obligation, reducing willingness to pay tax and even encouraging a retreat from the public domain. In the decades ahead, European politics itself may start to shift on this axis, with left and right being eclipsed by value-based culture wars and movements for and against diversity. Social democratic parties risk being torn apart in such circumstances, partly on class lines: recent British Social Attitudes reports have made it clear that the middle class and the working class increasingly converge on issues of tax and economic management, but diverge on diversity issues.

The anxieties triggered by the asylumseeker inflow into Britain now seem to be fading. But they are not just a media invention; a sharp economic downturn or a big inflow of east European workers after EU enlargement might easily call them up again. The progressive centre needs to think more clearly about these issues to avoid being engulfed by them. And to that end it must try to develop a new language in which to address the anxieties, one that transcends the thin and abstract language of universal rights on the one hand, and the defensive, nativist language of group identity on the other. Too often the language of liberal universalism that dominates public debate ignores the real affinities of place and people. These affinities are not obstacles to be overcome on the road to the good society; they are one of its foundation stones.

People will always favour their own families and communities; it is the task of a realistic liberalism to strive for a definition of community that is wide enough to include people from many different backgrounds, without being so wide as to become meaningless.

The following article demonstrates the remarkable propensity of left wing intellectuals to snatch doom and gloom from the jaws of the exquisitely wonderful and excellent. Monbiot is transparently arguing that we would be better off if the airplane had not been invented, and presumably he therefore believes people ought to be prevented from inventing things like airplanes - which, in practice, means he believes people ought to be prevented from inventing anything, since no one can know in advance which inventions will be consequential the way the airplane has been. He is a dreadful ghoul of a man.

from The Guardian, 2003-Dec-16, by George Monbiot:

A weapon with wings
The centenary of the Wright brothers' flight should be a day of international mourning

They will probably be commemorating the wrong people in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, tomorrow. Five months before the Wright brothers lifted a flying machine into the air for 12 seconds above the sand dunes of the Outer Banks, the New Zealander Richard Pearse had travelled for more than a kilometre in his contraption, without the help of ramps or slides, and had even managed to turn his plane in mid-flight.

But history belongs to those who record it, so tomorrow is the official centenary of the aeroplane. At Kitty Hawk, George Bush will deliver a eulogy to aviation, while a number of men with more money than sense will seek to recreate the Wrights' first flight. Well, they can keep their anniversary. Tomorrow should be a day of international mourning. December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine.

The aeroplane was not the first weapon of mass destruction. The European powers had already learned to rain terror upon their colonial subjects by means of naval bombardment, artillery and the Gatling and Maxim guns. But the destructive potential of aerial bombing was grasped even before the first plane left the ground. In 1886, Jules Verne imagined aircraft acting as a global police force, bombing barbaric races into peace and civilisation. In 1898, the novelist Samuel Odell saw the English-speaking peoples subjugating eastern Europe and Asia by means of aerial bombardment. In the same year, the writer Stanley Waterloo celebrated the future annihilation of inferior races from the air.

None of this was lost on the Wright brothers. When Wilbur Wright was asked, in 1905, what the purpose of his machine might be, he answered simply: "War." As soon as they were confident that the technology worked, the brothers approached the war offices of several nations, hoping to sell their patent to the highest bidder. The US government bought it for $30,000, and started test bombing in 1910. The aeroplane was conceived, designed, tested, developed and sold, in other words, not as a vehicle for tourism, but as an instrument of destruction.

In November 1911, eight years after the first flight, the Italian army carried out the first bombing raid, on a settlement outside Tripoli. Then as now, aerial bombardment was seen as a means of civilising uncooperative peoples. As Sven Lindqvist records in A History of Bombing, the imperial powers experimented freely with civilisation from the skies. Just as the Holocaust was prefigured by colonial genocide, so the bombing raids which reduced Guernica, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and parts of London to ash had been rehearsed in north Africa and the Middle East.

As the enemy was reduced to a distant target in an inferior sphere, greater cruelties could be engineered than any effected before. The British knew what they were doing in Germany. Directive 22 to Bomber Command in 1942 ordered that the "aiming points" for fire-bombing be "built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories". The Americans knew what they were doing in Japan. Major General Curtis LeMay, who incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo, admitted: "We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned that town. Had to be done." Japan sought to negotiate peace, but the Allies refused to talk until they had taken their firebombing to its logical conclusion, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay later became chief of staff of the US airforce. He was the man who, in 1964, promised to bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.

I doubt much mention will be made of all this at the centenary celebrations tomorrow. Instead we will be encouraged to concentrate upon the civil applications of this military technology. We will be told how the aeroplane has made the world a smaller place, how it has brought people closer together, fostering understanding and friendship. There is something in this: the people of powerful nations might be reluctant to permit their leaders to destroy the countries they have visited. But commercial flights, like military flights, are an instrument of domination. As tourists, we engage with the people of other nations on our own terms. The world's administrators can flit from place to place enforcing their mandate. The corporate jet-set shrinks the earth to fit its needs. Those with access to the aeroplane control the world.

The men who attacked New York and Washington on September 11 2001 drove one symbol of power into another. The aeroplane, more precisely than any other technology, represents the global ruling class. In the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens.

Those hijackers had turned the civilian product of a military technology back into a military technology, but even when used for strictly commercial purposes, the airliner remains a weapon of mass destruction. Last week the World Health Organisation calculated that climate change is causing 150,000 deaths a year. This figure excludes deaths caused by drought and famine, pests and plant diseases and conflicts over natural resources, all of which appear to be exacerbated by global warming. Flying is our most effective means of wrecking the planet: every passenger on a return journey from Britain to Florida produces more carbon dioxide than the average motorist does in a year. Every time we fly, we help to kill someone.

This morning, our government is expected to give a grand 100th birthday present to the aeroplane. Despite almost 400,000 objections to the expansion of airports in Britain, the transport secretary will announce new runways at Stansted and Birmingham, and more flights to Heathrow. This, the government hopes, will help accommodate a near-tripling of the number of journeys into and out of Britain by 2030. By then the 400,000 won't be the only ones wishing that Wilbur and Orville (if indeed they were responsible) had stuck to mending bicycles.

The $1,000 those men spent on developing their beast is just about the only expenditure on this doom machine that has not been state-assisted. All over the world, the aircraft industry was built by means of government spending. All over the world, it is sustained today through tax breaks and hidden subsidies. Mysteriously exempt from both fuel duty and VAT, airlines in Britain dodge some £10bn of tax a year. The aeroplane, in other words, is still treated by governments as a social good.

This might have something to do with the fact that prime ministers and presidents use it more often than anyone else. Or it might reflect the perennial male obsession with the instruments of control.

Just as Alexander the Great worshipped his horse, George Bush, the new conqueror of Persia, will tomorrow worship the aeroplane. Our societies are built upon these technologies of war: the current world order fell from the hatches of the aeroplane. At 10.35am, North Carolina time, George Bush and the other enthusiasts for domination will bow down before it. The rest of us should observe 12 seconds of silence, in commemoration of the deeds wrought by those magnificent men in their killing machines.

· The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can be found at www.monbiot.com

James Taranto dissects Monbiot's rant as follows.

from the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com, 2003-Dec-17, by James Taranto:

Fear of Flying

We've often observed that today's political left has largely abandoned its faith in social progress and become almost entirely a reactionary movement. George Monbiot, a columnist for the London Guardian, provides a nice example in a piece on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight, which is today.

The anniversary "should be a day of international mourning," moans Monbiot. "December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine." Monbiot calls flying machines a weapon of mass destruction; after all, have been used to drop bombs, including nuclear ones (though as the late Bob Bartley pointed out, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved a lot of Japanese lives). More recently, al Qaeda used planes in their attacks on Sept. 11. Monbiot's conclusion:

Just as Alexander the Great worshipped his horse, George Bush, the new conqueror of Persia [sic], will [today] worship the aeropla ne. Our societies are built upon these technologies of war: the current world order fell from the hatches of the aeroplane. At 10. 35am, North Carolina time, George Bush and the other enthusiasts for domination will bow down before it. The rest of us should obs erve 12 seconds of silence, in commemoration of the deeds wrought by those magnificent men in their killing machines.

But wait. Monbiot glosses too quickly over Alexander and his horse, though he does note earlier in the piece that "in the past we raised our eyes to the men on horseback. Today we raise our eyes to the heavens." Plainly the trouble began with the invention of horses. Horses go "neigh," it's time to say "nay" right back to them.

from the Wall Street Journal, 2005-Nov-11, p.A10, by Stephen Moore:

The War Against the Car

A few years ago, I made a presentation to my second-grader's social studies class, asking the kids what was the worst invention in history. I was shocked when a number of them answered "the car." When I asked why, they replied that cars destroy the environment. Distressed by the Green indoctrination already visited upon seven-year-olds, I was at least reassured in knowing that once these youngsters got their drivers' licenses, their attitudes would change.

It's one thing for second-graders to hold such childish notions, but quite another for presumably educated adults to argue that automobiles are economically and environmentally unsustainable "axles of evil." But with higher gas prices, as well as Malthusian-sounding warnings about catastrophic global warming and the planet running out of oil, the tirade has taken on a new plausibility. Maybe Al Gore had it right all along when he warned that the car and the combustible engine are "a mortal threat . . . more deadly than any military enemy."

* * *

Welcome to the modern-day Luddite movement, which once raged against the machine, but now targets the automobile. Just last month, environmentalists organized a "world car-free day," celebrated in more than 40 cities in the U.S. and Europe. In the left's vision of utopia, cars have been banished -- replaced by bicycles and mass transit systems. There is no smog or road congestion. And America has been liberated from those sociopathic, gas-guzzling, greenhouse-gas-emitting SUVs and Hummers that Jesus would never drive.

It all sounds idyllic, but in real life this fairy tale has a tragic ending. As Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, reminds us, if the "no car garage" had been a reality in New Orleans in August, we wouldn't have suffered 1,000 Katrina fatalities, but 10,000 or more. The automobile, especially those dreaded all-terrain four-wheel drive SUVs (ideal for driving through floodwaters) saved more lives during the Katrina disaster than all the combined relief efforts of FEMA, local police and fire squads, churches, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. If every poor family had had a car and not a transit token, few would have had to be warehoused in the hellhole of the Superdome.

This month we paid honor to the heroism of Rosa Parks for fighting racism through the bus boycott in Montgomery. What helped sustain that historic freedom cause was that hundreds of blacks owned cars and trucks that they used to carpool others around the city.

A strong argument could be made that the automobile is one of the two most liberating inventions of the past century, ranking only behind the microchip. The car allowed even the common working man total freedom of mobility -- the means to go anywhere, anytime, for any reason. In many ways, the automobile is the most egalitarian invention in history, dramatically bridging the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor. The car stands for individualism; mass transit for collectivism. Philosopher Waldemar Hanasz, who grew up in communist Poland, noted in his 1999 essay "Engines of Liberty" that Soviet leaders in the 1940s showed the movie "The Grapes of Wrath" all over the country as propaganda against the evils of U.S. capitalism and the oppression of farmers. The scheme backfired because "far from being appalled, the Soviet viewers were envious; in America, it seemed, even the poorest had cars and trucks."

It's not hard to imagine life in America without cars. If you travel to any Third World Country today, cars are scarce and the city streets are crammed with hundreds of thousands of bicycles, buses and scooters -- and peasant workers all sharing the aspiration of someday owning a car. But in America and other developed nations, the environmental elitists are intent on flipping economic development on its head: Progress is being measured by how many cars can be traded in for mass transit systems and bikes, not vice versa. The recently passed highway bill establishes a first-ever office of bicycle advocacy inside the Transportation Department. The bicycle enthusiasts seem to believe that no one ever has far to go, that it never rains, that families don't have three or more kids to transport, and that mom never needs to bring home three bags of groceries.

Similarly, there is now a nearly maniacal obsession among policy makers and the Greens to conserve energy rather than to produce it. Even many of the oil companies are running ad campaigns on the virtues of using less energy (do the shareholders know about this?) -- which would be like McDonald's advising Americans to eat fewer hamburgers because a cow is a terrible thing to lose. A perverse logic has taken hold among the intelligentsia that progress can be measured by how much of the earth's fuels we save, when in fact the history of human economic advancement, dating back to the invention of the wheel, has been defined by our ability to substitute technology and energy use for the planet's one truly finite resource: human energy.

It is because we have continually found inventive ways to harness the planet's energy sources at ever-declining costs -- through such sinister inventions as the car -- that the average American today produces what 200 men could before the industrial revolution began. Studies confirm that the more, not less, energy a nation uses and the more, not fewer, cars that it has, the more productive the workers, the richer the society, and the healthier the citizens as measured by life expectancy. When Albania abolished cars, it quickly became one of the very poorest nations in Europe.

The simplistic notion taught to our second-graders, that the car is an environmental doomsday machine, reveals an ignorance of history. When Henry Ford first started rolling his Black Model Ts off the assembly line at the start of the 20th century, the auto was hailed as one of the greatest environmental inventions of all time. That's because the horse, which it replaced, was a prodigious polluter, dropping 40 pounds of waste a day. Imagine what a city like St. Louis smelled like on a steamy summer afternoon when the streets were congested with horses and piled with manure.

The good news is that environmental groups and politicians aren't likely to break Americans from their love affair with cars -- big, convenient, safe cars -- no matter how guilty they try to make us feel for driving them. Instead they are using more subtle forms of coercion. The left is now pining for a $1-a-gallon gas tax to make driving unaffordable. Washington has also wasted over $60 billion of federal gas tax money on mass transit systems, yet fewer Americans ride them now than before the deluge of subsidies began. When the voters in car-crazed Los Angeles opted to fund an ill-fated subway system, most drivers who voted "yes" said they did so because they hoped it would compel other people off the crowded highways.

To be sure, if the entire membership of the Sierra Club and Greenpeace surrendered their cars, the world and the highways might very well be a better place. But for the rest of us the car is indispensable -- it is our exoskeleton. There's a perfectly good reason that the roads are crammed with tens of millions of cars and that Americans drive eight billion miles a year while spurning buses, trains, bicycles and subways. Americans are rugged individualists who don't want to cram aboard buses and subways. We want more open roads and highways, and we want energy policies that will make gas cheaper, not more expensive. We want to travel down the road from serfdom and the car is what will take us there.

from the Wall Street Journal via OpinionJournal.com, excerpted from Best of the Web, 2005-Nov-21, by James Taranto:

Murtha Balks at Own Proposal

Late Friday night the House took a vote on Rep. John Murtha's proposal for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. The vote was 403-3 against, with Murtha among the 403. The only congressmen favoring Murtha's idea were three far-left Democrats: Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Jose Serrano of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida. Six Dems voted "present": Michael Capuano (Mass.), William Clay (Mo.), Maurice Hinchey (N.Y.), Jim McDermott (Wash.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Major Owens (N.Y.).

Some Republicans have labeled Murtha a "coward," which strikes us as unduly personal. But he does seem to lack the courage of his convictions.

Democratic War Stories

In the Times of London, anti-Bush hysteric Andrew Sullivan lauds Rep. John Murtha:

All you have to do is look at John Murtha to see what he represents. He's a white-haired, red-faced pro-war Democrat with a record of 37 years of service in the US Marines.

Democratic chairman Howard Dean cited the "37 years" figure in an e-mail to supporters last week too. It's true, in a sense, but misleading. It makes it sound as though Murtha was a career military man. In fact, according to his congressional biography, Murtha was on active duty for six years at most (1952-55 and 1966-67); the rest of the time, including some 16 of his nearly 32 years in the House, he was a reservist.

We don't mean to disparage Murtha's service, but why do the Democrats always seem to exaggerate these things? John Kerry* was a "war hero" for serving 120 days in Vietnam and earning an improbable number of medals. In 2002 pro-Saddam Rep. Jim McDermott claimed that he and then-Rep. David Bonior served in Vietnam. In fact, McDermott served as a naval psychiatrist and Bonior as an Air Force cook--both in California.

Let's honor the service of all veterans--including, by the way, those who wore the uniform of the Texas Air National Guard, and those who criticize John Kerry. But all this phony jingoism in the service of weakness on national security has us nostalgic for the days when the Democrats nominated an honest-to-goodness draft avoider for president.

* The haughty, French-looking blankety-blank who on Friday e-mailed his supporters: "Yesterday, an extraordinary congressman, former Marine Drill Sergeant and decorated Vietnam veteran, spoke out on the war in Iraq. He didn't come to that moment lightly. He spoke his mind and spoke his heart out of love for his country and support for our troops. No sooner had the words left his lips than the vicious assault on his character and patriotism began."

from the Flint Journal, 2005-Nov-20, by David Forsmark:

Politically 'hip' can be hypocrites
Author finds contradictions between celebrities' rhetoric, actions

Which well-known figure associated with Flint has outsourced jobs to other countries and used union-busting tactics?

Delphi chief Steve Miller? Hardly. Outside of cities with Delphi plants, most people still think he sang "Fly Like an Eagle." So who flew to Canada to produce his products and escape union scale? Who said he would fire his employees if they organized?

None other than Michael Moore, "the champion of the working class."

In "Do as I Say (Not as I Do)," Peter Schweizer exposes Moore's fake public persona. Moore does his film production in Canada to avoid paying union scale and threatened to fire half of his TV show's writing staff when they wanted to join the union. He's a proponent of affirmative action but never has hired a black person to do anything important on one of his projects.

Moore claims he owns no stock and only puts "what little I can" in "something the old-timers call a savings account" - yet Schweizer writes that he owns stock in defense contractors and Halliburton.

While Moore says he gives away 40 percent of his money, Schweizer reports that his tax returns show his foundations give the minimum necessary to stay tax exempt - and most of the donations go to festivals that feature his films or promote preservation around his home on Torch Lake.

Schweizer shows that Moore did more than just borrow his anti-American slant on foreign policy from Marxist guru Noam Chomsky and his anti-capitalist screeds from Ralph Nader; Moore learned from both how to adopt a po' boy persona while socking away millions in tax shelters.

Why does Schweizer focus on the left when there's enough hypocrisy to go around? He says it's because the media doesn't let real or imagined slips go by for conservatives. Who doesn't know about Newt Gingrich's martial problems, Rush Limbaugh's addiction to prescription pain medication or Bill Bennett's gambling?

But that's Schweizers' point. If Bennett's gambling is an issue because he wrote a book on virtues (even though it didn't touch on gambling), then why has there been no "60 Minutes" report on environmental priestess Barbara Streisand's strip mine?

Liberal commentator Alan Combes claims only conservatives can be hypocrites because they stake out moral stands, and Schweizer maintains this attitude is prevalent in today's media. But while conservatives may be absolutists about personal conduct, liberals attach moral weight to economic actions - or so their rhetoric goes.

Thus, Schweizer thinks it's important for you to know that Ralph Nader claims a Spartan lifestyle, but there's a $2 million home in his unemployed brother's name. Nader, who says he doesn't own any stock not only does, but he also sells short in companies he's about to attack and buys into companies that make things he's about to promote, such as air bags.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are well known for working the system in financially crass ways, though I didn't know just how predatory the legal part of their Whitewater scheme was until reading about it here. And it's highly ironic that Hillary is against laws requiring minors to notify their parents if they want an abortion but wouldn't allow her daughter to pierce her ears.

The best stuff exposes House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who sponsored an effort to honor union leader Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers, with a national holiday. Schweizer notes that Pelosi owns a vineyard that uses nonunion labor exclusively to harvest its grapes. And the large resort hotel she owns is nonunion, too, despite the perennial support she gets from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union.

In other news, Professor Cornell West chides blacks who move out of the ghetto but owns luxurious homes in two lily-white enclaves; Gloria Steinem ridicules marriage but is a hopeless romantic; and Noam Chomsky, who trashes the concept of private property and likens the United States to Nazi Germany during a trip to Cuba, has made millions from consulting with the Department of Defense, then hides it in tax shelters.

Comedian-turned-commentator Al Franken's contradictions are too many to list here, but let's just say Schweizer shows he has no room to talk about affirmative action or racist rhetoric.

But maybe Schweizer is wrong, and it's not about hypocrisy after all. Could the reason Streisand, Franken and Moore advocate for affirmative action be because they know from looking at themselves that it is necessary? After all, if these bitter enemies of racism and sexism can't be trusted to hire a diverse group of people, what hope can there be for corporate America to do so?

Perhaps Moore rails against globalization because he knows first hand about the insidious lure of cheap, foreign scab labor.

"Do as I Say" is yet another political book that might have been better suited as a series of magazine articles. On the other hand, with another Al Franken screed climbing the charts, its timing could not be better.

Reviewer David Forsmark is a freelance writer who lives in Flushing.

from NewsMax.com, 2005-Nov-2:

Al Franken, Hillary, Kennedy, Caught!

A new book by a top investigative journalist exposes the blatant hypocrisy of liberals who loudly espouse principles they disregard in their own personal lives.

In "Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy," Hoover Fellow Peter Schweizer reveals the glaring contradictions between the public stances and real-life behavior of prominent liberals including Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Ralph Nader - among others.

"Hypocrisy has proved to be a wonderful weapon for liberals in their war against conservatives," Schweizer writes in the November issue of NewsMax Magazine.

"Yet for all the talk about conservative hypocrisy, there has been very little investigation into the prevalence of hypocrisy on the left."

After two years of research into liberal hypocrisy, Schweizer said, "what I discovered was just stunning."

Schweizer's well-annotated book, published by Doubleday, has just been released and its sure to turn several well-known liberals red with anger.

Among the eye-opening revelations of "Do As I Say":

Filmmaker Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn't invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore's IRS forms, viewed by Schweizer, show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton, Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric and McDonald's.

Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop.

The hypocrisy doesn't end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles.

But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty" and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals.

The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is - that's right, a non-union shop.

Ralph Nader is another liberal who claims that unions are essential to protect worker rights. But when an editor of one of his publications tried to form a union to ameliorate miserable working conditions, the editor was fired and the locks changed on the office door.

Self-described socialist Noam Chomsky has described the Pentagon as "the most vile institution on the face of the earth" and lashed out against tax havens and trusts that benefit only the rich.

But Chomsky has been paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon over the last 40 years, and he used a venerable law firm to set up his irrevocable trust to shield his assets from the IRS.

Air America radio host Al Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.

Ted Kennedy has fought for the estate tax and spoken out against tax shelters. But he has repeatedly benefited from an intricate web of trusts and private foundations that have shielded most of his family's fortune from the IRS.

One Kennedy family trust wasn't even set up in the U.S., but in Fiji.

Another family member, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., has said that it is not moral to profit from natural resources. But he receives an annual check from the family's large holdings in the oil industry.

Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a "living wage." But she prefers to do her filming and postproduction work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die.

Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives. But she barred 13-year-old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbid the teen from watching MTV or HBO.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros says the wealthy should pay higher, more progressive tax rates. But he holds the bulk of his money in tax-free overseas accounts in Curacao, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Schweizer writes: "Liberals claim to support affirmative action but don't practice it. They support higher taxes but set up complicated tax shelters to avoid paying them. They claim to be ardent environmentalists but abandon their cause when it impinges on their own property rights.

"The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things - racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed.

"But when it comes to applying those same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.

"The media and the American people need to hold them accountable."

from the Guardian, 1999-Oct-3, by Will Hutton:

Debt-relief campaign Jubilee 2000 can now claim its great victory, thanks to Leviticus

So who said religion was dead and there was no God? Certainly not the 41 heavily indebted poorest countries after President Clinton's pledge last week to forgo all $6 billion debt owed to the US, a challenge the rest of the industrialised world will have to match.The poorest may now start the next millennium unencumbered by debt. The Jubilee 2000 campaign has proved to be one the most effective ever mounted by any pressure group; it may secure an end that four years ago seemed a pipedream - the cancellation of the unpayable debt owed by the world's poorest countries.

But it owes its success and inspiration to the Bible. I doubt many readers know the Old Testament books of Leviticus, Exodus and Deuteronomy any more than I do, but without them there would be no Jubilee 2000, no debt campaign and no international public pressure. At the end of an increasingly secular century, it has been the biblical proof and moral imagination of religion that have torched the principles of the hitherto unassailable citadels of international finance - and opened the way to a radicalism about capitalism whose ramifications are not yet fully understood.

Just glance at the blessing the Pope gave to the Jubilee campaigners before the IMF/ World Bank meetings this year. The Catholic Church, he said, has always taught there was a 'social mortgage' on all private property. 'The law of profit alone cannot be applied to that which is essential for the fight against hunger, disease and poverty' In this context, he insisted, debt relief was urgent; it was a precondition for the poorest countries to make progress in their fight against poverty - and creditor nations had an obligation to God to act quickly.

The Pope, like the Church of England, is simply following the injunction of the Bible, and in particular Leviticus Chapter 25, a passage that makes Das Kapital look tame. Leviticus tells its readers that God designed the world to be in harmony, and that every seven years creditors should offer debtors a remission - or repayment holiday. But every seven times seven years (49 years for the arithmetically challenged) there should be a Sabbath's Sabbath; a complete dismantling of the structures of social and economic inequality. Debts should be forgiven completely, slaves freed and land forfeited for non-payment of debt returned to its original owners, a principle endorsed both by Exodus and Deuteronomy. The Bible is unambiguous.

The idea was simple. Israel's rich landowners had to be reminded that private property was not theirs - it was God's - and they had to accept that there was a social mortgage, as the Pope puts it, on their autonomy of action and capacity to build up wealth careless of the social consequences. The distribution of income and wealth had periodically to be equalised to restore God's harmony every 49 years. And once that was done, horns would sound 'the Jubilee' throughout the country.

Ann Pettifor, the director of Jubilee 2000, although a lapsed church-goer, freely acknowledges that her campaign was named after Leviticus's Jubilee and also the crucial role played by the support of evangelical Christians and the organised churches alike. It was a small evangelical group, Tearfund, which citing Leviticus, appealed to their members for contributions to keep the nascent campaign going in the dog days of 1996, and it has been the financial contribution, time and energy of the churches that have given the campaign its spine, notwithstanding Bob Geldof.

It has also reinforced its political impact. The Bible-worshipping Republican Right and American moral majority know Leviticus, too. They might oppose increasing US contributions to the UN, IMF and World Bank, but obstructing debt relief is another matter. It incurs God's wrath, so that one of Jubilee's stoutest advocates in Congress is the extreme right-winger, Congressman Bachus. Clinton is showing his usual canny political instincts and the betting is that his proposal will stand.

But as Jubilee 2000 knows well, until Clinton's announcement this week, it had done little more than get the G7 countries formally to acknowledge what was happening anyway; the debt was not being repaid. At the World Economic Summit in Cologne this summer, the decision to cancel $100bn of debt was welcomed, but it was only an admission of reality. The US Treasury, for example, had already secretly written off 90 per cent of its debt; all that happened at Cologne was that it went public.

Clinton's willingness to write off the last 10 per cent is in effect new money. And although Chancellor Gordon Brown, mindful of the religious passion with which his father, a former minister, supported Jubilee 2000 (he knew Leviticus, too), has been one of the leaders in forcing the pace on debt relief, he is now on his mettle if he is to match it. For Britain, unlike any other G7 state, makes no distinction in its public-accounting system between current and capital spending; we make the caveman's judgment that it is all cash and not worthy of differentiation.

This is one of the chief reasons for the abysmally low rate of capital investment in the public sector, but, paradoxically, it is also the reason Britain has been able to take the lead, first under Chancellors Major, Lamont and Clarke and now Brown, in arguing the case for debt relief. Writing off old loans costs us nothing in public-accounting terms because the capital transaction was counted (madly) as a current, cash expenditure that formally we never counted on seeing again. Our international liberalism, cancelling debt obligations that we never accounted for and are not receiving anyway, is thus completely cost-free.

But when it comes to new money, we have to account for the write-offs. Already, there are profound fears in Whitehall and Jubilee 2000 that Brown will only be able to find the $2.4bn of new money to match Clinton by raiding other budgets as he has for Britain's support to Kosovo. If so, Jubilee 2000 will have to get its supporters to link hands around Whitehall, as they did in Birmingham last year. New money should mean new money; there should be no robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Nobody argues that debt relief alone will solve world poverty. Economic development is a much more subtle process. But it is a beginning and it challenges one of the bedrocks of contemporary capitalism in a fundamental way. Private property and private finance are not independent of the world community - they are embedded in it. There cannot be a fatalistic view of the distribution of income internationally if it means unacceptable suffering. Creditors have social obligations apart from the insistence that they should eventually be repaid. If this has radical implications abroad, they are scarcely less radical at home; there is the moral basis for a new social settlement. The Left of Centre should take note; it is no longer Morris, Keynes and Beveridge who inspire and change the world - it's Leviticus.

from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000-Dec-19, by James Ostrowski:

Intellectual Roots of Terror

The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Reviewed by James Ostrowski

As zebras are fascinated by lions, libertarians are fascinated by communists, their polar opposites and sworn enemies for the last 150 years. If one believes that society should function with an absolute minimum of governmental coercion, one is curious to know the results of a philosophy which places its faith in the maximum possible use of governmental coercion, force, and violence, to achieve its goals. If communism worked, we libertarians would be forced to check our premises and watch our backs.   

Can the laboratory of communism also shed light on the viability of a related political philosophy, which also relies on centralized governmental coercion to achieve its goals: modern liberalism?  The communists did all at once what stealthy liberals apparently intend to do piece by piece while we sleep. We just lived through a century in which liberals enacted several recommendations of the Communist Manifesto and transformed a night watchman state into a welfare/warfare state with a continual flow of "progressive" legislation and various "Democrat wars" and crusades with the result that no one in my law school class in 1983 could identify, in response to Professor Henry Mark Holzer's query, any aspect of life that was not in some way regulated or controlled by the state.  Seventeen years later, are they through? 

Has liberalism closed up shop?  Will they ever be through?  Not until they have established an egalitarian utopia where virtually all responsibility for living has passed from the individual to the state. In the liberal utopia, if I may pilfer Paddy Chayefsky's words, "all necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."

If you think I exaggerate, consider that liberals and communists share five critical premises: egalitarianism, utopianism (the use of impossible "ideals" as a guide to policy), the efficacy of force in accomplishing positive goals, hostility to civil society (nonstate institutions, e.g., Boy Scouts, private schools), and the individual's inability to govern himself.  

In light of the recent attempted coup d'élection, I am tempted to add a sixth similarity - willingness to win political fights at all costs. Further evidence of some basic affinity between communism and modern liberalism is the latter's frequent cover-ups and apologies for the former. Finally, communists and liberals share a tendency to expressly support "mass democracy" while they in practice concentrate power in secretive elite bodies such as politburos and appellate courts.

THE BLACK BOOK

In that spirit of fascination with the enemy, I recently read The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1999), a clinical and relentless dissection of the crimes of communism in the 20^th century - defined by "the natural laws of humanity"--written by several ex-fellow travelers led by Stephane Courtois.  

It is not a book to be read before, during or after a meal.  You would not want to spoil a good meal with the image of Bolshevik troops throwing live human beings into a blast furnace.  The Black Book is a story of mind-numbing and mindless brutality.  Mao Zedong, one of the stars of the book, said, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."  

One wonders, after reading this book, whether political power actually grows out of the depraved minds of solipsistic, megalomaniacs like Lenin, Stalin and Mao.  It seems that if you hypnotize yourself into discarding all known ethics and morality, and are willing to use any and all ruthless means to achieve power, then you can have it.  A Bolshevik newspaper wrote in 1919: "Our morality has no precedent...everything is permitted...Let blood flow like water..."  And it did.

THE RAP SHEET

When Khrushchev said, "We will bury you," he meant it.  Communists buried eighty-five million people in the 20^th century, give or take the number of people who live in New York State.  What is really interesting, however, is not the sheer number of victims.  After all, as Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy.  A million deaths is a statistic."  And what a statistician Stalin proved to be.  

But even more awesome is the incredible variety of their murderous means.  In pursuit of utopia, the communists were forced to outdo themselves in continually discovering ever more ways to separate the bourgeoisie from their souls.  They murdered people by hanging them, whipping them, slitting their throats, carving them up with axes, boiling them, crucifying them, beheading them, drawing and quartering them, stoning them, forcing them to fight to the death against other prisoners, massively drowning them, throwing them from helicopters, asphyxiating them, starving them, poisoning them, burying them alive, and making life unbearable leading to mass suicides.  When creativity was absent, the communists fell back on their old standby - the banal bullet to the base of the brain.

Communists killed all types of people, but focused their most intense fury on entrepreneurs, community leaders and the highly educated.  They made some half-hearted efforts to abolish money and decried "speculators", "rich bastards", and, "shopkeepers."  Lenin said that "speculators...deserve...a bullet in the head..."  Like the Nazis later would, the communists recruited many of their murderous thugs from the dregs of society.  Thus, communism may be defined as the execrable executing the exceptional.

Communists were not merely satisfied with manufacturing ghosts; they wanted to teach their class enemies a lesson or two first.  It is not clear what that lesson was since, according to Marxist doctrine capitalists' capitalist ideas are strictly determined by their relationship to "the means of production."  I suppose the answer to that quibble is that the communists' hatred of the bourgeoisie was also a class-determined fact beyond their control.  There was no time for arcane debates, however, there was only politically incorrect flesh to be fried, literally.  

Leaving aside being forced to read all three volumes of Das Kapital, the communists' means of torture included: partial asphyxiation, burning with red hot irons, confinement in tiny cells without plumbing, systematic rape and forced prostitution of "bourgeois women", mock execution, beatings, near starvation, being forced to eat the flesh of recently executed family members, forced marches, electric shocks, kneeling on broken glass, being manacled in tight handcuffs, hanging by the wrists or thumbs, and prolonged sleep deprivation leading to madness. Cannibalism, while not strictly speaking a form of torture, was also a common occurrence in communist countries due to their felonious collectivization of agriculture and resulting famine. The things communists did to priests and seminarians were so despicable that I cannot bear to describe them in words.

When communists were not destroying individual persons, they were busy destroying individual personality.  They made heavy use of concentration camps and transported prisoners there in cattle trucks.  (Sound familiar?)  Prisoners were deprived of all privacy and were forced to confess their innermost thoughts.  Spies were everywhere.  No one could be trusted.  There was only the "brutish imposition of a heavy-handed ideology" and the "permanent saturation with the message of orthodoxy."  The result was an "abdication of the personality."

To rationalize their mass murder and torture, the communists first used the technique usually associated with the National Socialists--rhetorically dehumanizing their enemies.  The communists exhorted their thugs to "shoot them like dogs," and referred to the bourgeoisie as "vultures," "pygmies," "foxes," "lice," "insects," and "pigs."

Thus, communism meant mass murder, mass famine, mass torture, physical and psychological, dehumanization, and widespread cannibalism.  With that kind of record, we can say about the death of communism what Pol Pot's troops said to those about to experience death by communism: "Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain."  Lenin said, "The cruelty of our lives, imposed by circumstances, will be understood and pardoned."  Not!

THERE WAS GOOD STUFF TOO

Don't get me wrong.  Not all was bad under communism.  There were elements of life under the dictatorship of the proletariat that would appeal to today's liberals and conservatives.  Liberals, who on economic issues favor a dictatorship of the majority, would have been happy with socialized medicine, communal day care and the total abolition of private firearms.  Lenin, in a cautiously worded policy analysis, recommended "immediate execution for anyone caught in possession of a firearm."  He understood that "gun control" means the control that an armed citizenry has over a tyrannical government.  The Bolsheviks systematically disarmed the peasants before systematically starving millions of them to death.  Peasant pitchforks proved no match for Bolshevik machine guns. 

Liberals also would have been ecstatic over the enshrinement of their moronic slogan "People over Profits" by the communists.  There was not a capitalist profit to be made in communist countries, other than a few rubles for waiting in line to buy toilet paper for a comrade.  Communists knew, perhaps instinctively, that all human action, not just capitalist action, is profit-seeking behavior.  That is, all human action aims at achieving satisfaction from the attainment of goals more highly valued than the resources expended to attain them.  Thus, the only way to stop people from putting "profits over people", was to murder them en masse.  However, since the communist thugs' murderous behavior was itself profit-seeking, they logically erred by neglecting to commit suicide.

A certain type of conservative would have approved of the communist legal system.  There were no lawyers to speak of, except in graveyards: no criminal lawyers "getting people off"; no "ambulance chasers"; and no namby-pamby civil rights lawyers filing suits over prison conditions.  Habeas was a corpse.  Communist prison reform consisted of cleaning out the raw sewage from tiny prison cells at least one a month. Knee-jerk lawyer-bashing conservatives would have loved it there - right up until the moment when government agents broke down their doors in the middle of the night, arrested them for some imaginary crime, locked them up and tortured them until they not only confessed to the imaginary crime, but asked for forgiveness and literally thanked the government for prosecuting them, minutes before they were taken out, without appeal, put up against the nearest wall, shot and buried in an anonymous grave, while their families were sent a bill for the bullets.  

Under communism, "People were not arrested because they were guilty; they were guilty because they were arrested." Stalin eloquently expressed his own philosophy of criminal procedure when he commented about a tiresome lackey recently executed: "The old fellow couldn't prove his innocence."  Instead of the right to remain silent, interrogations lasted as long as 3,000 hours.  Rule of thumb: any country that kills people to use them as fertilizer probably has no lawyers.

I DID NOT KNOW THAT

I knew that the communists killed millions.  There were surprises in the book, however.  In the winter of 1939-40, many Polish Jews fled east to escape the advancing German Army.  They ran into the heroic Red Army, which five years later would boast of liberating the Jews from concentration camps.  The Red Army greeted the fleeing Jews with bayonets and machine gun fire.  Many Jews returned to the German sector.  Ultimately, 400,000 Polish Jews who ended up in Soviet-controlled territory died during deportation, brutal concentration camp life and forced labor.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

The Black Book of Communism is a brilliant description of the crimes of communism.  Its concluding chapter, written by Courtois, which attempts to explain "Why?", faces a more difficult challenge.  The "why?" will perhaps never be fully understood.  Courtois points to a number of factors, many of which are related to the philosophical similarities between communists and liberals previously discussed.

The inability of the individual to govern himself without coercive direction from the state.  Courtois locates the genesis of Leninist terror in the French Revolution.  Robespierre ruled by fear and terror because the people "were not yet pure enough" to grasp the wisdom of the Revolution.  All left-wing thought is premised on the individual's inherent inability, intellectually and morally, to function without continual direction from the state.

Elitism.  Of course, if people are incapable of successful living without external guidance, that implies the need for a small elite, the "moral guardians of society"--Courtois' words describing the Bolsheviks' self-image--to give them their marching orders.  

Utopianism.  This concept is critical to understanding the crimes of communism.  Utopians posit some imagined, allegedly ideal state of affairs, which, not being grounded in human nature and the human condition, cannot be achieved.  Yet, it must be achieved, and since it is the ultimate moral value, any and all means necessary to achieve this ideal, are sanctioned.  As Courtois writes, 

"the real motivation for the terror . . . stemmed from . . . the utopian will to apply to society a doctrine totally out of step with reality. * * * In a desperate attempt to hold onto power, the Bolsheviks made terror an everyday part of their policies, seeking to remodel society in the image of their theory, and to silence those who, either through their actions or their very social, economic, or intellectual existence, pointed to the gaping holes in the theory. * * * Marxism-Leninism deified the system itself, so that categories and abstractions were far more important than any human reality."

Egalitarianism.  The primary targets of communism were persons of accomplishment: businessmen, successful farmers, intellectuals, and priests.  It was easy to harness the natural envy of the masses toward their betters, particularly when this age-old envy was dressed up in utopian and moralistic terms.  

The efficacy of force.  Naturally, at the heart of Leninism was a fervent belief in the use of force and violence.  Society can be improved by killing, starving, torturing and generalized terror.  Trotsky said it best: "only force can be the deciding factor . . . Whoever aims at the end cannot reject the means."

Violence begets violence.  Courtois deems it significant that communism first emerged from the wreckage of World War I.  The war "to make the world safe for democracy" made it safe for a murderous communist dictatorship in Russia.  The senseless violence of the war habituated the Russian people to the senseless violence of Leninism and Stalinism.  Later communist regimes were nurtured in the womb of other senseless wars.  Courtois quotes Martin Malia:

"crime begets crime, and violence violence, until the first crime in the chain, the original sin of the genus, is expiated through accumulated suffering. . . it was the blood of August 1914, acting like some curse of the Atreidae on the house of modern Europe, that generated the chain of international and social violence that has dominated the modern age."

None of these factors, however, can fully explain why a human being would throw another human being into a blast furnace.  In the end, we are left with the words of Maksim Gorky: "What are the roots of human cruelty?  I have thought much about this and I still do not understand it in the slightest."

-----------

James Ostrowski practices law in Buffalo, NY. See his archive and send him MAIL.

excerpts from Chapter 5: Freedom Virtually Eliminates Genocide And Mass Murder, from The Miracle That Is Freedom by R.J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii:

Turning now to communist China, its Cultural Revolution during the 1960s was a tumultuous period. The communist party was split between those who supported Mao's desire to continue the glorious communist revolution and those who were more pragmatic, the so called "capitalist roaders." No one could be neutral in the bloody conflict for power between these two groups. Military units fought each other, even with cannon and tanks; students waged pitched battles with machine guns and grenades given them by military sympathizers. The victors in one battle or another would then often systematically purge the opposition, subjecting them to torture and mass execution. How many died in this internal conflagration cannot be counted. Perhaps 1,600,000; even possibly 10,000,000.

In this struggle, Mao and his supporters could trust no intellectual or scientist of any sort, especially in the governing of any organization. For this reason it was customary in these years to put fanatical communist radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations of one sort or another. Consider the following experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, such a fanatic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of most prestigious of China's institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun.

Now Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, also a name, unfortunately, of a real scientist working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was in fact the real life spy in the book. So, fully understandable in the context of the "Cultural Revolution," Shan had 166 scientists at the institute arrested as spies, along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; some others committed suicide. Sufficient proof of spying was the existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language. After thus purging the institute of these "spies," Shan was promoted to a provincial Party committee.

[...]

With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, of all countries in this century, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of initial population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.

In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist country--well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it.

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 5.1.

Communism has been human kinds greatest social engineering experiment. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed about 110,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power the political regime has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering freedom.

And consistent with this, communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of totalitarian Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and other nationalities. Then there is the authoritarian Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the totalitarian Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during World War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the authoritarian Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in authoritarian Mexico from 1900 to 1920, which includes many poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratically free, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

All this gives no better utilitarian argument for freedom. It preserves and secures life.

from the Boston Globe, 1995-Dec-7, by Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist:

TO THE VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM, LEST WE FORGET

In 1993, President Clinton signed Public Law 103-199, authorizing a memorial in Washington to those who died in the ``unprecedented imperial Communist holocaust'' that began in 1917. It is a memorial long overdue. And it is well-suited to Washington, the capital of the Free World and the headquarters of what President Kennedy called the ``long twilight struggle'' against the totalitarians of the Left. When completed, the Victims of Communism Memorial will include a museum documenting the crimes committed by the disciples of Marx and Lenin; original artifacts from the bitter night of Communist brutality (a piece of the Berlin Wall, a cell from the ``Hanoi Hilton''); and a database preserving the names of those wiped out in history's greatest slaughter.

Or at least as many of those names as can be identified. It is impossible that we shall ever know them all. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of Cossacks butchered on Lenin's orders in 1919? Every Miskito Indian killed in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas? Every Chinese peasant, all 2 million-plus of them, obliterated during Mao Zedong's ``land reform'' in the early 1950s? Impossible.

For pure murderous evil, there has never been a force to compare with Communism. The Nazis didn't come close. The Holocaust was uniquely malignant - never before or since did one people construct a vast industry of death for the sole purpose of rounding up and destroying every single member of another people. But the Nazis exterminated 11 million innocents; the Communist death toll surpasses 100 million. Nazi power lasted from 1933 to 1945. The Communist nightmare began in November 1917, and continues to this day.

Savagery has always been a hallmark of Communism. It is an ideology that requires the destruction of human beings. ``We have never rejected terror in principle,'' wrote Lenin in 1901, ``nor can we do so.''

Half a century later, even as he denounced the extremes to which his predecessors went, Nikita Khrushchev vowed that the terror so esteemed by Lenin would go on. ``The questioning of Stalin's terror,'' he cautioned the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, ``may lead to the questioning of terror in general. But Bolshevism believes in the use of terror.'' Not long afterward, Khrushchev sent 3,000 Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian freedom fighters.

Communism equals murder. Everywhere. Always.

In Ukraine, for example, where 7 million people were starved to death on the Kremlin's orders. ``If you go now to the Ukraine or the North Caucuses,'' wrote British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in 1933, ``exceedingly beautiful countries and formerly amongst the most fertile in the world, you will find them like a desert; . . . no livestock or horses; villages deserted; peasants famished, often their bodies swollen, unutterably wretched.'' Farmers who took grain or vegetables from their own land were shot. Dead bodies littered the streets of Kharkov, the capital. ``It was,'' an eyewitness later recalled, ``as if the Black Death had passed through.''

Communism equaled murder in Ethiopia, where Mengistu Haile Mariam became dictator in 1977 and embarked on what he called his ``Red Terror.'' Tens of thousands were massacred, including the graduating seniors of almost every high school in Addis Ababa.

Communism equaled murder in North Vietnam as far back as 1945, when Ho Chi Minh resolved to annihilate his Nationalist rivals. ``It was appalling,'' recorded the historian Lucien Bodard. ``Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of men had been liquidated . . .. The intention was that horror and dread should extinguish the last trace of respect for them among the masses: Their execution had to be both shameful and terrifying. That was the reason for the mass executions of hundreds at once, the fields of prisoners buried alive, the harrows dragged over men buried up to the neck.''

Communism equaled murder in Tibet, where Mao's campaign to extirpate Buddhist culture turned 1.2 million Tibetans into corpses. It equaled murder in gentle Cambodia, where the bloodlust of the Khmer Rouge vaporized one-third of the nation in less than four years. It equaled murder in Cuba, in East Germany, in Afghanistan. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic - murder. In the Gulag and the laogai - murder. At Tienanmen Square - murder. In the Korean War and the Vietnam War, in the forest of Katyn and the dungeons of the Lubyanka - murder.

One hundred million victims of Communism. And those are only the victims who were slain. It doesn't include those who were maimed or driven mad. Those whose lives went dark when a loved one was butchered. Those who spun out their years in potato queues, in vodka stupors, in daily fear. It doesn't include those who wasted 30 years as slaves in Siberia. The boat people who flung themselves into the South China Sea. The stifled poets, the gagged priests, the tormented refuseniks, the exiled democrats.

Rarely do we think of them, or of the hundred million. We forget how pathologically evil Communism has been, or why we poured so much blood and treasure into fighting the Cold War. It is to correct that amnesia that the Victims of Communism Memorial will be built.

For information, contact:

VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
P.O. Box 1997
Washington, DC 20013

202-785-0266
202-785-0261 (fax)

JEFF JACOBY IS A GLOBE COLUMNIST. HIS EMAIL ADDRESS IS - jacoby@globe.com

To find more articles by Mr. Jacoby - CLICK HERE

(In 2000, the Globe suspended Jacoby for four months on frivolous charges. After the suspension, they allowed him to return to his job.)

from TPDL 1999-Sep-10, from Investors Business Daily:

Government's War On The Poor

While most people celebrated Labor Day by laboring less, the self-appointed defenders of the working man stayed busy fomenting division between the economic classes. They should have just kept quiet. Their solutions are all too often at the root of workers' problems.

This year, three of these ''defenders'' released reports that made the holiday weekend hostage to the politics of envy. Abetted by a willing media, the reports shrieked about a widening income gap, told us we're working too much and groused about the churning labor markets in a growing economy.

It's all a lot of predictable whining.

The biggest offender was the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. The liberal group used Congressional Budget Office data to back a familiar complaint: The rich are getting richer while the poor are falling behind.

Meanwhile, the United Nations' International Labor Organization released a report that says Americans' working hours are the longest in the industrialized world. In 1997, the year from which the latest figures are available, Americans worked an average of 1,966 hours a year. That's up from 1,883 hours in 1980.

The implication? That's just too much work, and something must be done about it.

The University of California, San Francisco, joined the chorus by releasing the results of a survey that indicates the booming, high-tech economy means workers move around a lot - in California, at least. Four in 10 workers have been at their jobs for less than three years.

These reports carry a not-so-subtle message: Government must narrow the income gap through wealth redistribution, cut work time by mandating a shorter work week and stabilize the turbulent labor market.

None of those actions would make life better for the poor. Government interventions simply don't work as intended.

Look at the developed countries where workers are worse off than they are here. In Europe, South America and Canada, governments take a bigger part of the economy than does the U.S. government. Are their working classes better off than they are here? Hardly.

The generous benefits in those countries, in the name of helping the less fortunate, actually encourage people not to work. On top of that, businesses there must pay high taxes to fund these benefits. It's a recipe for unemployment. The European Union's unemployment rate, for instance, is more than twice that of the U.S.

More government intrusion and higher taxes - for greater wealth redistribution - don't create a workers' nirvana. In fact, the effect is usually the opposite. When government sets out to improve workers' lives through regulation, a minimum wage, union-favoring labor laws and any of countless other measures, it's doing them a disservice.

Start with regulation. Compliance costs the private sector roughly $600 billion a year. Economist Robert J. Genetski says the deluge of government rules costs each worker $5,000 to $10,000 a year ''over and above the benefits they receive from regulation.''

Ask the low-income worker and he's likely to say he'd rather have that money in wages than have his employer spend it trying to keep up with the roughly 60,000 new pages of regulation added each year.

Minimum-wage laws, an icon of the political left, are particularly damaging to low-income workers. Many are locked out of jobs. The Employment Policies Institute figures that the first 50 cents of the $1 hike in the minimum wage in 1996-97 cost 645,000 jobs.

It's clear to everyone but the most die-hard socialists how that happens. Employers who can afford to pay four workers $5 an hour can't afford them all at $6 an hour. Somebody has to go. So three are marginally helped. (The Ludwig von Mises Institute estimates that after taxes, minimum-wage workers gained less than $2 a day from the last hike.) A fourth is simply without a job. And the fifth, sixth and seventh don't get hired in the first place.

Most lawmakers are fully aware of the problems created by minimum-wage laws. Yet Congress will seek to boost the federal wage again this fall. Politicians are quick to abandon sound economics for political gain. If they really thought that hiking the minimum wage would pull low-income workers out of poverty, they'd enact a $50 an hour minimum.

But they know better. They'll vote to raise it a dollar or so an hour, and crow about their concern for the working class. Most supporters of minimum-wage laws have more concern for union workers who benefit from the lack of competition.

Politicians have favored unions with labor-relations laws, too - often in the name of helping the working poor. But, like other attempts, they've backfired.

Labor laws have created animosity between labor and management where there should be none and given unions power at the expense of workers, whose mandatory dues are often used for political purposes at odds with their views.

The labor laws have also entrenched the union-leader class that rakes in billions of dollars from workers' pockets. Gus Bevona, who stepped down as president of a local union in February, is a prime example. He made more than $400,000 a year. He got a $1.5 million severance package. The doormen, elevator operators and janitors he represented? Most make less than $35,000 a year.

Labor laws also bar companies from hiring permanent replacement workers in disputes over noneconomic issues, such as working conditions. Those open positions could be filled by the unemployed or those who wish to improve their job situation. But the law denies them the chance.

Government also restricts access to health care for the working poor. How can that be? The big-government crowd loves to talk about expanding such access, proposing billions in new spending.

But this problem is of government's creation. Here's how: Government grants tax breaks to companies that provide health-care insurance for employees. That leads to an overconsumption of health care because workers don't directly pay for it. So as consumption (demand) grows, so must premiums.

Premiums eventually get so high that small businesses are forced to drop insurance coverage for their employees. So who's hurt the most? Low-income employees. Most of them work at the small businesses that struggle to afford insurance.

Government also keeps the poor down with programs that promote dependency. Incentive to improve one's financial condition is dulled when the public trough offers food, housing, health care and some spending money.

Even the government's ''free'' education keeps many in a permanent disadvantaged state. The monopolistic school system has little reason to provide a quality service - especially in poor areas - because the children have no other place to go. Yet liberals continue to defend government schools, rather than help the poor lift themselves out of poverty with better education.

And despite all these obstacles, the poor do lift themselves. Today's poor are often tomorrow's rich. That undercuts the liberal nostrum that only the government can really help the working man ascend in a world controlled by the evil rich.

The Census Bureau shows that more than 80% of low-income workers - those making $5.70 an hour or less - move into higher income brackets within two years.

In a free society even those with mediocre skills and modest ambition can climb the income scale. Only 5% of Americans who were in the lowest income bracket in 1975 were still there in 1991. Most had achieved middle-class status. Nearly a third made it to the highest income bracket.

Opportunities are abundant in a free society; if they weren't, no one would move up. Lawmakers have spent far too much time trying to fix perceived inequities, legislating a subjective justice and playing nanny.

Yet the carping and crying for more government aid continues. Politicians will no doubt oblige. But the best way to help the poor isn't more programs, it's fewer.

from the Creators Syndicate via the Bradenton Herald, 1997-Sep-18, by Walter Williams:

Capitalism benefits common man far more than the rich

There are some arguments so illogical that only an intellectual or politician can believe them. One of those arguments is: Capitalism benefits the rich more than it benefits the common man. Let's look at it.

The rich have always had access to entertainment -- sometimes in the comfort of their palaces and mansions. The rich have never had to experience the drudgery of having to beat out carpets, iron their clothing or slave over a hot stove all day in order to have a decent dinner; they can afford to hire people. Today, the common man has the power to enjoy much of what only the rich could yesteryear. Capitalism's mass production has made radios and televisions, vacuum cleaners, wash-and-wear clothing and microwave ovens available and well within the reach of the common man, sparing him of the drudgery of the past.

What about those who became wealthy making