Should one resign from one's congregation when it invites a seriously radical (some might say deranged) individual to take over the podium? This is my dilemma today.
As legislative counsel for the ACLU in 1985, Lynn told the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography...that child pornography was protected by the First Amendment. While production of child porn could be prevented by law, he argued, its distribution could not be. A few years later (1988), Lynn told the Senate Judiciary Committee that even requiring porn producers to maintain records of their performers' ages was impermissible.
"If there is no federal record-keeping requirement for the people portrayed in Road and Track or Star Wars," he said, "there can be no such requirement for Hustler or Debbie Does Dallas."
Lynn told Citizen that he urged his superiors at the ACLU to modify their position, and that he believes that there are "mechanisms by which child pornography can be controlled at every stage, from production to distribution," so long as those mechanisms are not overly "broad."
Lynn also would like Congress to fire its Christian chaplains. But he has spoken in defense of the right of Wiccans and other neopagans to worship on U.S. military bases. When a publication of the religiously conservative Family Research Council (FRC) complained about a Hindu priest's having delivered an invocation before a joint session of Congress in September 2000, Americans United blasted the council for its religious "intolerance," attracting widespread media attention.
To get a sense of how far the ACLU would go in purging from society all public expressions of religion, consider the following list (it is not exhaustive) of practices the Union has opposed as unconstitutional:
-the tax exemption of churches and synagogues -creches and menorahs on public property -the maintenance of chaplains by Congress -the maintenance of chaplains by the Armed Services -a city employees' Christmas pageant at a local zoo -all blue law statutes -the singing of "Silent Night" in the classroom -Christian anti-drug groups who perform in public schools -all voucher plans and tuition-tax credits -the inscription "In God We Trust" on coins and postage -government census questions on religious affiliations -municipal funding of a platform to accomodate the Pope -kosher inspectors on the payroll of Miami Beach -a statue of Jesus underwater off the coast of Key Largo -the word "Christianity" on town seals -prayers said in a huddle before a football game
The ACLU's positions on church and state have become so unbending that even "strict separationists" like former board member and professed atheist Nat Hentoff have been taken aback: "When I was elected to the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union some years ago," he wrote, "I thought I would be the most anti-clerical kid on that block." Three years later he left with a bad taste in his mouth: "there are members of that board . . . who see the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door." Yet recall: the ACLU customarily defends the most obscene and profane words, in schools and everywhere else.
One of the major reasons given for suing the BSA for excluding atheists concerns Boy Scout meetings in public schools. The latter should not be open, opponents say, to promoters of religious faith. The question arises: Why should young atheists and/or Marxists be allowed to meet after school, and not young believers in God and country?
In 1984 a "Religious Speech Protection Act" was introduced in Congress to ensure students the right to voluntarily engage in religious speech. The ACLU opposed it. Rev. Barry Lynn of its Washington Office warned the House Education and Labor Committee that the bill would render it "hard to tell the classroom from the Sunday school room." In the end the bill gained a majority but fell eleven votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary under the special procedure chosen for passage.
After considerable negotiation an "Equal Access" bill was introduced, requiring that if a school permitted one noncurricular and student-initiated (i.e., non-school sponsored) meeting to occur before or after school, it could not deny other student groups the right to hold similar meetings. It passed the Senate by a vote of 88-11, and won in the House by a margin of 337-77. The ACLU's Washington office remained warily neutral. This wasn't good enough for the national board, which came out squarely against the bill. It was this decision that led Nat Hentoff to charge that the ACLU "has become a relentless opponent of student religious groups trying to secure their First Amendment rights under the Equal Access Act."
Wherever there is a nexus, however indirect, between the public sector, however broadly defined, and the promotion of religion, however broadly defined, the ACLU and its modern liberal supporters swing into action. The state grows more intrusive and Americans' natural and constitutional rights fall by the wayside.
UPDATE III: More from the 1990 Village Voice, which kinda, uh, you know, puts everything in perspective for us:
I call the hullabaloo surrounding child pornography a moral panic (defined by Nina Eliasoph, author of The Missing Children Myth, as a situation "in which a minor social problem expresses and preempts a deeper related one") because no epidemic of child pornography exists and no child abuse-child pornography link has ever been scientifically established. At its height, prior to Anita Bryant's "Save Our Children" crusade of 1977, the total number of children involved in kiddie porn worldwide during the 1960s and '70s (most of which was produced abroad) did not exceed 5,000 to 7,000. What little child pornography did exist was halted by the Protection of Children From Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977. (According to the Illinois Legislative Investigating Committee report, commercially distributed child pornography had disappeared by 1980.) By the mid-1980s the U.S. Customs and Postal Service were virtually alone in "mass-marketing" child pornography in this country, according to researchers including attorney and obscenity expert Lawrence Stanley. The government's purpose, ACLU legislate (sic) counsel Barry Lynn believes, has been "a kind of entrapment."
This may help explain why the number of child pornography-related federal indictments has increased from 61 in fiscal year 1984 to 244 in 1987 and continues to balloon... (Emphasis added)
Get it? Child pornography isn't really a problem at all. It's all just part of some right wing plot.
I suppose I favor this essay because it cites Edward Gibbon Wakefield:
...changing money stocks create uncertainty causing capital to seek out apparently safer havens. The effect of this process is to over-value a favoured currency. In my opinion, this is what has happened to the US dollar.
If those who claim that the strength of the US economy is driving the current account deficit were right then the dollar would not be falling. But what can one expect when from January 2001 to December 2004 M1 grew by 27 per cent? What this means for America’s trading partners is another story — and a pretty ugly one at that.
The problem is not entirely Keynesian. Other economic fallacies that central bankers have swallowed are also at work. Meanwhile, the rest of us can only sit back and watch with increasing foreboding.
Tim Worstall explains why the Texas BP refinery explosion will lower -- not raise -- the world price of crude. (You know, my forehead just seems to get flatter and flatter each time I hit it with the palm of my hand...)
For every single disabled person in a wheelchair putting sidewalk corner ramps to their intended use I've seen at least ten dozen rollerbladers or bicycle riders moving in a flash, sidewalk to sidewalk, happily daring every car to end their twentysomething-and-oh-so-fitness-oriented lives. (I wonder how many of them were actually put in wheelchairs by the very disabled ramps they misuse with such impunity?)
-- Perfectly reasonable arguments with which the author does not happen to agree are labeled "myths."
-- "Serious analysis" is said to begin when the author starts relaying his own opinions.
"Advocates of personal accounts cite the low rates of return in the current system," says professor Barro, but he finishes with those very dangerous words: "this is misleading." Watch out, Robert. You seem inches away from claiming those with whom you disagree are dishonest.
It was based on Milton Friedman's cost arguments...
Buried in this story is anecdotal (and completely unintentional) support for the proposition we're finally entering into the upside of the Lucas aggregate supply cycle.
In English: sometimes the economy works more like Keynes imagined it -- prices are fairly sticky, "quantity signals" like inventories transfer information as readily as prices. Sometimes the economy works more like market theory imagines it -- price signals transfer information so rapidly that all cost changes (wherever possible) are immediately shifted to products' buyers.
And, in rare instances, the economy works as Lucas imagined it might: price signals get transmitted slowly and without much accuracy, with a fortuitous result. In response to rising prices, the economy pumps out higher and higher levels of real output. And -- for a time, at least -- prosperity reigns.
* In September of 2000, less than two years before the passage of McCain-Feingold, the liberal magazine The American Prospect put out a special issue devoted to campaign-finance reform. With incredible hypocrisy, the magazine failed to tell its readers that the "Checkbook Democracy" issue was paid for with a $132,000 check from the Carnegie Corporation -- which, again, has spent $14 million promoting the regulation of political speech in the last decade.
* Since 1994, National Public Radio has accepted more than $1.2 million from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance reform for items such as (to quote the official disclosure statements) "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making." About $400,000 of that directly funded a program called, "Money, Power and Influence."
NPR claims that there has never been any contact between the funders and the reporters. NPR also claims that some of the $1.2 million went to non-campaign-finance-related coverage. But at least $860,000 can be tied directly to coverage of money in politics.
* Lastly, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation accepted $935,000 between 1995 and 2001 from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance reform for things like a "training initiative to help television, radio and print journalists provide better news coverage of the influence of private money on electoral, legislative and regulatory processes."
UPDATE: A reader sends this tidbit of anectodal evidence:
I worked for a refining technology development company, and out worst years ever were 2000 to 2003. I got no raise in 2002 and 2003. The refiners are spending their money to get the sulfur out of fuel, not to increase their capacity. All of our equipment business was in new refineries overseas.
Here's one of EconoPundit's most loyal readers sprinting past Ben Miller of Penn State to take the win for MIT at the Men's B Criterion, Penn State Pagoda Weekend, 12-13 March, 2005!
UPDATE: We've linked the above photo to MIT's cycling site, and here is a bit of an addendum (uh, is that spelled right?) from the guy on the cycle in the photo:
Just one note: it's the Men's B Criterium (not "Criterion") -- a criterium ("crit" for short, in English at least; I'm not sure about French) is a road circuit race held on a closed course of 800m - 5km in length (though usually in the 1-2km range). The race is run for a prescribed number of laps (or nominally for a prescribed time, in which case the speed of the pack is computed after a few laps and by halfway through the race, racers are given the number of laps to go), and typically emphasizes cornering acceleration, and sprinting. This race was rather unique in that it was just up and down one section of road on e big hill (the planned road race couldn't be run due to snow, so this was improvised), so the climbers had a rare chance to place well in a race that nominally should have gone to the sprinters!
Since the beginning, advocates of the Washington Consensus have been greatly divided about the pace and sequence of the reforms. Profound differences quickly emerged about the need or desirability of what came to be known as the application of a "shock therapy" [or alternatively "the big bang"] approach to policy reforms. This approach implied the implementation of as many reforms as quickly as possible. Others argued for a slower, more sequenced pace. This is not a debate just between experts in Washington and others elsewhere. It also rages among insiders. This is illustrated by Strobe Talbott's now famous remark during a 1993 trip to Moscow when he told an anxious Russian media that "what Russia needs is less shock and more therapy". The statement, warmly welcomed by many, was, however, clearly at odds with the line espoused by his colleagues at the US Treasury and by the IMF and World Bank with the active backing of the US government. That debate of course continues today and is far from resolved, with both sides declaring victory using the same facts to back their cases.
A few years later, Joseph Stiglitz, the Chief Economist of the World Bank and former Chairman of President Clinton's Counsel of Economic Advisors, publicly denounced the IMF's handling of the financial crises in Asia and Russia. This led Anders Aslund, a Russian expert at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to tell The Economist that "without knowing anything [Stiglitz] mouths any stupidity that comes to his head". Ricardo Hausmann, the Chief Economist of the Interamerican Development Bank [IDB] enthusiastically recommends that countries shed their currencies in favor of the US dollar, a policy that would shield them from the ills brought about by international financial volatility. Harvard's Jeffrey Sachs thinks that this is a reckless recommendation and Enrique Iglesias, the President of the IDB, emphasizes that Hausmann's opinions are his own and that the Bank does not endorse them. The Asian crisis prompted MIT's Paul Krugman to call for the governments beset by the crisis to impose controls on capital flows, a solution that, at the time, was immediately rejected by then-Secretary of the US Treasury Robert Rubin, the IMF's Michel Camdessus, his deputy Stanley Fisher, and Rubin's then—deputy Lawrence Summers, among many others.
Nobel laureate James Tobin calls for a tax on currency transactions to "put sand in the wheels of international finance" and tame volatility while Nobel laureate Milton Friedman thinks that the problem is perhaps too much sand in the wheels of global finance and calls for, among other measures, the abolition of the IMF. Not so fast, say financier George Soros, Yale's Dean Jeffrey Garten as well as a blue ribbon commission sponsored by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. The world is in dire need of a new financial architecture, they claim. Some of them even urge the establishment of new multilateral institutions like an international debt insurance agency, a global central bank or an international bankruptcy court. Others, however, like Barry Eichengreen and Robert Rubin, insist that while the international financial system does require some maintenance and modernization what is really needed is not a general overhaul or new institutions, but better "plumbing", meaning the detailed reexamination and redesign of existing institutions and practices. James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank and Stiglitz, his Chief Economist, extol a new approach, the "comprehensive development framework", that the Bank officially adopted in 1999 to guide its lending and advice to its client countries. This leads Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati to puzzle in the pages of the Financial Times about what could explain the mistaken assumptions and outright fallacies on which Wolfensohn and Stiglitz's framework is surely based. He generously concluded that perhaps it was just the result of "plain ignorance". A day later, in the same pages, T. N. Srinivasan, another prestigious development economist at Yale, also fumed about Wolfensohn and Stiglitz's, arguments dismissing them as "cliche ridden and banal".
If this sample represents the Washington Consensus, then just imagine what a Washington Confusion would be like. A point worth reiterating is that these are not the debates between say, French deconstructionist sociologists and American mathematical economists. These are disagreements among some of the most respected and influential individuals in the field and ones that share favorable ideological pre-dispositions towards markets, private capital and free trade and investment, while harboring a deep distrust of socialist ideas, central planning and government intervention. The size of the rifts and the even bigger confusion that ensues when the opinions and policy prescriptions of less market-friendly experts are brought into the fray is hard to fathom. (Full footnotes with links can be found in the original document)
I regret to say "Bloogger" has simply stopped working for me. If this gets through it is the first post in three days that has taken me less than thirty minutes to complete.
We will be switching out of Blogger ASAP. Meanwhile sorry for the sparse posting.
UPDATE: I may have found a temporary solution by limiting number of displayed days to five rather than seven. (Heck, I used to be able to show the whole month!)
UPDATE II: Lots of good alternatives to Blogger out there. The dealmakers for me are (1) nice format for block quotes and (2) ease of uploading graphics. (Am I silly to dream of cut-and-paste style insertion of graphics, or online graphics editing?)
Consider, for example, the story that is the centerpiece of their book: the rise and fall of the British welfare state. The outlines of that story are well told: after depression and war the British people demanded and got a state that provided a strong social safety net and job security, in part by simply nationalizing key industries - the "commanding heights".Given our current cynicism about government it is hard to imagine that this statist solution could have had any merits - but the fact was that for a generation or so it worked pretty well. Perhaps economic growth was slower than it might have been, perhaps Britain's rank as a world power eroded, but given full employment and steadily rising living standards Harold Macmillan's famous declaration that "you never had it so good" was the simple truth. Then it all began to fall apart: inflation, rising unemployment, increasingly disruptive labor disputes - all preparing the ground for the radical free-market ideology of Margaret Thatcher and her guru Keith Joseph. And Thatcherism, after a rocky start, did seem to deliver on enough of its promises that its essentials now seem secure despite the return of Labor to power.
So what do we learn from this account? Free-market capitalism was discredited by its failures, replaced with a mixed economy that was legitimized by its successes; then the mixed economy began to work badly, and was replaced by a return to free-market capitalism, which has been legitimized by its successes ...Clearly this leaves all the important questions unanswered. Why do free markets, which seemed to fail so drastically in the 1930s, seem to work pretty well nowadays? Why did the mixed economy, which seemed to work pretty well in the 50s and 60s, fall apart in the 70s and 80s? And, the big question, are we on some sort of pendulum - will the state rise again?
The import of his current editorial is to finally show him not as someone who questions the viability of markets as opposed to planning, but rather as an active opponent of the market mechanism.
UPDATE: I can't resist this mini-Fisking. Here's Krugman:
Latin Americans are the most disillusioned. Through much of the 1990's, they bought into the "Washington consensus" - which we should note came from Clinton administration officials as well as from Wall Street economists and conservative think tanks - which said that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to economic takeoff. Instead, growth remained sluggish, inequality increased, and the region was struck by a series of economic crises.
Audiences the world over seem to believe that this signifies a set of neoliberal policies that have been imposed on hapless countries by the Washington-based international financial institutions and have led them to crisis and misery. There are people who cannot utter the term without foaming at the mouth. (Emphasis added)
Once again, here's Krugman:
Moses Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, says that the Wolfowitz nomination turns the World Bank into the American Bank. Make that ugly American bank: rightly or not, developing countries will see Mr. Wolfowitz's selection as a sign that we're still trying to impose policies they believe have failed.
Well, that's all very interesting. But what else, I wonder, has Moses Naim said, anyway? How about this for starters:
Moses Naim, the editor of Foreign Policy, has argued that no ["Washington consensus"] exists. Naim highlights the fact that economists are often divided over such issues as the East Asian crisis, the need for an international financial architecture, and the effectiveness of "open" trade policies. "If this sample represents the Washington Consensus, then just imagine what a Washington Confusion would be like," he says.
So what do the Naim and Williamson comments about the "Washington consensus" seem to have in common?
Can it be, perhaps, that those using the phrase are being a bit, uh, shall we say, ideological?
UPDATE: And just as he was (figuratively speaking) quietly walking composing in his head a thoughtful attack on the the administration for an inappropriate choice for the World Bank, Bruce Bartlett (figuratively speaking) stubbed his toe on this rather crude editorial -- which in turn caused him to wonder whether he shouldn't perhaps be cheering the appointment instead.
However bear in mind what seems to be at stake here is not whether nuclear storage facilities are safe in the near future, but whether they will continue to be safe 10,000 years from the current date.
In late February, a National Association of Realtors report provided stunning confirmation that speculation in housing is soaring. The group said 23 percent of homes purchased last year were bought as investments or second homes. The report suggested that many people are buying homes for quick turnarounds, much as they'd plunk money into rising stocks.
Now just think about this for a moment. 23%? Again, 23%?
23% -- If under one in four of all homes purchased last year were bought for strictly speculative purposes, wouldn't you have heard about it before now?
I know this has lots to do with Social Security, private accounts, all that stuff, but it's also exciting the way this confirms Marx's theory of "class consciousness."
One's political consciousness, the numbers say, is mostly informed by one's relationship to the means of production!
As you read this Peoples' Daily interview with Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett, as yourself the following. Is there any evidence Bennett can distinguish legitimate, non-exploitative international business transactions from exploitative, illegitimate ones? Put the question another way: is there any evidence Bennett knows how business -- international or otherwise -- operates?
Johnathan Chait's Principled Case for Obstruction is rapidly coming to be standard required reading for both sides on the Social Security debate:
How will this work? Conservatives believe, not without reason, that private accounts will offer an invidious comparison to traditional Social Security. Workers will note that the taxes they send off to the traditional program disappear, while the money in their own accounts grows before their eyes. The private accounts will, in most cases, also appear to provide a higher rate of return. As noted above, the comparison is deceptive--traditional Social Security will be bearing the weight of the legacy debt, disability benefits, and, for affluent workers, redistribution to those earning less. But the comparison will create a constituency clamoring for expansion. Conservatives once proclaimed this unabashedly. The 1983 Cato Journal paper, which advocated what it called a "Leninist Strategy" for undermining Social Security, argued, "This mechanism for demonstrating the individual gains and losses that occur under Social Security is a key step in weakening public support for our present system." (Emphasis added)
I wonder why some individuals rightly demand absolute transparency when it comes to the worlds of finance and business, but at the same time claim it to be a sort of highest-virtue that the Social Security System hides its redistributive features behind the retirement system disguise? Why is transparency good for business but bad for government programs?
This story, via Glenn Reynolds and Mark Blumenthal, is simply astounding. Here's the gist: While blogs' total readership is quite minor as compared with MSM, it is none the less -- objectively speaking -- massive.
7% of respondents are "very familiar" with blogs? 7% of the US public is a gigantic number.
The textbooks say in conditions like these world price is likely to plummet during the coming six months or so.
A reasonable policy would be to set an internal (i.e. U.S.) price most manufacturing activity can live with, and tax petroleum imports on a sliding scale to maintain that internal price.
What's a good candidate for such an "internal price"? Well, how about a few bucks a barrel more than estimated exploration plus production ANWAAR costs?
And you can even stabilize the whole thing by selling out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve like an ever-normal granary system if price rises above the internal price.
Arguably, the most serious thing about fluctuating energy costs is the uncertainty -- not whether energy prices are "too high" or whatever. A national energy policy like the simple one suggested above would generate a fully stabilized price for the next several decades, and just maybe it would give the economy's aggregate supply curve a good healthy kick to the right as well.
I know "Social Security" makes your eyes glaze over...but still check this out...
This new study contains a basic smoking gun that may change the debate. Consider these numbers: To do better with Social Security than with a basic private plan a low income worker must survive and collect benefits well into his/her mid-90's -- and one way to interpret the result can be stated as follows: rich-to-poor redistribution via Social Security works only for the extremely small number of working poor whose lifespan approaches a century.
Via Bruce Bartlett.
UPDATE: Okay, yes, the distributional aspect is a logical stretch. But it's Friday afternoon. Give me a break.
David Malpass is analyzing policy rumblings from China's annual National People's Congress and has this to say:
We disagree with prevalent notions of China as economically or politically fragile, and continue to expect China’s performance in 2005 to be characterized by
-- ongoing policy-driven restraint of capacity expansion, including the likelihood of further monetary tightening;
-- continued policy support for private consumption expenditure.
-- We continue to think China’s primary policy response in 2005 to large-scale capital inflows will be further capital account liberalization – i.e. enabling more robust capital outflows -- rather than a sizeable currency appreciation.
-- Our full-year reported real GDP growth forecast is a conservative 8.2%, with expectations for a continued healthy shift toward private consumption rather than investment-driven growth.
Just take from these guys and give it to those guys...No, not at all. Why do you say that's "rearranging deck chairs?"
Here's E.J. Dionne on Social Security, the inheritance tax, and Rahm Emanuel:
"We should be for a savings revolution in this country," Emanuel said. "The president's plan isn't big enough. He just wants to rearrange the deck chairs...The public's view is of their insecurity about retirement. It's not about their Social Security. They're worried about what they can't see, not what they can see."
Emanuel and his former Clinton administration colleague Gene Sperling have worked on a series of proposals to create new private retirement accounts for workers without pensions. They would not be carved out of Social Security but financed separately. One way of covering the costs of these accounts: blocking the total repeal of the inheritance tax, as envisioned by Bush, and using the proceeds from levies on large fortunes to help workers who have little savings begin building their own nest eggs.
Here's a note -- an econopundit exclusive, representing thoughts somewhat deeper than mine -- sent by Bruce Bartlett to E.J. Dionne this very morning:
I think Bush's central problem has always been that the main argument for SS reform is that we have to get control of entitlement spending. He might have argued that dealing successfully with SS would make it easier to do Medicare, which is where the real problem is. But Bush cannot make that argument because he made Medicare's problems far, far worse than they already were with the drug bill--a $16.6 trillion new unfunded entitlement on top of a system that was already deep in the red. Therefore, he has no credibility on the fiscal responsibility issue and cannot use it to support SS reform. Consequently, he has been forced to rely on weaker arguments that are not resonating with Congress or the people.
Think about this: SS's long-term unfunded liability is only $10 trillion. In other words, we could repeal the drug bill, fund SS in perpetuity and still cut $6 trillion off the nation's long-term indebtedness.
I find the Democratic position to be strange. As best I can tell, their position is that it is okay to raise taxes and cut SS benefits to keep the system going, but under no circumstances can private accounts be allowed. It seems to me that a more logical position would be to say okay to higher taxes to fund add-on accounts, but under no circumstances should benefits be cut for anyone. This would be more consistent with the party's historical position on SS. Fighting private accounts--and only the accounts--when a majority of workers today have 401(k) plans, IRAs and other types of private pension accounts seems like a total loser to me.
My prediction is that at the end of the day, Republicans and Democrats will agree to a consensus SS bill that will raise the retirement age, raise the payroll cap a little, tinker with the benefit formula and a few other things that together will keep the system going for at least the next 75 years--but no private accounts. But this will not be any Democratic victory, because personal saving accounts will then become the centerpiece of tax reform. The result will be to shield even more capital income from taxation and move more toward a consumption-based tax system--which I favor. Democrats will be unable to oppose this move because of the way they are playing their SS cards.
Conservatives seem to understand better than liberals these days that there is a fight going on simultaneously on many fronts. If they are stalled in one area, they shift easily to an unprotected flank. Liberals seem to view every fight as separate and discrete. They delude themselves that if they can hold the line one place, they will win the war, and so they drain resources from other places, leaving them weakened and vulnerable to a conservative counterattack. While liberals have been fighting a futile battle against SS private accounts, conservatives have gotten tort reform and bankruptcy reform. And we're going to get private accounts through the back door anyway. That's inevitable.
The core of this weakness by liberals is that they are fighting a defensive war. As long as they stay on defense and conservatives stay on offense, the liberal position will weaken over time. I know that some liberals understand this. But they think that just redoubling their efforts, turning up the rhetoric, making their attacks ever more shrill constitutes a valid strategy. It is not. What someone needs to do is find a new vision of liberalism that is not anchored in 1930s or 1960s, which will create a position from which liberals can go on offense.
The funny thing is that Bill Clinton started doing this and was rewarded politically for doing so. Yet his vision was completely trashed in 2000 and again in 2004. We don't do that on our side. When we find something that works, like tax cuts, we beat it to death. Your side seems to view political success with deep skepticism, which I find very bizarre.
Dr. Que does not have access to the daily diet of news that feeds the free world. But given the feats of modern technology to spread information, he knows enough about what is now happening in the Middle East so that he wished to share his views on how America's intervention in Iraq is like the war in Vietnam, and how it isn't. The similarity, he says, "is the same fighting spirit for freedom." The difference, he adds, is that in the fight for freedom, the side America is on "will triumph this time." Why?
"The world is changing," says Dr. Que. "There are more opportunities than ever."
He is right, and if the world is changing, it is because the U.S. is hardly alone in prizing freedom. In every country are people who care about liberty--and in most places there are a few willing to pay dearly and take extraordinary risks to lead the way. Dr. Que is one, and as we watch the Middle East, it bears remembering, as he says, that these are "universal values," that in many places there are people who given any chance at all will answer freedom's call.
Here's Ted Turner's new firm and uncompromising UN blog -- reportedly the brave new answer to all that mean and unfair criticism of the UN.
Maybe blogging should be left ot the bloggers?
UPDATE: Here, to give you some of the flavor of this new enerprise, is an excerpt from the first link I explored:
Resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is key to any hope of curtailing global outbursts of violence, panelists at a summit on democracy, terrorism and security said Wednesday.
That's at the heart of Arabs' feelings of discrimination by foreign political, social and economic policies. What others call "terrorism," they may see as "resistance."
Really helps "sell" the UN to all the doubters, right?
China now has 46 million government bureaucrats, new statistics revealed yesterday, a number almost as great as the entire population of England.
While the country is used to outdoing the rest of the world for sheer numbers, the explosion in officialdom is alarming its ruling Communist Party.
Its excessive and corrupt bureaucracy was regarded as one of the principal causes of the decline of imperial rule. Yet there are now 35 times as many people on the government payroll, even as a proportion of the population, than at the time of the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Corruption aside, today's civil servants are also expensive, requiring official cars, holidays masquerading as training sessions and receptions.
Hundreds of Kuwaiti women activists and their male supporters marched on parliament Monday in the conservative Gulf state's largest female suffrage rally, as the government pushed lawmakers for a quick debate on reforms to give women the right to vote.
This response betrays the sort of elitist ignorance that's all-too common among politicians of a certain persuasion. They simply don't know anything beyond the isolated and self-absorbed world of Big Business/Big Labor.
In the real world of small employers -- where I live -- there are many instances of workers going out and finding second jobs because their primary employer simply can't afford to extend their hours beyond 40 per week. The price of the product -- as dictated by customers -- won't support higher labor costs at overtime rates.
Frankly, I would love to be able to offer some of my employees the extra hours they now spend delivering newspapers at minimum wage. At non-overtime rates I'd be able to pay them $7/hour more than they currently get in their second jobs.
But of course I can't do that legally under current legislation. Apparently the Santorum bill would change all that, but the ongoing ideological war against business and markets may be enough to defeat Santorum.
Via Bruce Bartlett.
UPDATE: Here's Ray Fair's "moonlighter" index. Did changes in minimum wage legislation during the early Clinton years cause the rapid departure from historical norms shown after 1990?
In a 2003 study, sociologists Chistopher Uggen and Jeff Manza found that roughly 4.2 million had been disfranchised nationwide, a third of whom had completed their prison time or parole. Taking into account the lower voter turnout of felons, they concluded that about one-third of them would vote in presidential races, and that would have overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates. Participation by felons, Messrs. Uggen and Manza estimated, also would have allowed Democrats to win a series of key U.S. Senate elections, thus allowing the party to control the Senate continuously from 1986 until at least this January.
UPDATE: I can't help it, I'm a sucker for the sort of inappropriate wordplay you can find in this article's easily-missed headline.
One of Roosevelt's most promising grad students has sent me a link to this article:
The raising of the mathematical bar in graduate schools over the past several decades has driven many intelligent men and women (perhaps women especially) to pursue other fields. The graduate training process filters out students who might contribute from a perspective of anthropology, biology, psychology, history, or even intense curiosity about economic issues. Instead, the top graduate schools behave as if their goal were to produce a sort of idiot-savant, capable of appreciating and adding to the mathematical contributions of other idiot-savants, but not necessarily possessed of any interest in or ability to comprehend the world to which an economist ought to pay attention.
My response is as follows -- Look here: if I had to make it through Gerard Debreu's lectures, you can sure as heck try to make it through mine! Yeah.
To me this chart says: (1) everyone's effective federal tax rates went down, (2) the top quintile's rate, having trended upward for the 1990-2000 decade, enjoyed a rate cut roughly equivalent to everyone elses', (3) the system is still healthily progressive.
UPDATE: Here's the same data with the numbers normalized to make comparisons easier:
At some point purveyors of the "tax cut for the rich" mantra must be clear on exactly how progressive a system they actually want.
I've spent much of the afternoon fiddling with data in this new CBO report forwarded by Bruce Bartlett.
It is really hard to find much in the way of a tax cut "for the rich" in these data. The computer in my current campus office won't allow graphics work/uploads, so charts illustrating this point have to wait until tomorrow.
