Month: August 2004

The Inevitable Fate of Campaign Finance Reform

Even The New York Times admits it:

For the second time this campaign season outside groups that are not legally allowed to coordinate with Mr. Kerry’s campaign are riding to its rescue at a crucial time in its advertising campaign against President Bush – the most expensive on record. The spots hit just when Mr. Kerry ceased advertising and when Mr. Bush increased his with commercials reminding the nation of what it has been through, the dangers that lie ahead and, in one released Tuesday, declaring it is “rising to the challenge.”

What an amazing coincidence!

Not that the failure of McCain-Feingold bothers or surprises me. But it would have been better if McCain-Feingold had died in Congress or had been invalidated by the Supremes. Flouting the law foments disrespect for the rule of law.

A Leftist Version of the First Amendment

Dem lawmakers say Fox News is unbalanced

UPI – Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Date: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 7:13:55 PM EST By HANNAH K. STRANGE, UPI Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 (UPI) — Several members of Congress sent a letter Tuesday to Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, to express their opposition to what they say is the network’s “unfair and unbalanced” bias towards the Republican Party.

The group, composed of 38 Democrats and Independents from the U.S. House of Representatives, has requested that Murdoch meet with them to discuss their concerns.

“The responsibility of the media is to report the news in an unbiased, impartial and objective manner,” the letter reads….

I guess they’re upset that all major media outlets don’t tilt to the left. What do you expect from legislators who believe that the Constitution is their license to redistribute income?

The Fruits of Judicial Meddling

Remember those detainees at Guantanamo whose “rights” the U.S. Supreme Court was so avid to protect? Well, BBC News reports this:

Guantanamo inmates refuse review

Five detainees at the US naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, have refused to participate in military hearings to review their cases, officials say….

The reviews were set up after the US Supreme Court ruled the detainees had a right to challenge their detentions….

The detainees who refused to appear when called this week were [a] Saudi, [a] Moroccan and three Yemenis….

* one Yemeni admitted being with Osama bin Laden during the siege of the Tora Bora caves near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in 2001 and was “captured with an AK-47 rifle”

* the Saudi, 29, fought on the front line in Afghanistan and was later captured in Pakistan

* the Moroccan, 32, was a Taleban fighter captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan

The first detainee who was reviewed, a 24-year-old Algerian, reportedly said he would “kill Americans” if released.

Don’t you sleep better at night knowing that the U.S. Supreme Court has placed their non-existent rights above your safety?

Fair, Balanced, and Responsible

Washingtonpost.com reports:

Federal investigators concluded that Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) divulged classified intercepted messages to the media when he was on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to sources familiar with the probe.

No, that’s not news. But if you read on you find some nuggets:

Specifically, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron confirmed to FBI investigators that Shelby verbally divulged the information to him during a June 19, 2002, interview, minutes after Shelby’s committee had been given the information in a classified briefing….

Cameron did not air the material. Moments after Shelby spoke with Cameron, he met with CNN reporter Dana Bash, and about half an hour after that, CNN broadcast the material, the sources said. CNN cited “two congressional sources” in its report….

The disclosure involved two messages that were intercepted by the National Security Agency on the eve of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but were not translated until Sept. 12. The Arabic-language messages said “The match is about to begin” and “Tomorrow is zero hour.” The Washington Post, citing senior U.S. intelligence officials, reported the same messages in its June 20, 2002, editions.

National security officials were outraged by the leak, and moments after the CNN broadcast a CIA official chastised committee members who had by then reconvened to continue the closed-door hearing….

Emphasis added by me to underscore an important difference — at least in this case — between Fox News, on the one hand, and CNN and The Washington Post, on the other. The First Amendment protects the press from censorship, but it doesn’t ban self-censorship.

And FDR Didn’t Do a Thing About It

FuturePundit informs us that Long Droughts Were Common in American Great Plains Holocene Era:

A team of Duke University researchers led by Jim Clark looking at core drillings found repeated dust bowl periods during “the mid-Holocene period of 5,000 to 8,000 years ago in parts of the Dakotas, Montana and western Minnesota.”

PORTLAND, ORE. – Events like the great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, immortalized in “The Grapes of Wrath” and remembered as a transforming event for millions of Americans, were regular parts of much-earlier cycles of droughts followed by recoveries in the region, according to new studies by a multi-institutional research team led by Duke University.

Some of those prehistoric droughts in the northern Great Plains of what is now the United States also lasted longer than modern-day dry spells such as the 1930s Dust Bowl decade, according to sediment core studies by the team.

The group’s evidence implies these ancient droughts persisted for up to several decades each….

Too many people believe that whatever weather one has seen in one’s own lifetime is “normal”. When weather suddenly veers from the pattern one has become accustomed to there is a human tendency to look for some exceptional cause such as human intervention. While human intervention may well be changing the climate, the climate is not stable to begin with. We should expect large climate changes as natural.

Even the 1930s drought was not unique in modern times with the 1890s having gone through a drought period as well….

The regularity of these ancient droughts make much more recent Great Plains droughts in the 1890s and 1930s appear “unremarkable” by comparison….

…Whether or not humans reduce their emissions of green house gases, sooner or later the Earth is going to go through some large regional and eventually even global climate shifts….

However, not all the natural changes lying in our future will come to pass. At some point humans are going to start intervening to prevent some changes while perhaps in other cases humans will engineer other desired changes….

But it will happen because the parties with a stake in the outcome (e.g., agribusiness and food processing) make the necessary investments in research and technology, not because FDR’s spiritual successors impose yet another government program on taxpayers.

Age Does Not Become Him

From a Guardian Unlimited profile of neo-octogenarian Paul Fussell:

He thinks Bill Clinton is “wonderful”, and argues that anti-semitism was one reason why Americans were so eager to punish his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

That’s a new one. If you can’t defend Clinton on his own merits, make up an absolutely silly reason to discredit his opponents.

“Conservatives know that I cannot be trusted… I hate them in general, I grew up in that atmosphere, my father was a corporate lawyer and always voted Republican — that’s one reason I decided not to. It’s a standard boy’s reaction. If your father’s a dentist you either become a dentist or you ridicule dentists for the rest of your life.”

At least he admits that his liberalism arose from adolescent rebelliousness, which I have contended is a primary source of liberalism.

Fussell was vigorously opposed to last year’s invasion of Iraq: “If you don’t get angry about this war you don’t deserve to be alive.”

If he’s serious, he’s certainly an examplar of today’s hateful version of liberalism. If he’s merely trying for hyperbole, he’s not doing a very good job of it.

Fussell, having fought in World War II, rightly attacks those who romanticize war. But the fact that war isn’t a romantic adventure doesn’t make it any the less necessary, from time to time.

The Wisdom of Limited Government, Confirmed Again

Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at The Johns Hopkins University, have written Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public. This review by Robert Heineman tells me all I need to know. Here are some excerpts from the review:

…Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy….

[T]he proliferation of special interests in the nation’s capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors’ words, “The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away”….

Group conflict within the beltway now dominates American politics, and by the mid–twentieth century political scientists viewed group activity as “the essence of American politics”…. With the rise of what Theodore J. Lowi has critically described as interest-group liberalism, government became little more than a broker for competing interests. Moreover, in terms of information and access, the increase in regulatory institutions at the national level has given group leaders located within the beltway a tremendous advantage over their colleagues in other parts of the nation. Perhaps of most concern, these “insider” groups themselves now discourage their members’ active political involvement….

The proliferation of groups that function without public support has been encouraged by major changes in the litigation process. By providing successful plaintiffs with a right to legal fees in many cases, Congress has encouraged attorneys to push advocacy and tort litigation, which in turn has been facilitated by judicial loosening of the requirements for standing and class action. Thus, special interests now can obtain from the courts policy decisions that previously would have required political pressure on elected officials….

Despite the acuity of the authors’ insights into the dire direction of the U.S. policy process, they seem oblivious to the possibility that big government itself is the cause of the problem….

Indeed.

In summary: The pigs keep demanding a bigger public trough at which to feed, and their “public servants” in Congress continue to comply.

Why the Silence?

UPDATED BELOW

There’s surprisingly little chatter in the libertarian-conservative segment of the blogosphere about this:

About 70% of voters agreed to add this sentence to the Missouri Constitution: “To be valid and recognized in this state, a marriage shall exist only between a man and a woman.”

Are libertarians depressed? Are conservatives trying not to gloat? Or perhaps they expect one of the lawyers at The Volokh Conspiracy to tell us that the will of the voters is likely to be overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

We’ve heard from The Corner, but that’s about it. Someone else say something.

UPDATES:

Stanley Kurtz at The Corner adds this:

Apparently, …Democrats outnumbered Republicans at the polls. That makes the already dramatic 71 percent vote in favor of the Missouri marriage amendment all the more impressive. The Post-Dispatch also notes that gay marriage advocates outspent opponents, and launched a major television ad campaign to boot….

In a post that predates the Missouri vote, the usually sensible Virginia Postrel opines that:

People support abortion rights out of fear. They support gay marriage out of love.

A lot of “people” support abortion rights and gay marriage simply because it’s the politically correct thing to do — a litmus test of one’s open-mindedness and liberality — and a form of delayed adolescent rebellion against moldy reactionaries and religious fundamentalists.

Don’t Waste Your Vote

I’m not surprised that an antiwar libertarian like Gene Healy sees Bush vs. Kerry as Freddy vs. Jason. He does admit, however, that it’s hard to vote for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party candidate, with a straight face. Healy cites a piece by Bill Bradford, in which Bradford says:

Badnarik believes that the federal income tax has no legal authority and that people are justified in refusing to file a tax return until such time as the IRS provides them with an explanation of its authority to collect the tax. He hadn’t filed income tax returns for several years. He moved from California to Texas because of Texas’ more liberal gun laws, but he refused to obtain a Texas driver’s license because the state requires drivers to provide their fingerprints and Social Security numbers. He has been ticketed several times for driving without a license; sometimes he has gotten off for various technical legal reasons, but on three occasions he has been convicted and paid a fine. He also refused to use postal ZIP codes, seeing them as “federal territories.”

He has written a book on the Constitution for students in his one-day, $50 seminar on the Constitution, but it is available elsewhere, including on Amazon.com. It features an introduction by Congressman Ron Paul and Badnarik’s theory about taxes. His campaign website included a potpourri of right-wing constitutional positions, as well as some very unorthodox views on various issues. He proposed that convicted felons serve the first month of their sentence in bed so that their muscles would atrophy and they’d be less trouble for prison guards and to blow up the U.N. building on the eighth day of his administration, after giving the building’s occupants a chance to evacuate. In one especially picturesque proposal, he wrote:

I would announce a special one-week session of Congress where all 535 members would be required to sit through a special version of my Constitution class. Once I was convinced that every member of Congress understood my interpretation of their very limited powers, I would insist that they restate their oath of office while being videotaped.

One assumes, although one cannot prove, that none of this is an exercise in irony. At any rate, these opinions were removed from the website shortly after he won the nomination, and they didn’t come up when he visited state party conventions. Nor did his refusal to file tax returns, thereby risking federal indictment and felony arrest. While many of his closest supporters were aware of these issues, they were unknown to most LP members.

Irony seems to be lost on card-carrying Libertarians. The Party seems to have been taken over by the tinfoil-hat brigade.

A Pseudo-libertarian Whiner, Cornered

The Corner‘s Ramesh Ponnuru zaps a pseudo-libertarian:

John Perry Barlow was being interviewed, with much of the discussion concerning his turn away from the Republicans. He said: “…in the past I found it most effective to be inside the Republican Party acting as a libertarian. But I’ve switched. One of the things going on in my mind when I wrote that note [announcing the decision to embrace political activism over lifestyle libertarianism] was that I’d just been busted for having a really trivial amount of marijuana in a checked bag under a PATRIOT Act search. I was arrested, hauled off in irons, an ugly experience. At San Francisco airport, for, like, three joints’ worth of dope. Before the plane took off, Delta employees came on and said, Mr. Barlow, you have to step off the plane, and bring your personal effects. Then San Francisco cops arrested me. I spent the day in Redwood City in jail. It was a chilling experience. It’s happening, and happening a lot. The Transportation Security Administration is now routinely searching checked bags. They are not just looking for explosives….”

The Transportation Security Administration is doing more intensive bag searches than we used to have, and when they find illegal substances they are not ignoring them. You can wish that marijuana were legal, or that the TSA were prohibited from enforcing the law in this way. But what any of this has to do with Patriot is beyond me.

Exactly! I speed a bit, but I’m not about to become a Democrat if I’m pulled over for speeding. Get over it, Mr. Barlow.

"The Party of the Little People"?

Conjure with this:

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of America’s poorest people and of its very richest. (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros and Donald Trump are all for Kerry. So is almost all of Hollywood and most of Wall Street. Kerry will probably win at least eight of the 12 richest zip codes in America. The four per cent of voters who described themselves to pollsters in 2000 as “upper class” decisively favoured Al Gore over George W Bush.)

The writer is David Frum, a former special assistant to President Bush, but I have no reason to doubt his facts. They’re consistent with the vast sums that are pouring into the treasuries of pro-Kerry Section 527 organizations.

Why are the super-rich more likely to be Democrats than Republicans? Here are some possibilities:

1. Super-rich Democrats suffer from a certain degree of guilt about their wealth, especially those of the super-rich who became wealthy because they happened to have a marketable talent, such as singing or acting, or a remarkable streak of good fortune in notoriously volatile professions, such as investing. Thus, out of guilt, they feel compelled to side with the party that professes to favor the less-fortunate. (They might not call it guilt, but it sure smells like guilt.)

2. They rightly resent the attitude of some Republicans who are super-rich or who aspire to that status, namely, that government can be used to tilt economic outcomes in their direction.

3. The super-rich are little affected by taxes and therefore don’t see why others should care so much about them. They can’t understand, for example, why mere millionaires should resent the estate tax, when they, the super-rich, can so easily get around it with trusts and other devices. Similarly, they’re so wealthy (already) that they don’t care about progressive income tax rates, which they know how to avoid to the extent that they wish to do so.

4. They’re good at what made them wealthy, but that doesn’t mean they are especially well educated or insightful about the causes of poverty and corruption (in both cases, too much government, not too little). To the extent that they’re good at business, they have a wrong-headed belief that government can “run” the economy in the way that a business is run.

5. Then there is knee-jerk opposition to war — peace is good, war is bad — which is fashionable, and easy for shallow minds to embrace. Shallow-minded or not, the super-rich have acquired a taste for consorting with pseudo-sophisticated “opinion makers” and left-wing “intellectuals”.

A super-rich person may be a Democrat for any combination of these reasons, or others I haven’t listed. Whatever the case, the Democrat Party is no longer “the party of the little people” — if it ever was. That term is not only condescending, it’s just plain wrong.

He’s Right, Don’t Listen to Him

Sometimes — well, perhaps most of the time — “conservative” columnists, like left-wing actors and singers, ought to just shut up. Now comes David Brooks of The New York Times (free registration required) to opine that

we need an ambitious national service program to demystify the military for the next generation of Americans. It also seems clear, looking at our history, that combat heroism is not an essential qualification for a wartime leader. It’s much more important to have the political courage that Lincoln had and Kennedy celebrated. But don’t listen to me. I never served.

I never served, either, but I know a dumb idea when I read it.

Brooks started with the observation that, in the campaign of 2000, veterans in South Carolina seemed less awed by John McCain than did non-veterans in New Hampshire. Being a “creative” writer, Brooks couldn’t simply stop with the obvious truth: South Carolinians, being more conservative than New Hampshirites were therefore more likely to favor Bush over McCain. Instead, he extrapolated and embellished his four-year old observation into the notion that “national service” ought to be required. To put it baldly, which Brooks can’t bring himself to do, he wants to restore the draft.

There are many good arguments against the draft, which this succinct essay summarizes. My favorite argument against the draft, however, is one that I coined some years ago: A nation that must draft its defenders probably isn’t worth defending.

The Tricks Time Plays on Us

Remember when Barry Goldwater was reviled as a right-wing extremist? Of course, he still is in many quarters, but his ideas have much more currency today than they did in 1964, when he lost the presidential election, in a landslide, to FDR’s spiritual and moral heir, LBJ. Here are some passages from Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention:

[T]he tide has been running against freedom. Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, return to proven ways — not because they are old, but because they are true….

[W]e are a Nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding along at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.

Rather than useful jobs in our country, our people have been offered bureaucratic “make work”; rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses….

Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth….

It is our cause to dispel the foggy thinking which avoids hard decisions in the delusion that a world of conflict will somehow mysteriously resolve itself into a world of harmony, if we just don’t rock the boat or irritate the forces of aggression — and this is hogwash….

[O]nly the strong can remain free, that only the strong can keep the peace….
Now, we here in America can keep the peace only if we remain vigilant and only if we remain strong. Only if we keep our eyes open and keep our guard up can we prevent war. And I want to make this abundantly clear: I don’t intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will — and that I promise you, Americans….

Now I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts of brave and wise men. And I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. And I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism….

We see in private property and in economy based upon and fostering private property, the one way to make government a durable ally of the whole man, rather than his determined enemy. We see in the sanctity of private property the only durable foundation for constitutional government in a free society. And — And beyond that, we see, in cherished diversity of ways, diversity of thoughts, of motives and accomplishments. We don’t seek to lead anyone’s life for him. We only seek — only seek to secure his rights, guarantee him opportunity — guarantee him opportunity to strive, with government performing only those needed and constitutionally sanctioned tasks which cannot otherwise be performed….

A hard-nosed, libertarian Republican. If only….

Advice about Battling Political Correctness

American Rhetoric has had 4.9 million visitors since August 1, 2001. I just learned about it. It has text and, sometimes, audio and video of speeches ranging from Lincoln at Gettysburg to Russell Crowe as General Deridius in The Gladiator. As I browsed the site, I came across the a Charlton Heston speech on “Winning the Cultural War” (Harvard University Law School, February 1999). As a conservative libertarian, I find it meritorious. Here are some snippets:

…Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, “We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”

Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart….

For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 — long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist.

I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life — throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.

I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.

Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I’m talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh….

You are the best and the brightest. You, here in this fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it, you are — by your grandfathers’ standards — cowards….

If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe.

Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. That’s what it is: New McCarthyism. But, what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation?

Well, the answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people.

You simply disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom….

I’m asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives, and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful. It hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated — to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water Cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort….

When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself, jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your university is pressured — your university — is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors, choke the halls of the Board of Regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and then gets hauled into court for sexual harassment, march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you — petition them, oust them, banish them….

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country….

An Aside about Libertarianism and War

Gene Healy has myopia when it comes to libertarianism and war. In his post on “Barnett on War and Liberty” he sees the trees — the high cost of securing the rights of Iraqis — and not the forest — the strategic advantage of defeating an antagonistic regime and securing a stronger foothold in the Middle East, where Americans have vital interests. Here’s some of what Healy has to say:

Does it violate libertarian principle for the U.S. government to wrest scores of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer (possibly as much as $3,000 per American family in the case of Iraq,) in order to address rights violations committed half a world away against people not under its protection?

I’d say it does. I have a right to come to the defense of others. I do not have the right to steal Randy Barnett’s car in order to do so….

[Barnett] might say the argument above applies just as well to taxation for the defense of Americans — it says the U.S. government can’t come to the defense of Californians if it has to tax Kansans to do it. After all, none of us signed any kind of “social contract” or consented to a Constitution that pledges us to the “common defence” of Americans. But if even that limited justification of the state-as-common-defense-pact is problematic, how do you justify the state-as-world-liberator? Where does it get the authority to carry out these missions, however benevolent they might be?

In any event, I think it’s odd to proceed as if the only rights in question are the rights of those who are to be liberated.

I think it’s odd to ignore the broader question of how Americans might benefit from such ventures as the war in Iraq. To put it in Healy’s terms, you can defend California on the Pacific Coast or you go sail across the Pacific and defend California on the enemy’s coast. That’s what we did in World War II. In my view, that’s just what we’re doing now, in the Middle East.

I Used to Be Too Smart to Understand This

When I arrived in college (eons ago) I soon discovered that learning is more than memorization, which had served me well through the 12th grade. I therefore began to denigrate memorization. It took me years to understand that it’s just as important as the skeptical and logical traits that I began to cultivate as a college student. Now, from
City Journal, comes this:

In Defense of Memorization

Michael Knox Beran

If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.

Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.

Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?

That too-common view is sadly wrong. Kids need both the poetry and the memorization. As educators have known for centuries, these exercises deliver unique cognitive benefits, benefits that are of special importance for kids who come from homes where books are scarce and the level of literacy low. In addition, such exercises etch the ideals of their civilization on children’s minds and hearts….

What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience….

No less important, memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease. Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, argues that memorization “builds into children’s minds an ability to use complex English syntax.” The student “who memorizes poetry will internalize” the “rhythmic, beautiful patterns” of the English language. These patterns then become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells that we all use every day in writing and speaking.” Without memorization, the student’s “language store,” Bauer says, will be limited: memorization stocks “the language store with a whole new set of language patterns.”

It also stocks those bins with a generous supply of the English language’s rich accumulation of words. Research suggests that the size of a child’s vocabulary plays an important part in determining the quality of his language-comprehension skills. “The greater and wider the vocabulary,” says education historian [Diane] Ravitch, “the greater one’s comprehension of increasingly difficult material.” Bauer points out that if “a student reads a word in a novel, she might or might not remember it for later use. But when she commits it to memory in proper context (as the memorization of lines of poetry requires), she is much more likely to have it at her ‘mental fingertips’ for use in her own speaking and writing.”

All these benefits are especially important for inner-city kids. Bill Cosby recently pointed to the tragedy of the black kids he sees “standing on the corner” who “can’t speak English.” “I can’t even talk the way these people talk,” Cosby said: “ ‘Why you ain’t. Where you is.’ ” To kids who have never known anything but demotic English, literary English is bound to seem an alien, all but incomprehensible dialect. Kids who haven’t been exposed to the King’s English in primary school or at home will have a hard time, if they get to college, with works like Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick. In too many cases, they will give up entirely, unable to enter the community of literate citizens—and as a result will live in a world of constricted opportunity….

Today’s public-school educators, of course, aren’t allowed to teach the true ideals of our civilization. (MLK is okay, but GW and TJ were just slave-owning honkies.) Perhaps those so-called educators would be willing to allow their students to memorize comic books. That might be better than nothing.

This Isn’t Free-Market Capitalism in Action

From today’s NYT online (free registration required):

Bill Would Raise Franchise Value of Sports Teams

By DUFF WILSON

Owners of professional sports teams stand to gain tens of millions of dollars in the values of their franchises because of a single sentence buried deep in a sprawling piece of export-tax legislation now before Congress.

The benefit to sports franchises is contained in a small part of an enormous bill introduced originally to settle a trade dispute with the European Union. But the legislation has since become laden with add-ons for interests ranging from tobacco farmers to Oldsmobile dealers….

Another good argument for replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.

The Veil of Ignorance in Ohio (and Elsewhere)

I was reminded of the veil of ignorance when I read in The New Republic online that Kerry may have a shot at winning Ohio because, according to Democrat pollster Stanley Greenberg, “Bush’s support among …”Country Folk” has weakened”:

The Country Folk are the most anti-corporate in the Republican base (33 percent warm and 35 percent cool thermometer readings). By 57 to 41 percent, they reject the assertion that Bush’s economic policies are proving successful, affirming instead that the middle class is not sharing in the income and employment gains. They are particularly upset with rising health care costs and the fact that people are financially squeezed. Over half agree (60 percent) that Bush is neglecting domestic problems.

The ignorance, of course, lies in the “folk wisdom” that corporations are bad, that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run, that government is responsible for health care and the cost of health care, and that a president is responsible for economic performance in the short run. (See, “folk wisdom” makes me so crazy that I start repeating myself.)

“Folk wisdom” isn’t restricted to Ohio, of course. It’s widespread. Ohio’s “Country Folk” have no monopoly on economic ignorance.

Blatant economic ignorance reminds me of John Rawls’s legendary veil of ignorance, which according to Wikipedia,

is a method of determining the morality of a certain issue (e.g., slavery) based upon the following principle: imagine that societal roles were completely re-fashioned and redistributed, and that from behind your veil of ignorance you do not know what role you will be reassigned. Only then can you truly consider the morality of an issue. For example, whites in the pre-Civil War south did indeed condone slavery, but they most likely would not have done so had there been a re-fashioning of society because of which they would not know if they would be the ones enslaved. It is a philosophical idea related of method of two people dividing a cake: one cuts, the other chooses first (see pie method).

The “wisdom” of Ohio’s Country Folk and their ilk — rural, suburban, and urban — illustrates a deep flaw in Rawls’s formula for so-called social justice. The veil of ignorance, aside from being a useless thought experiment, works only if you believe that people can simply make up rules about such things as how an economy should work and what outcomes it should produce.

Free-market capitalism is the best economic system because — when it’s left alone — it produces more income and wealth than any alternative system. And it’s good for everyone, not just those “filthy capitalists” and their corporations. Yes, the rich get richer, but so do the poorer — except for those whose incentives are blunted by the lure of welfare benefits.

Free-market capitalism was invented neither by a bunch of economic ignoramuses operating behind the veil of ignorance nor by Adam Smith. It evolved over centuries of trial and error. Smith merely tried to understand it and explain why it works so well.

Karl Marx and his intellectual heirs retreated behind the veil of ignorance and brought forth Communism, Socialism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and other impoverishing schemes — all in the name of social justice. The veil of ignorance is aptly named.

The Physics of John Kerry

Jay Tea at Wizbang calls it the “Kerry Uncertainty Principle”:

Werner Heisenberg was a quantum physicist of the early and mid 20th Century. He’s probably best well known for his Uncertainty Principle, which states that one can know the exact position of a particle or its exact speed, but not both simultaneously. Heisenberg pointed out that the mere fact of observing such particles changes them, and renders prior observations moot.

Were Heisenberg alive today, and were he more interested in politics than subatomic particles, he would have made the same discovery by observing John Kerry’s positions on issues. It seems the more one examines where the Democratic nominee stands on an issue, the less you actually know.

My comment:

I think Kerry’s mind exhibits the qualities of Schrodinger’s cat; his state of mind is an unpredictable, random event. Wikipedia explains the concept:

A cat [Kerry’s mind] is placed in a sealed box [his head]. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas [his thought processes]. There…is a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat…However, when the box is opened [Kerry speaks] the experimenter sees only a “…dead cat” or a “…living cat [whatever happens to come into Kerry’s mind at the moment].”

Note to Colorado Democrats…Not So Fast

Colorado Democrats think they’ve found a way to tip 4 of the State’s 9 electoral votes to Kerry, even if Bush wins the popular vote in Colorado. How? They’ve floated a ballot initiative that would split the State’s electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote. The formula would, in most cases, result in a 5-4 split in favor of the candidate with the most popular votes in Colorado. The initiative has garnered enough signatures to be placed on the November ballot.

Fortunately, there are two obstacles to the passage of this scheme. First, it must be approved by a majority of Colorado’s voters, which is unlikely because most (if not all) Bush voters will reject it, and some Kerry voters will reject it on the off-chance that Kerry will win Colorado’s popular vote. Second, even if it’s approved by a majority of Colorado’s voters it will be challenged as unconstitutional (that’s the U.S. Constitution I’m talking about). As it says in Article II, Section 1, paragraph 2 of the U.S. Constitution:

Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…[emphasis added].

It seems to me that a ballot initiative, in this case, would amount to an unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power.

(Here’s the story. Thanks to Ed Driscoll.com for the tip.)