A Contrarian View of Segregation

TheFreeDictionary.com reminds us that today is the 109th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896):

In 1890, the State of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. Concerned, several black and white citizens in New Orleans formed an association dedicated to the repeal of that law. They eventually persuaded Homer Plessy, an octoroon (someone of seven-eighths Caucasian descent and one-eighth African descent), to test it. Plessy purchased a first-class ticket on the East Louisiana Railway from New Orleans to Covington. The railroad company had been informed already as to Plessy’s racial lineage, and after Plessy had taken a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks-only car. Plessy refused and was arrested immediately….

Announced on May 18, 1896, the 7-1 decision, with one abstention, upheld the Louisiana statute.

Segregation of the type considered by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson suffers two fundamental flaws:

It allows for no subtlety, as in the case of Plessy, who — as an octoroon — may have been no less “white” than many “whites” who rode in “whites only” railway cars.

It declares an entire group of otherwise law-abiding persons “off limits” to society, rather than allow the members of that group to be considered on individual merit.

The second point goes to the heart of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the case (as quoted in Wikipedia):

[I]n the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

I agree with Harlan, up to that point. The law should be racially neutral. By the same token, the law should not tell private parties whom they must employ and with whom they must trade and associate. As I wrote recently,

we would be much better off, socially and economically, if government intervention were limited to the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property. Such a regime would enable persons of ability — regardless of race or gender — to prove their worth and earn the trust of others. That is true progress.

The Economy Works, in Spite of Zany Economists

This post is from the archives of the pre-blog version of Liberty Corner. I wrote it in 1998. I still like it.

Even though Stephen Jay Gould once accused social scientists of “physics envy,” he did not deter economists’ efforts to practice the dismal science as if it were really a science. Thus, for example, a Robert Shiller of Yale University arms himself with data about the past performance of the stock market and warns us that the Dow will lunge from 8,000 (make that 9,000 . . . 10,000 . . . 11,000) to 6,000 or less. The problem with such analytical exercises is that they tell us what has happened but not what will happen. Statistics predict the past with uncanny accuracy.

Not that Professor Shiller is entirely wrong about the future performance of the stock market. He is almost certainly right, in principle, because the only known monotonic trends in the universe are its expansion and its aging — and a lot of physicists aren’t sure about the permanence of those trends. No, Professor Shiller will probably be right, some day, because — as the old saying goes — a stopped watch is right twice a day.[*]

John Maynard Keynes (created Lord Keynes for his services to economic thought and to some members of the Bloomsbury Set) averred that a government could spend an economy out of a depression. In spite of Keynes, the United States and Great Britain remained mired in the Great Depression for most of the 1930s. Some have argued that Keynes was vindicated by post-World War II prosperity, which they attribute to the the binge of consumer spending spawned by the massive infusion of government spending in wartime. That argument overlooks the inconvenient possibility that the Great Depresssion, like earlier depressions, would have ended without the benefit of government largesse. The argument also overlooks the fact that, unlike the United States, Great Britain did not plunge into prosperity at the end of World War II.

One could argue that Germany and Japan proved Keynes right because unemployment in those countries vanished in the face of their massive arms buildups. Yes, and one could say that the members of a chain gang are well off because they have “jobs.”

Enough of old feuds. Let us return to the present scene.

Today’s “green economists” advance the notion that free markets are all right in their place — but not when it comes to protecting the environment. Conjuring dire results for humankind if markets continue to cater to the crass demands of consumers, those economists would commandeer the economy in the name of future generations yet unborn. (Sound the trumpets! Wave the flag!) If one reasonably assumes that such economists know that there are market-based ways to solve the problems caused by pollution, what is one to make of their anti-market rhetoric? Answer: Just like any consumer of “political pork,” they’re perfectly willing to have the government aggrandize their own (psychic) income at the expense of the general welfare. That is, they simply don’t like economic growth and don’t care who is hurt by their anti-growth propoganda.

Consider, finally, the antediluvian agitators for antitrust actions against successful companies. The scions of Roosevelt the First seem to be stuck in a zero-sum view of the economic universe, in which “winners” must perforce be balanced by “losers.” Or perhaps they, like their green brethren, suffer a form of success envy.

Whatever the case, the antitrusters forget (or wish not to remember) that (1) successful companies become successful by satisfying consumers, (2) consumers wouldn’t buy the damned stuff if they didn’t think it was worth the price, and (3) “immense” profits invite competition (direct and indirect), which benefits consumers. On the third point, if the USPS — a government monopoly that claims to own my mailbox — can’t stave off competition from alternative delivery services and e-mail, what’s to keep a new Bill Gates from building a better mouse (pun) trap? Only the fear of being pursued by the almighty federal government. Thanks a lot, feds.

All of which underscores another old saying: A sucker is born every minute — and then he moves to Washington.
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* In fact, I agreed with Prof. Shiller and had already moved the bulk of my investments from the stock market to fixed-income securities. Better too soon than too late; when the market crashes, it crashes fast.

Class in America

The New York Times is running a series on “Class in America,” the introduction to which includes the usual Leftist cant,* and which assumes that class is tied to occupation, education, income, and wealth:

At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more.[**] At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe….In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say….

One way to think of a person’s position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. [Click here to see where you fit in the American population.] [***] Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person’s class is his parents’ class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always.

Well, success in school, income, and health are linked tightly to intelligence, and those who have the genes for high intelligence tend to have more schooling, make more money, stay healthy, and pass their genes on to their children. Is that somehow wrong? The Times implies that it is.

In spite of the tight link between genetic inheritance and success, there is a lot on intergenerational mobility across the income distribution. (Who are you going to believe, the lying NYT or me?)

In any event, the Times swings and misses twice when it comes to defining and measuring class.

First, the Times deploys the card-game analogy quoted above, which suggests that life is a zero-sum game in which the winners win at the expense of the losers — when that isn’t the case. The Times reinforces the zero-sum notion by introducing a class scale that measures relative status; someone must move down the scale if someone else is to move up it.

Second, and more fundamentally, class is something that one possesses independently of job, education, income, and wealth. A super-rich person can inhabit the lowest class, while an extremely poor person can inhabit the highest class. We could be a nation composed entirely of high-class persons. There’s nothing to prevent it — nothing, that is, but the choices each of us makes about three facets of life:

Tastes – our likes and dislikes. A high-class person eschews loudness, crudeness, and ostentation and adopts reflective pursuits (e.g., writing, reading demanding works of fiction and non-fiction, understanding music and art).

Manners – overt behavior toward others. A high-class person is polite toward and considerate of the feelings of others, even in fleeting encounters.

Ethics – the rules by which we live. Regardless of tastes and manners, a person cannot be high-class without also being honest, fulfilling obligations, and avoiding the temptation to use power to dictate to others.

Money makes it easier to have good taste and good manners, but money is no guarantee of either; Paris Hilton and scores of rock musicians, sports stars, movie stars, and other celebrities are cases in point. Ethics seems to have little do with money or high station, as business and political “leaders” are wont to remind us by their actions, year after year.

Consider the presidents of the U.S. from FDR through Clinton. Based on their tastes, manners, and ethics, I rate them as follows:

Low-class: Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton

Middle-class: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter

High-class: Ford, Reagan, Bush 41

In other words, it’s entirely possible to be something less than high-class even if one has held the most prestigious job in the world, earned a college degree (or two), made a high income, and possessed considerable wealth (as have most modern presidents). Class comes from within, not from the material attainments by which the Times would judge us.
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* Leftists like Charlie Rangel like to think that by attacking the rich they are helping the poor, when just the opposite is true. Well, Rangel is evidently a lot richer than I am, so I guess he is going to hell, if I am to believe this exchange with Chris Matthews on 04/07/05:

Matthews: “I mean Charlie, Jesus didn’t hang around with the swells- the rich people.”

Rangel: “Well, he said the rich people are going straight to hell.” [Courtesy Trey Jackson]

Just the place for him. He’ll like the company, which undoubtedly includes at least one other infamous racial demagogue.

** What people do with their money is — or should be — a personal matter, subject only to the proviso that they do no harm to others. Gated community? Fine. I’d like to live in one, as would many if not most of the poor with whom the Times seem to identify. What’s wrong with keeping the riff-raff at bay? Do you think that law-abiding poor people enjoy living where they do? When the poor finally make enough money to afford a move to the suburbs, they do so to escape their former neighbors, not to mingle with them.

*** I followed the link (bracketed in the original) to learn my “class standing” and wound up in the 87th percentile, based on my pre-retirement job and (in today’s dollars) income and wealth. By the same criteria, my father was somewhere in the 40th to 50th percentile. Not bad. But my grandfather undoubtedly was somewhere near the bottom. I didn’t steal from anyone to move up, nor did my father, nor did the vast majority of those who now stand higher than their parents and grandparents on the Times‘s class scale. But my standing on the Times‘s scale would be meaningless had I the tastes, manners, and ethics of a Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Racist or Realist?

UPDATED BELOW

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Mexico’s Fox Defends Comment on Blacks

MEXICO CITY – President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won’t….

Lisa Catanzarite, a sociologist at Washington State University, disputed Fox’s assertion. She said there is intense competition for lucrative working class jobs like construction and that employers usually prefer to hire immigrants who don’t know their rights.

“What Vicente Fox called a willingness to work … translates into extreme exploitability,” she said.

No, it translates into a willingness to work. No one forces Mexicans to cross the border to work — and work hard — for low wages.

Here’s the acid test: Given a choice between hiring an anonymous group of Mexicans and an anonymous group of American blacks to do the same job at the same hourly rate, which group would you choose? I think most employers would choose the Mexicans.

That’s not to say American blacks are lazy, but that they’re less likely to perform well at low-wage work because the welfare system removes the incentive to perform well. Illegal immigrants, on the other hand, don’t have full access to the welfare system. It’s another example of the perverse consequences of the regulatory-welfare state, which destroys income and wealth.

UPDATE: So Fox has “regretted” his statement. But he hasn’t withdrawn it.

The End of MSM as We Know It?

UPDATED BELOW, 05/15/05

Three blogging powerhouses — ArmedLiberal.com, RogerLSimon.com and LittleGreenFootballs.com — are spearheading the formation of a consortium of news bloggers, to be known as Pajamas Media (announcement here, followup here, signup form here).

Here’s the deal: For a long time, the MSM got away with editorializing disguised as reporting. The rise of conservative talk radio and FoxNews began to expose the MSM for what it is, namely, a propaganda machine for the brand of Leftism that is pretty much responsible for America’s economic, moral, and military decline. The rise of blogging has exposed the MSM’s biases in detail, and in something close to real time.

Bloggers aren’t unbiased, of course, and I don’t expect PJ Media to be unbiased. What I do expect is that PJ Media will serve as a viable blogging alternative to the MSM because it will be the equivalent of a news network, major daily paper, or weekly news magazine — one-stop shopping for news and views on a variety of subjects — with a news cycle of seconds or minutes instead of hours, days, or weeks.

Will PJ Media (and its inevitable imitators) hasten the decline of the MSM or force the MSM to clean up its act? Decline seems more likely than reform: Blogging news services will suck advertising dollars away from the MSM, which the MSM will try to recoup by playing to its strength, which is a Left-oriented sensationalism, for which there will always be a market. Then, too, the MSM may simply begin to use the blogosphere in the same way as PJ Media and its ilk, further hastening the decline of print and broadcast media and setting up a classic Left-Right/Libertarian confrontation in cyberspace.

Now there’s a digital divide for you.

UPDATE: Newsweek sort of fesses up to a colossal error:

May 23 issue – By the end of the week, the rioting had spread from Afghanistan throughout much of the Muslim world, from Gaza to Indonesia. Mobs shouting “Protect our Holy Book!” burned down government buildings and ransacked the offices of relief organizations in several Afghan provinces. The violence cost at least 15 lives, injured scores of people and sent a shudder through Washington, where officials worried about the stability of moderate regimes in the region.

The spark was apparently lit at a press conference held on Friday, May 6, by Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket legend and strident critic of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Brandishing a copy of that week’s NEWSWEEK (dated May 9), Khan read a report that U.S. interrogators at Guantánamo prison had placed the Qur’an on toilet seats and even flushed one. “This is what the U.S. is doing,” exclaimed Khan, “desecrating the Qur’an.” His remarks, as well as the outraged comments of Muslim clerics and Pakistani government officials, were picked up on local radio and played throughout neighboring Afghanistan. Radical Islamic foes of the U.S.-friendly regime of Hamid Karzai quickly exploited local discontent with a poor economy and the continued presence of U.S. forces, and riots began breaking out last week.

Late last week Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita told NEWSWEEK that its original story was wrong. The brief PERISCOPE item (“SouthCom Showdown”) had reported on the expected results of an upcoming U.S. Southern Command investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Gitmo. According to NEWSWEEK, SouthCom investigators found that Gitmo interrogators had flushed a Qur’an down a toilet in an attempt to rattle detainees. While various released detainees have made allegations about Qur’an desecration, the Pentagon has, according to DiRita, found no credible evidence to support them.

How did NEWSWEEK get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest? While continuing to report events on the ground, NEWSWEEK interviewed government officials, diplomats and its own staffers, and reconstructed this narrative of events:

At NEWSWEEK, veteran investigative reporter Michael Isikoff’s interest had been sparked by the release late last year of some internal FBI e-mails that painted a stark picture of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo. Isikoff knew that military investigators at Southern Command (which runs the Guantánamo prison) were looking into the allegations. So he called a longtime reliable source, a senior U.S. government official who was knowledgeable about the matter. The source told Isikoff that the report would include new details that were not in the FBI e-mails, including mention of flushing the Qur’an down a toilet. A SouthCom spokesman contacted by Isikoff declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but NEWSWEEK National Security Correspondent John Barry, realizing the sensitivity of the story, provided a draft of the NEWSWEEK PERISCOPE item to a senior Defense official, asking, “Is this accurate or not?” The official challenged one aspect of the story: the suggestion that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, sent to Gitmo by the Pentagon in 2001 to oversee prisoner interrogation, might be held accountable for the abuses. Not true, said the official (the PERISCOPE draft was corrected to reflect that). But he was silent about the rest of the item. The official had not meant to mislead, but lacked detailed knowledge of the SouthCom report.

Given all that has been reported about the treatment of detainees—including allegations that a female interrogator pretended to wipe her own menstrual blood on one prisoner—the reports of Qur’an desecration seemed shocking but not incredible. But to Muslims, defacing the Holy Book is especially heinous. “We can understand torturing prisoners, no matter how repulsive,” says computer teacher Muhammad Archad, interviewed last week by NEWSWEEK in Peshawar, Pakistan, where one of last week’s protests took place. “But insulting the Qur’an is like deliberately torturing all Muslims. This we cannot tolerate.”

NEWSWEEK was not the first to report allegations of desecrating the Qur’an. As early as last spring and summer, similar reports from released detainees started surfacing in British and Russian news reports, and in the Arab news agency Al-Jazeera; claims by other released detainees have been covered in other media since then. But the NEWSWEEK report arrived at a particularly delicate moment in Afghan politics. Opponents of the Karzai government, including remnants of the deposed Taliban regime, have been looking for ways to exploit public discontent. The Afghan economy is weak, and the government (pressed by the United States) has alienated farmers by trying to eradicate their poppy crops, used to make heroin in the global drug trade. Afghan men are sometimes rounded up during ongoing U.S. military operations, and innocents can sit in jail for months. When they are released, many complain of abuse. President Karzai is still largely respected, but many Afghans regard him as too dependent on and too obsequious to the United States. With Karzai scheduled to come to Washington next week, this is a good time for his enemies to make trouble.

That does not quite explain, however, why the protest and rioting over Qur’an desecration spread throughout the Islamic region. After so many gruesome reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, the vehemence of feeling around this case came as something of a surprise. Extremist agitators are at least partly to blame, but obviously the reports of Qur’anic desecration touch a particular nerve in the Islamic world. U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, are uneasily watching, and last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointedly remarked that any desecration of the Qur’an would not be “tolerated” by the United States. (As a legal matter, U.S. citizens are free to deface the Qur’an as an exercise of free speech, just as they are free to burn the American flag or tear up a Bible; but government employees can be punished for violating government rules.)

After the rioting began last week, the Pentagon attempted to determine the veracity of the NEWSWEEK story. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers told reporters that so far no allegations had been proven. He did appear to cryptically refer to two mentions found in the logs of prison guards in Gitmo: a report that a detainee had used pages of the Qur’an to stop up a crude toilet as a form of protest, and a complaint from a detainee that a prison guard had knocked down a Qur’an hanging in a bag in his cell.

On Friday night, Pentagon spokesman DiRita called NEWSWEEK to complain about the original PERISCOPE item. He said, “We pursue all credible allegations” of prisoner abuse, but insisted that the investigators had found none involving Qur’an desecration. DiRita sent NEWSWEEK a copy of rules issued to the guards (after the incidents mentioned by General Myers) to guarantee respect for Islamic worship. On Saturday, Isikoff spoke to his original source, the senior government official, who said that he clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident. But the official, still speaking anonymously, could no longer be sure that these concerns had surfaced in the SouthCom report. Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”

In the meantime, as part of his ongoing reporting on the detainee-abuse story, Isikoff had contacted a New York defense lawyer, Marc Falkoff, who is representing 13 Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo. According to Falkoff’s declassified notes, a mass-suicide attempt—when 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves in August 2003—was triggered by a guard’s dropping a Qur’an and stomping on it. One of Falkoff’s clients told him, “Another detainee tried to kill himself after the guard took his Qur’an and threw it in the toilet.” A U.S. military spokesman, Army Col. Brad Blackner, dismissed the claims as unbelievable. “If you read the Al Qaeda training manual, they are trained to make allegations against the infidels,” he said.

More allegations, credible or not, are sure to come. Bader Zaman Bader, a 35-year-old former editor of a fundamentalist English-language magazine in Peshawar, was released from more than two years’ lockup in Guantánamo seven months ago. Arrested by Pakistani security as a suspected Qaeda militant in November 2001, he was handed over to the U.S. military and held at a tent at the Kandahar airfield. One day, Bader claims, as the inmates’ latrines were being emptied, a U.S. soldier threw in a Qur’an. After the inmates screamed and protested, a U.S. commander apologized. Bader says he still has nightmares about the incident.

Such stories may spark more trouble. Though decrepit and still run largely by warlords, Afghanistan was not considered by U.S. officials to be a candidate for serious anti-American riots. But Westerners, including those at NEWSWEEK, may underestimate how severely Muslims resent the American presence, especially when it in any way interferes with Islamic religious faith.

So much for all those layers of editing and fact-checking. So much for candid acceptance of blame. Newsweek doesn’t have a motto (that I know of) but if it did, it would be this: “Sensationalism for the sake of sensationalism, and the consequences be damned.” Or this: “Pass the buck.”

Democracy and Great Art

I have written much about democracy’s insidious effect on liberty. For example, in Part V of “Practical Libertarianism for Americans” I said:

[P]ublic opinion, elite opinion, and the media have combined to undo the great work of the Framers, whose Constitution prevented tyranny by the majority. Unchecked democracy has become the enemy of liberty and, therefore, of material progress. As Michael Munger says, “The real key to freedom is to secure people from tyranny by the majority, or freedom from democracy.”

The last best hope for liberty and prosperity lies in the neutralization of public opinion through a renewal of constitutional principles.

To which I added, in Part VI:

Unchecked democracy undermines liberty and its blessings. Unchecked democracy imposes on everyone the mistakes and mistaken beliefs of the controlling faction. It defeats learning. It undoes the social fabric that underlies civility. It defeats the sublime rationality of free markets, which enable independent individuals to benefit each other through the pursuit of self-interest. As “anonymous” says, with brutal accuracy, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.”…

Human nature has overcome constitutional obstacles. The governed and their governors — locked in a symbiotic relationship that is built on a mistrustful worldview, economic illiteracy, and baser instincts — have conspired to undermine the Constitution’s checks and balances. People, given their mistrustful and ignorant nature, have turned to government for “solutions” to their “problems.” Government, in its turn, has seized whatever power is necessary to go through the motions of providing “solutions.” For rare is the legislator who doesn’t want to legislate, the executive who doesn’t want to act, and the judge who doesn’t want to exercise his judgment by interpreting the law rather than simply apply it…

[L]iberty has been vanquished in the mistaken belief (or hope) that government can effectively and efficiently make us better off, salve our woes, and put an end to social and racial divisions. To those ends, the governed and their governors, walking hand in hand, have taken liberty for a stroll down a slippery slope. Every step they have taken down that slope has made more problematic our journey back up the slope.

Think of the Constitution as a great work of art that has been altered through the operation of public and elite opinion. The result is analogous to this:

That’s da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, in case you don’t recognize it.

Abortion and Crime

REVISED 05/15/05 (9:11 PM)

Several months ago, in “How to Fight Crime,” I said:

According to an article in today’s NYTimes.com, “Most Crimes of Violence and Property Hover at 30-Year Lows.” Three important things happened after 1995 — the year in which the rate of violent crime began to drop markedly. First, the incarceration rate continued to rise: Persistence pays off. Second, the percentage of the population that is male and 20-24 years old continued to drop, in keeping with the general aging of the population. (Age usually brings with it a greater degree of maturity, stability, and aversion to committing criminal acts.) At the same time, spending on criminal justice functions (police, corrections, and courts) continued to rise, especially spending on police.

I’m sure there are other causal factors, but those are probably the big ones. The first and third of those factors — incarceration and spending on the criminal justice system — go hand in hand. And they are the public-policy weapons of choice in a society that values individual responsibility.

Then Freakonomics was published. In it economist Steven Levitt challenged that orthodoxy. Here’s how The Washington Post reported Levitt’s findings about the drop in crime:

Freakonomics is packed with fascinating ideas. Consider Levitt’s notion of a relationship between abortion access and the crime drop. First, Freakonomics shows that although commonly cited factors such as improved policing tactics, more felons kept in prison and the declining popularity of crack account for some of the national reduction in crime that began in about the year 1990, none of these completes the explanation. (New York City and San Diego have enjoyed about the same percentage decrease in crime, for instance, though the former adopted new policing tactics and the latter did not.) What was the significance of the year 1990, Levitt asks? That was about 16 years after Roe v. Wade . Studies consistently show that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by those raised in broken homes or who were unwanted as children. When abortion became legal nationally, Levitt theorizes, births of unwanted children declined; 16 years later crime began to decline, as around age 16 is the point at which many once-innocent boys start their descent into the criminal life. Leavitt’s [sic] clincher point is that the crime drop commenced approximately five years sooner in Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York and Washington state than it did in the nation as a whole. What do these states have in common? All legalized abortion about five years before Roe .

Well, Steve Sailer (among others) has attacked Levitt’s findings:

First, Levitt’s theory is predicated — at least publicly — on abortion reducing the proportion of “unwanted” babies, who are presumed to be more likely to grow up to be criminals. The empirical problem with this is that legalization (which occurred in California, New York, and three other states in 1970 and nationally in 1973), didn’t put the slightest dent in the illegitimacy rate, which is, by far, the most obvious objective sign of not being wanted by the mother and father, and has been linked repeatedly with crime:

You’ll note that the growth in the illegitimacy rate didn’t start to slow down until the mid-1990s when the abortion rate finally went down a considerable amount.

My article offers a simple explanation, drawn from Levitt’s own research, of why legal abortion tends to increase illegitimacy.

Second, the acid test of Levitt’s theory is that it predicts that the first cohort to survive being culled by legal abortion should have been particularly law-abiding. Instead, they went on the worst teen murder rampage in American history. Here’s a graph showing the homicide rate for 14-17 year olds, and below each year is the average birthdate of the 14-17 year old cohort.

For example, the 14-17 year olds in the not particularly murderous year of 1976 were, on average, born about 1960 (i.e., 1976 – 16 years of age = 1960), so they didn’t “benefit” from being culled by legalized abortion the way that the 14-17 years olds during the peak murder years of 1993 and 1994 should have benefited, according to Levitt.

In contrast, the homicide rate for the 25 and over cohort (none of whom enjoyed the benefits of legalized abortion) was lower in 1993 than in 1983.

Levitt seems to have a good answer to Sailer’s second point. But Sailer has the better of it on the first point, which is the critical one to Levitt’s case. As Sailer puts it in his American Conservative article:

The most striking fact about legalized abortion, but also the least discussed, is its pointlessness. Levitt himself notes that following Roe, “Conceptions rose by nearly 30 percent, but births actually fell by 6 percent …” So for every six fetuses aborted in the 1970s, five would never have been conceived except for Roe! This ratio makes a sick joke out of Levitt’s assumption that legalization made a significant difference in how “wanted” children were. Indeed, perhaps the increase in the number of women who got pregnant figuring they would get an abortion but then were too drunk or drugged or distracted to get to the clinic has meant that the “wantedness” of surviving babies has declined.

If the legalization of abortion did result in less crime it’s only because abortion became more prevalent among that segment of society that is most prone to commit crime. (I dare not speak its name.) What policy does Levitt want us to infer from that bit of causality? Would he favor a program of euthanasia for the most crime-prone segment of society? Now there’s a fine kettle of fish for Leftists, who favor abortion and oppose “oppression” of the the segment of society that is the most crime-prone.

I stand by my original assertion that ” incarceration and spending on the criminal justice system…are the public-policy weapons of choice” in dealing with crime. Whatever abortion is, it isn’t a crime-footing tool.

Illusory Progress

Ed Brayton, who writes Dispatches from the Culture Wars, opined recently:

I am a passionate advocate for the principles of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But I am also firmly convinced that our nation is far closer to living out those ideals today than at any time in the almost 230 years since that document was written. It has taken the extraordinary sacrifice of many great men and women, an enormous amount of social upheaval and even a civil war to put those principles into action, but it has brought us closer to making the promise of those self-evident truths a reality for a far higher proportion of our people.

What Brayton overlooks is the vast amount of damage government has done to the social and economic fabric of this nation. It’s easy to see the “good” that government action has wrought (or the “good” that its proponents claim for it), but hard to see the evil it has done, unless you know where to look. (See my series on “Practical Libertarianism for Americans,” especially Part V and its addendum.) On the whole, government’s intrusiveness in our social and economic affairs has made us much worse off than we could have been.

But what about the end of segregation and the social and economic progress made by blacks and women? To the extent that progress on those fronts came about through government action, it came about because of the inevitable evolution of social attitudes. Government’s ability to force social change is limited by the a people’s ability to circumvent social engineering — as we have seen in the case of campaign finance “reform.”

In fact, programs such as affirmative action — which impose unequal treatment under the law — have backfired, to the extent that they have fomented resentment of and doubts about the qualifications of their intended beneficiaries. It is easier for an employer to reject a black or female applicant than it is for that same employer to fire a black or female employee. The employer may be making a mistake in rejecting a black or female applicant, but the operation of the law encourages such mistakes.

So, my contention is that we would be much better off, socially and economically, if government intervention were limited to the equal protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property. Such a regime would enable persons of ability — regardless of race or gender — to prove their worth and earn the trust of others. That is true progress.

What’s Your Point?

Apropos today’s scare in the air over D.C., Slate’s Timothy Noah writes:

[J]udging from past history the de facto procedure is that an airborne threat to the White House or the Capitol will not be shot down if doing so poses a meaningful risk that one or more bystanders will be killed. I applaud the policy. But if I’m able to figure this out, I have little doubt that al-Qaida figured it out long ago.

It ain’t necessarily so. A lot depends on the response (or non-response) of the pilot of an aircraft that ventures into the no-fly zone above Washington, D.C., as well as other information that might be gathered about an intrusive aircraft.

Yes, shooting down an intrusive aircraft might pose a risk of casualties and damage on the ground, but that risk must be weighed against the risk of a catastrophic strike on the White House, Capitol, or other symbol of American pride. The loss of such a symbol — and the disruption of government that might accompany it — would be far more damaging to America and Americans than the collateral damage from a shoot-down.

Perhaps Noah is cheering al-Qaida on, in the hope that it will again venture an airstrike against a prominent government building. It would be in keeping with his Leftist anti-Americanism.

PETA Propoganda?

Following my own advice, I watched another animated feature from Disney’s golden age. This time it was Bambi, which I hadn’t seen in more than 50 years. Originally released in 1942, Bambi seems to have been re-released in 1947, 1957, and 1982. Then there are the never-ending rentals.

I now know how PETA members and sympathizers are created. Three generations of impressionable youth have grown up loving “cute” animals and hating “predatory” humans because of Bambi.

Bah! Humbug!

Science in Politics, Politics in Science

Here’s Will Saletan of Slate, writing about Intelligent Design (ID):

In September 1999, [John] Calvert founded the Intelligent Design Network to promote his mutant line of creationism. The next year, a political asteroid struck Kansas. Alarmed by the 1999 curriculum changes, voters went to the polls and wiped out the education board’s creationist majority. With the old species out of the way, the new one took over. In January 2001, as the newly constituted board reopened the curriculum standards, IDnet proposed revisions radically different from [those of the Creation Science Association for Mid-America (CSA)].

The board’s draft standards said, “The fossil record provides evidence of simple, bacteria-like life as far back as 3.8+ billion years ago.” CSA would have tried to remove that sentence. IDnet embraced it and proposed to add a prepositional phrase: “almost simultaneously with the postulated habitability of our earth.” This would underscore Calvert’s argument that life arose faster than randomness could account for. A few lines later, the board’s draft mentioned the fossil record, radioisotope dating, and plate tectonics. CSA would have fought all three references. IDnet affirmed them and asked only for a revision to limit their implications: “Certain aspects of the fossil record, the age of the earth based on radioisotope dating and plate tectonics are consistent with the Darwinian theory. However, this evidence is not inconsistent with the design hypothesis.”

Two years later, in a bioethics journal, Calvert and an IDnet colleague, biochemist William Harris, summarized the differences between Biblical creationism and ID. “Creation science seeks to validate a literal interpretation of creation as contained in the book of Genesis,” they explained. “An ID proponent recognizes that ID theory may be disproved by new evidence. ID is like a large tent under which many religious and nonreligious origins theories may find a home. ID proposes nothing more than that life and its diversity were the product of an intelligence with power to manipulate matter and energy.”

Last year, conservatives regained a narrow majority on the Kansas board. They’ve reopened the curriculum, but this time, CSA isn’t running the show. Calvert and Harris are. At last week’s hearings, Calvert presented 23 witnesses– scientists, philosophers, and teachers — to make the case for ID. A lawyer representing evolutionists asked the witnesses how old the earth was. Most affirmed the conventional geological estimate: 4.5 billion years. Only two stuck to the young-earth theory.

Essentially, ID proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can’t. They already acknowledge microevolution — mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can’t fall back on the Bible; you’ve already admitted it can’t always be taken literally. All you’re left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory — how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil — and the vague default assumption that an “intelligence” might fill in those gaps. Calvert and Harris call this assumption a big tent. But guess what happens to a tent without poles.

Perversely, evolutionists refuse to facilitate this collapse. They prefer to dismiss ID proponents as dead-end Neanderthals. They complain, legitimately, that Calvert and Harris are trying to expand the definition of science beyond “natural explanations.” But have you read the definition Calvert and Harris propose? It would define science as a continuous process of “observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.” Abstract creationism can’t qualify for such scrutiny. Substantive creationism can’t survive it. Or if it can, it should.

It’s too bad liberals and scientists don’t welcome this test. It’s too bad they go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously. It’s too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things. In the long view — the evolutionary view — good science consists of using evidence and experiment to find out whether what we thought was right is wrong. If they do that in Kansas, by whatever name, that’s all that matters.

The money quote: “It’s too bad [liberals and scientists] think good science consists of believing the right things.” Not all scientists think that way, but it’s obvious that many of them do. Politically correct science is dangerous science, for it can be used to “prove” that we ought to do things that are against our own best interest.

Consider this:

Our planet’s air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week.

Reductions in industrial emissions in many countries, along with the use of particulate filters for car exhausts and smoke stacks, seem to have reduced the amount of dirt in the atmosphere and made the sky more transparent.

That sounds like very good news. But the researchers say that more solar energy arriving on the ground will also make the surface warmer, and this may add to the problems of global warming. More sunlight will also have knock-on effects on cloud cover, winds, rainfall and air temperature that are difficult to predict.

And this:

While researchers argue whether Earth is getting warmer and if humans are contributing, a heated debate over the global effect of sunlight boiled to the surface today.

And in this debate there is little data to go on.

A confusing array of new and recent studies reveals that scientists know very little about how much sunlight is absorbed by Earth versus how much the planet reflects, how all this alters temperatures, and why any of it changes from one decade to the next.

Determining Earth’s reflectance is crucial to understanding climate change, scientists agree.

And this:

Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.

A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.

Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: “The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.

“The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years.”…

Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki’s research. “While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant,” he said.

“It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor.”

And this:

Earth’s temperature is on the rise, researchers say, and environmental watchdogs are howling, hoping it’s not too late to avert negative effects that could range from melting icecaps to mass extinctions.

Some scientists, however, now think global warming is irreversible. In light of this sobering view, certain economists and scientists are searching for a silver lining. While the good news they find might not be global, some researchers believe the benefits of Earth’s warming will help compensate for the harmful consequences.

But global warming may in fact be a long-term cyclical phenomenon, and it may have little or nothing to do with human activity.

In spite of vast uncertainty about the causes and consequences of global warming, many scientists have joined the Luddites of the Left in their demand that we do something about global warming, namely, curtail economic activity and impoverish ourselves. Why? Because scientists are human, too. And many scientists, beneath a pretense to objectivity, are in fact Leftists who view global warming as a moral issue — it must be the consequence of our sinful embrace of capitalism and economic growth — and not as a series of unsettled scientific questions:

What actually causes global warming?

Is it permanent?

What might we be able to do about it, if anything?

Are its consequences, on balance, negative or positive — and for whom?

Why should we trust Left-wing scientists (or nonscientists) on the subject of evolution when we can’t trust them on the subject of climate?

Another Thought about Anarchy

REVISED 05/11/05 (8:57 AM)

Re the preceding post:

Individualist anarchists (like Lysander Spooner) and anarcho-capitalists believe that we’d be better off in the absence of a state. They’re right, in one respect: We’d be better off in the absence of a state like most of the states that now exist and have existed in human history.

But anarchy isn’t a real option. The urge to control is as deeply rooted in humans as the urge to be free. Anarcy is therefore an unstable state of affairs, one that will always resolve itself into some form of control. The question is: What kind of control? The real choice in the real world isn’t between benign anarchy and a state that’s entirely evil. The real choice is between a state that’s entirely evil (e.g., Soviet Russia), one that’s somewhat evil (e.g., France), one that’s somewhat benign (e.g., the U.S.), and one that’s entirely benign (none that I know of).

We can and should work to make the U.S. more benign, that is, more libertarian. But if we didn’t have our somewhat benign state to protect us it’s quite likely that we’d live under one that’s entirely evil. Remember Hitler and Stalin? Those bad guys were really bad — even worse than FDR, Truman, Johnson, and Clinton. And there are plenty more where they came from. Just look around you at the world we live in.

The Legitimacy of the Constitution

REVISED 05/10/05 (9:18 AM)

Thanks to a pointer from Randy Barnett (The Volokh Conspiracy), I read Lysander Spooner’s 1870 essay, “The Constitution of No Authority.” Spooner’s anarchistic thesis is that the Constitution never was and never will be binding because it isn’t a voluntary contract entered into by those presumed to be bound by it. That is, by Spooner’s reckoning, the Constitution was simply imposed on us.

Spooner’s right: The Constitution was simply imposed on us by those who actually consented to it. But so what? That doesn’t necessarily make the imposition of the Constitution a bad thing. Consider this:

There are two competing systems: one would tax everyone in order to protect people from murderers; the other would require everyone to rely on self-defense, which would be inadequate in most instances.

Those who wish neither to murder nor to be murdered comprise 80 percent of the population, whereas the other 20 percent are of a suicidally murderous bent.

Murderous proclivities are unknowable in advance, so that it’s impossible to create a society that consists solely of non-murderous people and erect a barrier between that society and a society of murderous people.

A powerful fraction of the 80 percent, knowing that they cannot identify the murderers in advance, make a rule that says “murder is wrong and will be punished.”

The powerful minority then collects enough taxes to defray the cost of protecting everyone from murder — even potential murderers. The protection enables non-murderous persons to go about their lives without being constantly on guard. And many non-murderous persons who might have been murdered are not murdered, though their identity is unknowable and they cannot be taxed additionally for the service.

Thus all non-murderous persons become more productive members of society. There is a positive net benefit for everyone — except persons with a strong taste for murdering others.

There’s nothing wrong with that outcome, unless you’re a murderer — or an anarchist. It strikes me as a good thing to impose a set of rules designed to protect life, liberty, and property from those who would deprive others of life, liberty, and property.

The Constitution is such a set of rules. It’s an instrument of self-defense. Even anarchists believe in self-defense.

It’s true that the Constitution isn’t always properly interpreted or enforced, but the alternative is no common set of rules — a state of anarchistic bliss in which Spooner and his ilk repose misplaced faith. As we have seen time and time again — especially in America’s cities — lawlessness spreads like a cancer when the state does not or cannot enforce the rule of law. The ranks of the “20 percent” swell and a barbarous minority holds sway over a peaceable majority. And there’s never an anarchist cop around when you need one.

Traffic-Congestion Hysteria

The construction and maintenance of streets and highways — a government-dominated enterprise — is experiencing “government failure”:

Congestion delayed travelers 79 million more hours and wasted 69 million more gallons of fuel in 2003 than in 2002, the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2005 Urban Mobility Report found….

“Urban areas are not adding enough capacity, improving operations or managing demand well enough to keep congestion from growing,” the report concluded….

The report was released Monday, the same day the Senate resumes debate on a bill that would spend $284 billion on highways over the next six years.

But that’s not enough money to solve traffic problems, according to highway and transit advocates.

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials estimated it would take as much as $400 billion in federal spending over the next six years to solve traffic problems, based on a 2002 study.

Roads aren’t being built fast enough to carry all the people who now drive on them, according to the Transportation Development Foundation, a group that advocates transportation construction.

Well, of course a group that advocates transportation construction would say that roads aren’t being built fast enough. The Transportation Development Foundation, as you might have suspected, is an arm of an industry lobbying group, specifically the American Road & Transporation Builders’ Association, which bills itself as “the U.S. transportation construction industry’s representative in Washington, D.C.” Its mission: “advocating strong federal investment in the nation’s transportation infrastructure to meet public demand for a safe and efficient business transportation network.” Enuff said.

Anyway, the likely outcome of a study sponsored by highway builders is the pouring of more tax dollars into the soil of America, in a futile effort to reduce traffic congestion.

That’s a bad and unnecessarily costly solution to a so-called problem. Why? Because there is no problem. If people are willing to endure long commutes in snarled traffic, they’re revealing a preference for that activity over other uses of their time. In short, it’s worth it to them; otherwise, they wouldn’t be doing it.

Instead of paving America — at vast expense — we should simply let the market solve the problem. When commuters have truly had enough they will turn to alternatives that will arise to meet the demand. Those alternatives — if government will stay out of the way — will be offered by private transportation companies, automobile manufacturers, employers (who may finally get serious about telecommuting, for example), and workers (some of whom will opt for simpler lives or forms of employment that don’t require commuting).

The Huffington Post

Ariana Huffington’s new group-blog is up and…not exactly running. Huffington’s stable of celebrity bloggers is heavy on name recognition and light on original thought. For example:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Brad Hall (a heterosexual, married, Hollywood couple) predictably defend gay marriage because it doesn’t affect them (or so they think).

Mike Nichols (the former comedian and successful film director) babbles on about the purpose of the blog, fundamentalists, evil market forces, and the need for better metaphors. Mike needs to find a metaphor and stick with it.

Film actor John Cusack eulogizes Hunter S. Thompson, probably unaware that Thompson was the antithesis of a Hollywood liberal.

Comedien(ne) Ellen DeGeneres laments that fact that 1,000 wild horses have been turned into dog food. Did I miss the part where she offered to pay for their care and feeding?

Director David Mamet rambles as if under the influence of a hallucinatory drug, though he manages to slip in a predictable, Hollywoodish dig about “a vast coup…in our government.”

There’s more, but that’s more than enough for me. The Huffington Post won’t appear on my blogroll, nor will I visit it regularly. There’s no “there” there.

How Not to Fix Social Security

On reading Mickey Kaus’s post, “Let’s Not Save Social Security,” I had the following reactions to his nine points:

1. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a “universal” Social Security program that pays benefits to rich and poor. Yes there is, because Social Security itself is inherently wrong.

2.The only problem with this system is we can’t afford it! We can “afford” it in the sense that we can impose ever-larger taxes on workers. But why should we do that when privatization would eventually remove the burden from workers?

3. We should be sticking it to today’s recipients! Well, yes, if you think it’s all right to renege on promises made, however rash those promises were.

4. Bush’s proposed plan isn’t quite ‘means-testing’. So what? Means-testing may appeal to quasi-hardboiled socialists, but it’s just a symptom of an essentially corrupt system.

5. Democrats would fiddle with the benefit schedules too! You bet they would. But why should they be given the chance to do so? Let’s privatize Social Security before Democrats regain power.

6. Indeed, the Democrats’ solvency plans are grimmer than you’d think. Any “solvency” plan that tries to preserve the essential character of Social Security — a transfer-payment Ponzi scheme — is bound to be grim. (See #2.)

7. We could radically cut the cost of Social Security. If complete privatization is out of the question, politically, the best way to cut the cost of Social Security is to make it a “safety net” for the truly poor.

8. Even a radical means test wouldn’t turn Social Security into welfare. Any scheme that takes from the “rich” and gives to the “poor” is a form of welfare.

9. Do we really want to save Social Security now? Absolutely not! What we want to do is phase it out, as quickly as possible, in favor of a scheme that enables workers to make real investments in growth-producing stocks and bonds.

Slippery Sunstein

Legal Affairs Debate Club this week hosted an exchange between Cass Sunstein and Randy Barnett (“Constitution in Exile?“), in which Sunstein exuded his usual slipperiness. I was taken especially by this bit of casuistry:

Let’s define judicial activism neutrally, as invalidation of government action.

Sunstein, in his zeal to discredit judges who try to enforce the Constitution, attempts to smear them with the term “judicial activism,” which was coined to describe judges who try to rewrite the Constitution. Moreover, Sunstein subtly tries to illegitimate the judiciary by separating it from “government,” which he — as a knee-jerk majoritarian — identifies with the legislature.

Redeeming the Promise of Liberty

These are excerpts of Part VII of my series, “Practical Libertarianism for Americans.”

I ended Part VI by saying that

liberty has been vanquished in the mistaken belief (or hope) that government can effectively and efficiently make us better off, salve our woes, and put an end to social and racial divisions. To those ends, the governed and their governors, walking hand in hand, have taken liberty for a stroll down a slippery slope. Every step they have taken down that slope has made more problematic our journey back up the slope.

Is it possible to journey back up the slope — even part of the way — toward something resembling liberty? And if so, by what route?…

At this moment in history, federalism seems the most promising option because the Left is now beginning to understand that the power of the federal government may be used not only to advance its agenda but also to thwart that agenda. Leftists, like conservatives and pragmatic libertarians, may be willing to settle for a “good” solution rather than hold out for the “best” of all possible worlds. But, as I will explain, the way to federalism isn’t through a collaboration between Left and Right….

The Left’s vision of federalism is to devolve the central government’s acquired anti-libertarian powers to somewhat less remote commissars at the State and local level. The Left simply isn’t to be trusted as a partner in the shaping of a new federalism. A pro-libertarian federalism would not only limit the power of the central government but would also limit the power of State and local governments to advance the Left’s anti-libertarian agenda.

The only way to advance pro-libertarian federalism is to ensure that the Left neither controls the central government nor has little influence over its policies. This is especially true of the Supreme Court….

Something resembling pro-libertarian federalism will come about only if a Republican president, aided by a strongly Republican Senate, is able to stock the courts with judges who are committed to the restraint of government power — at all levels of government….

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POST.

On Seeing "Dumbo" Again

I first saw Walt Disney’s rollicking Dumbo in the 1940s. I’m sure that the “pink elephant” scene gave me nightmares. Dumbo is an early pearl in the string of Disney’s greatest animated features:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Pinocchio (1940)
Fantasia (1940)
Dumbo (1941)
Bambi (1942)
Song of the South (1946)
Cinderella (1950)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Peter Pan (1953)

I include the ponderous Fantasia only because of its visual effects. The rest are good old-fashioned packages of fun, produced by the best animators ever to have been assembled in one studio. You can skip Fantasia, but if you haven’t seen the others — ever, or in a long time — don’t delay. Put them on your DVD wish list today.

The Threat of the Anti-Theocracy

The following is an adaptation of Stanley Kurtz’s parody of the left’s view of the religious right’s political agenda.

What is the real agenda of the anti-religious far Left? I’ll tell you what it is. These nuts have practically taken over the federal government. Now they want to effect total control of the populace through Hitlerian eugenics, namely, abortion and euthanasia. They want to perpetuate our enslavement to the state by raising taxes to confiscatory levels and by regulating every mode of social and economic intercourse. They want to execute anyone found guilty of thinking that abortion and pre-martial, extramarital, or homosexual sex are wrong. Otherwise, they want to abolish the death penalty, empty the prisons, and allow criminals to roam the streets, where they can prey on innocent, disarmed citizens.

But aren’t extremists like this far from political power? On the contrary, the anti-religious political movement called “Liberalism” or “Leftism” has gained control of the Democrat party, and often controls Congress and the White House as well. Having already taken over most of the judiciary, the conversion of America to a politically correct, socialist, slave state is well in hand.

It is estimated that 100 million Americans are Liberals or Leftists, although many of them are unaware of the true effects of their beliefs and goals on liberty. It would be a mistake, by the way, to think of Liberals and Leftists as simple working people. Their leadership and funding comes from the super-rich, the influential intelligentsia, and political power brokers at all levels of government. The quest of these cryptofascists for power and world domination is a self-conscious program of pure, unmitigated evil.

You don’t believe me? Well, consider the fact that Hillary Clinton is positioning herself to run from the center-right in the 2008 election. From that point on the political spectrum, she will draw enough votes to capture the White House and bring in a Democrat Congress on her skirt-tails. She will then be in a position to appoint Leftist justices to the Supreme Court, ensuring permanent dominion of the Leftist agenda in America.

For Leftists, the most important event of the last half of the 20th century occurred when Bill Clinton proved that Leftists would support a demonstrably corrupt leader for the sake of gaining and holding onto power.

There is an infection, an anti-religious and political pathology that has corrupted our politics. The Left has embraced evil. Let us pray that Americans will go to the voting booth and finally free this country from the Democrat Leftist menace.

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