This is the car for me. It’s a Bugatti Veyron 16.4, with a 16-cylinder engine capable of producing 1,001 horsepower. Estimated price tag? $1.24 million. I think I’ll order one today.
The only glitch: Bugatti is now a VW marque. And VW has become synonymous with unreliability. So, I’ll have to order two: one for the shop and one for the highway.
Bush rules out a tax hike to cover the cost of rebuilding after Katrina:
The president said in a nationally televised speech Thursday night that the federal government will pick up most of the tab. Congress has already approved $62 billion in aid, and reconstruction costs are estimated to be at least $200 billion. . . .
Speaking at the White House Friday afternoon, Bush said that although rebuilding the Gulf Coast would be expensive, he was “confident we can handle it and our other priorities.” He said the government will “have to cut unnecessary spending” and should not raise taxes.
That raises a few questions:
Stand by for some kind of tax increase. Read my lips.
UPDATED TWICE, BELOW
It’s ludicrous that hundreds of pundits, thousands of politicians, and millions of citizens with little or no experience in the planning and direction of complex operations are judging the performance of various governments in the preparation for and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. All that these uninformed pundits, politicians, and citizens could know for a fact is that a major hurricane hit an area that hadn’t been hit by a stronger hurricane in 36 years. They could also know that Louisiana has been struck by lesser hurricanes about once every three years. And, finally, they could know (if they had been paying close attention to federal, state, and local machinations over many decades) that New Orleans was nevertheless ill-prepared for a major hurricane for many reasons that long predate the ascension of the current federal, state, and city administrations. Knowing only those facts (if they indeed know them), these “experts” nevertheless leap to the conclusion that “someone” must be to blame for this, that, and the other aspect of the disaster in New Orleans because, well, “someone” must be to blame.
I daresay that I know a lot more than most of the armchair critics about the planning and direction of complex operations. I have been immersed, at various times, in the planning and construction of a house, the planning and construction of major renovations and additions to a house, and — of most relevance — the design of and negotiation of a lease for a 200,000 square-foot office building. The office building was not just a partitioned shell, but one designed to incorporate state-of-the art modular furniture (not in cubicles, but in private offices), a variety of computing and telecommunications facilities, many special security features, conference facilities, food-preparation areas, libraries, and on and on. But that’s not all. At the company for which I planned the office building, I also had a broader portfolio of responsibilities, including the provision of physical and information security, financial and contractual management, the operation of central and distributed computing services, and the administration of personnel services in compliance with an array of federal, state, and local laws and regulations.
Now, one of the main lessons that I learned from my years of planning and directing complex operations is the following: Success has many parents; failures and setbacks have but one, the person on the spot. Yet, the person on the spot almost never starts with a clean slate or gets to run in a clear field. The person on the spot always operates within many constraints (e.g., budgets, traditions, and expectations). The person on the spot can never anticipate every contingency (especially the contingency that disrupts a plan). And, no matter the competence of the person on the spot, it takes time, effort, and (often) additional resources to regroup when a plan has been disrupted by reality.
There may be obvious instances of incompetent performance in the aftermath of Katrina; Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, and former FEMA director Mike Brown are obvious candidates for Bumbler of the Year. But the armchair critics on the sidelines are looking beyond the obvious bumblers and second-guessing the performance of various government entities from nothing more than pure, unadulterated ignorance: ignorance of the long and complex history of political and budgetary bargains that led to the state of New Orleans’s defenses against Katrina; ignorance of the political and budgetary bargains that led to the state of readiness on the part of various responders; ignorance of the difficulty of developing complex plans for events that will never unfold according to plan; ignorance of the hard fact that no plan survives “first contact with the enemy” (Katrina, in this case); ignorance of the amount of time, effort, and resources it takes to recover from the kinds of setbacks that are inevitable in a complex and chaotic operation; and, finally, ignorance of what was possible in the first place, given all of the foregoing complexities. Just to say that the preparations for and response to Katrina were inadequate — which is about all that most of the second-guessers really have to say — is, in a word, inadequate.
Well, I’ve had more than enough of second-guessers in my career. I got the job done in spite of them, but I long ago grew sick and tired of listening to them. So, I’ll not waste any more of my time reading what the second-guessers have to say about Katrina. And, as qualified as I might be to second-guess the second-guessers, there’ll be no more second-guessing from me, on this subject.
P.S. But, Columbo-like, I must add something on my way out. You’ve probably noticed that most of the armchair critics are animated by Bush-hate. That’s a fact which trumps their laughable “expertise,” which is on a par with William Jennings Bryan’s expertise in evolution.
As for Bush, he is now apologizing for failures on the part of the feds, which is fair enough to the extent that there were actual failures to do the right thing when confronted with actual events and armed with the proper tools with which to respond to those events. But what’s really going on, in my view, is that Bush is throwing his critics a crumb. He has nothing to lose by doing so (the haters will still hate him), and much to gain from those in the middle who will credit him for “taking responsibility” — whatever that Clintonesque term means when one cannot be fired, fined, or jailed for one’s actions.
P.P.S. Let me make it perfectly clear that I am not apologizing for the Bush administration, or any other government entity. I’m just explaining how it is that few — if any — of those who are bashing government’s response to Katrina have any basis for doing so, other than a desire to seem appropriately wise and/or indignant. Moreover, though it might be possible for government to have done better than it has done, it could not have done as well as private citizens and business owners, had they been allowed to keep their tax dollars and use them to prepare for and recover from Katrina. For more on that score, see these posts:
Katrina’s Aftermath: Who’s to Blame? (09/01/05)
“The Private Sector Isn’t Perfect” (09/02/05)
A Modest Proposal for Disaster Preparedness (09/07/05)
No Mention of Opportunity Costs (09/08/05)
Whose Incompetence Do You Trust? (09/10/05)
An Open Letter to Michael Moore (09/13/05)
Hey Mikey,
I understand that you’ve written an open letter to all who voted for George W. Bush in 2004. Something about how Katrina is all Bush’s fault — from start to finish. Well, I guess you’d know about such things, if anyone does. After all, your resume is quite impressive. Among other things,
So, it’s obvious that you know a lot about how the world works. In fact, you know so much that I’ve begun to wonder about your involvement in Katrina. Given your wealth, the combined wealth of your Lefty pals in Hollywood, and the immense wealth of Lefty sympathizers like George Soros, I think I know what happened.
You and your buddies didn’t cause Hurricane Katrina. I don’t think you’re up to that task, yet. But you knew it was developing and knew precisely where it was headed, long before the National Weather Service did. So, you got to Mayor Noggin and Governor Blank-o and made it worth their while to screw up the evacuation of New Orleans and surrounding areas. (Governor Barbour of Mississippi couldn’t be bought off, for obvious reasons, so you saved some bucks there.)
After the hurricane struck, and before everyone realized the full extent of the death and destruction it had caused, you got to CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and MSNBC and fed them the lie that Bush was responsible for the destruction of New Orleans because he piddled the money away in Iraq. (FoxNews couldn’t be bought off, either, but five out of six ain’t bad.) You also concocted the fable that poor blacks were disproportionately affected by Katrina because Bush doesn’t care about blacks. That’s all it took. Those stories had legs, man; now they’re gospel in most quarters. And your pet pollsters are having a field day spinning the results.
So, Mikey, I have to hand it to you. Your deeply felt empathy for the “common man” has served him well. I mean, what’s a few thousand deaths if that’s what it takes to help open Americans’ eyes to the evil that is Bush.
Of course, I’m sure you’ll be well served, too. I can envision the title of your next hit movie: Farhrenheit 212: Bush in Hot (Flood) Water.
Yours in paranoia forever,
LC
P.S. Are you still at the fat farm? It’s a shame you got so grossly overweight. But I know it wasn’t your fault, because you’re not one of the stupid white guys. I remember when a younger George Bush forced those Big Macs down your throat. You were hooked for life, and it’s all Bush’s fault.
P.P.S. I see that CNN has a story in which every level of government is taking heat for what happened in New Orleans. You know what that means, of course. The big government that you love so much — not the one that fights to defend your right to make a rather nice living, but the other one that thinks more money is always the answer, regardless of the question — that big government is going to get bigger.
That’s the American way, isn’t it Mikey? Put all responsibility on government, praise it when it’s in Democrat hands, blame it when it’s in Republican hands, and keep on spending, no matter how much it screws up. It sure beats giving individuals back their tax money, along with the responsibility for choosing safe places to live or protecting themselves when they decide to live in unsafe places. (Oh, I almost forgot about the poor, untaxed people who are poor mostly because they’ve never been weaned from the government tit or who can’t find jobs because taxation and regulation destroy jobs.)
Anyway, if you make people responsible for themselves they might do something stupid like getting grossly fat, as you did. But it wouldn’t be their fault, of course. So, as long as we’re going to have a federal czar for disaster-prevention-against-all-odds, instant-response-at-all-costs, and rebuilding-bigger-and-better-in-dangerous-places, we might as well have a federal czar for forcing-fat-boys-to-run-two-miles-a-day. How’s that strike you?
Americans are targets simply because we’re Americans. Our main enemy — Osama bin Laden and his ilk — chose to be our enemy long before 9/11, and long before you began marching for “peace in our time.”
It doesn’t matter to our main enemy whether you’re an anarchist, crypto-anarchist, libertarian, fascist, Democrat, or Republican. Which “side” you choose doesn’t matter to our main enemy — unless you choose to be on his side as an active member of his terrorist team, or unless you elect a president who is likely to walk away from the fight. That’s the choice he wants from you: to walk away from the fight.
The only ideology our main enemy values is fundamentalist Islam, and he would impose a fundamentalist Islamic state upon you if he could. But he may settle for the retreat of the United States from the Middle East. In that event, he would be in a position to disrupt that region’s oil production, and you would become progressively poorer and ever more vulnerable to his threats of death and destruction.
If you think fighting for oil is “evil,” try living with a lot less oil for the many years it would take to exploit domestic oil sources (if environmentalists will let us) and to develop substitutes for it. If you think that leaving the Middle East to its own devices would buy “peace in our time,” put the face of Adolf Hitler on Osama bin Laden. It’s not hard to do, is it?
Perhaps this is all too much for you. Perhaps you would simply like to declare your independence from the policies of the United States and declare to the world that your person and possessions are off-limits to attack. Do you think al Qaida will go to the trouble of putting a tracking device on you and exempting you from harm when it blows up the building or airplane you happen to be in?
Oh, but you just want peace. Well, I want peace, too, but a peace that’s on my terms, not the enemy’s. Tell me your plan for achieving a peace that isn’t the peace of the grave. Tell me how you would deal with the reality that we have a vicious enemy who would impoverish us if he cannot enslave us. Tell me how marching for peace, instead of killing the enemy, advances the cause of a peace that’s worth having.
From TTLB’s ecosystem report (number of inbound links in parentheses):
1.Instapundit.com (4200) details
2.Michelle Malkin (3308) details
3.Captain’s Quarters (2488) details
4.Power Line (2437) details
5.Daily Kos: State of the Nation (2435) details
6.lgf: active anguish in a context of flux (2270) details
7.Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (2245) details
8.Hugh Hewitt (1800) details
9.DRUDGE REPORT 2005® (1778) details
10.Wizbang (1722) details
Putting aside Boing Boing, which isn’t a political blog, and Drudge, which is sort of a news site, seven of the eight most-linked blogs can be claimed by the conservative-libertarian camp. But Daily Kos, the only Leftist blog among the eight most-linked political blogs ranks first in traffic, whereas Wizbang (eighth of eight) ranks only 38th in traffic (from TTLB’s ecotraffic report, link ranking in parentheses):
1) Daily Kos: State of the Nation 580069 visits/day (5)
2) Gizmodo: The Gadgets Weblog 230286 visits/day (89)
3) Instapundit.com 138604 visits/day (1)
4) Gawker 136833 visits/day (162)
5) Eschaton 126234 visits/day (12)
6) Defamer, the L.A. Gossip Rag 117552 visits/day (317)
7) lgf: active anguish in a context of flux 97539 visits/day (6)
8) Go Fug Yourself 95870 visits/day (240)
9) Michelle Malkin 88491 visits/day (2)
10) Wonkette, Politics for People with Dirty Minds 68667 visits/day (45)
11) Power Line 66210 visits/day (4)
12) Crooks and Liars 61848 visits/day (75)
13) A Socialite’s Life 52320 visits/day (2245)
14) Blogcritics.org 48976 visits/day (54)
15) The Washington Monthly 48151 visits/day (17)
16) Scared Monkeys 47599 visits/day (256)
17) Pink Is The New Blog | Fingers Firmly On The Pulse 43402 visits/day (1948)
18) The Smirking Chimp 43042 visits/day (616)
19) Riehl World View 38904 visits/day (424)
20) Hugh Hewitt 36317 visits/day (8)
21) Blog for America 33746 visits/day (1288)
22) www.AndrewSullivan.com – Daily Dish 33164 visits/day (24)
23) Captain’s Quarters 26798 visits/day (3)
24) Lifehacker 25173 visits/day (420)
25) Drunken Stepfather :.:.:Vida Guerra Amateur Pictures:.:.:Vida Guerra Naked Pics:.:.: Cellphone Hack: 20679 visits/day (7851)
26) PoliPundit.com 18265 visits/day (64)
27) The Irish Trojan’s blog – Brendan Loy’s homepage 17765 visits/day (711)
28) BTF’s Baseball Primer Blog 17681 visits/day (4619)
29) Jesus’ General 17611 visits/day (129)
30) The Volokh Conspiracy – – 17582 visits/day (11)
31) Famous Recipes on World Famous Recipes – If you are looking for famous recipes then you came to the 17414 visits/day (9133)
32) Recipes – World Famous Recipes 17364 visits/day (615)
33) Confirm Them 17174 visits/day (1942)
34) RedState.org 17174 visits/day (9929)
35) MyDD :: Due Diligence of Politics, Election Forecast & the World Today 16117 visits/day (130)
36) Drudge Retort: Red Meat for Yellow Dogs 16041 visits/day (4977)
37) Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire 15909 visits/day (174)
38) Wizbang 15873 visits/day (10)
Other Leftist blogs also garner more traffic than several of the most-linked conservative-libertarian blogs. (You’ll have to find the Lefties for yourself; I’m not going to mention any more of them by name.)
Why the discrepancy between the link rankings and the traffic rankings? Here’s my hypothesis: Conservative-libertarian blogs get more links because they’re considered more authoritative. Leftist blogs get more traffic because Lefties flock there, in search of reassurance for their views.
That hypothesis is consistent with the prevalance of vitriol-saturated posts and comments at Leftist blogs. Buzzards of a feather do flock together.
When my wife and I turned on our TV set that morning, the first plane had just struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later we saw the second plane strike. In that instant what had seemed like a horrible accident became an obvious act of terror.
Then, in the awful silence that had fallen over Arlington, Virginia, we could hear the “whump” as the third plane hit the Pentagon.
Our thoughts for the next several hours were with our daughter, whom we knew was at work in the adjacent World Financial Center when the planes struck the World Trade Center. Was her office struck by debris? Did she flee her building only to be struck by or trapped in debris? Had she smothered in the huge cloud of dust that enveloped lower Manhattan as the Twin Towers collapsed? Because telephone communications were badly disrupted, we didn’t learn for several hours that she had made it home safely.
Our good fortune was not shared by tens of thousands of other persons: the grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, lovers, and good friends of the 3,000 who died that day in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and western Pennsylvania.
Never forgive, never forget, never relent.
So you think government is to be trusted to “get the job done”? Are you less certain, in the aftermath of Katrina? Well, even if you’re not certain, you can bet that many other remain certain that government is still to be trusted, if it’s given more money or put it in the hands of the right party. I think not.
FDR’s administration might have foreseen the vastly expensive and intrusive central government that grew out of its anti-Depression efforts. But whether or not FDR’s administration foresaw the regulatory-welfare state, its “experiments” on the American people shouldn’t have been trusted.
FDR’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee and prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a successful defense of Pearl Harbor might have deterred the Japanese and hastened victory in Europe. (The U.S., rightly, would have at some point come to the aid of Great Britain.)
Truman’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee and prevent the invasion of South Korea, which led to a costly and inconclusive war and demonstrated, for the first time, a lack of military resolve (Truman’s willingness to accept the status quo ante). Thus it should have come as no surprise that the USSR was emboldened to tighten its grip on Eastern Europe and to squash the 1956 uprising in Hungary.
Eisenhower’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee that the Bay of Pigs invasion, which the Kennedy administration botched, would make Castro more popular in Cuba. The botched invasion pushed Castro closer to the USSR, which led to the Cuban missile crisis.
JFK’s inner circle was unwilling to believe that Soviet missile facilities were enroute to Cuba, and therefore unable to act before the facilities were installed. JFK’s subsequent unwillingness to attack the missile facilities made it plain to Kruschev that the the Berlin Wall (erected in 1961) would not fall and that the U.S. would not risk armed confrontation with the USSR (conventional or nuclear) for the sake of the peoples behind the Iron Curtain. Thus the costly and tension-ridden Cold War persisted for almost another three decades.
LBJ’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee the consequences of the incremental application of military power in Vietnam, which led to the enemy’s eventual victory. Worse for the U.S., the Vietnam experience became a rallying point for the anti-war Left, which continues to undermine the defense of American interests.
Nixon’s administration wasn’t to be trusted, period.
Carter’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee how its feeble, futile, and belated effort to rescure the Americans held hostage in Iran would encourage Islamic terrorists. Ditto for the Reagan administration’s willingness to cut and run after the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, for the Clinton Administration’s similar bug-out after the massacre of U.S. troops in Somalia, and for the Clinton administration’s feeble, legalistic responses to the bombing of the World Trade Center and the bombings U.S. embassies in Africa.
Bush I’s administration wasn’t to be trusted to foresee that the failure to remove Saddam and install a friendly Iraqi government in 1991 would eventually require us to start from scratch, after Saddam and his party had had time to plan for a post-invasion insurrection.
Bush II’s adminstration wasn’t to be trusted to go where the Clinton administration had failed to go, that is, to anticipate and prevent the long-planned attacks of September 11, 2001.
Government incompetence is nothing new under the sun. It just seems new to hundreds of millions of naïve Americans, who want to believe that government, which usually fails to anticipate rather predictable and often manipulable human enemies (and fails to defeat them except when it wages all-out war), will magically become competent when it comes to dealing with implacable nature, in all its variety — the usual log-rolling, pork-barreling, and graft notwithstanding.
But of course, the sudden emergence of governmental competence is precisely what most Americans want to believe in. (It’s the main theme of every presidential election.) And so we will end up throwing more money at the problem, to little avail and without regard for the viable alternative. That alternative is to let people decide for themselves what risks are important to them, and to let them decide how to spend their money (cooperatively, as they wish) in preparation for those risks.
We should trust the collective wisdom of people acting cooperatively in their own interest, through markets, to protect and preserve their lives and property. We should not trust the amply demonstrated incompetence of government, which suppresses the collective wisdom of markets and replaces it with the collective misjudgments of politicians and bureaucrats, whose main interest is to protect and preserve their power and perquisites.
(For more, see this post at ParaPundit, and this one. Then there’s this one, and several others, at Capital Freedom. And don’t forget Catallarchy, which has plenty, just scroll down.)
Today the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals issued this spot-on opinion in the case of José Padilla. Briefly, Padilla is the wannabe dirty bomber who was captured in Chicago three years ago after having fought against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Lyle Benniston, writing at SCOTUSblog, says:
The ruling . . . did not go as far as the Administration had asked. The Court did not rely upon the President’s claim that he has “inherent authority” as Commander in Chief to order the designation and detention of terrorist suspects. Rather, it relied only on the resolution Congress passed in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the President to respond. The Supreme Court similarly avoided the “inherent authority” claim when it upheld detention of citizens captured in foreign battle zones in its decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld — so far, the only other case of detention of a citizen named as an “enemy combatant.”
The Circuit Court commented: “Like Hamdi, Padilla associated with forces hostile to the United States in Afghanistan….And, like Hamdi, Padilla took up arms against United States forces in that country in the same way and to the same extent as did Hamdi….Because, like Hamdi, Padilla is an enemy combatant, and because his detention is no less necessary than was Hamdi’s in order to prevent his return to the battlefield, the President is authorized by the AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution] to detain Padilla as a fundamental incident to the conduct of war.”
That the ruling did not go as far as the administration asked doesn’t alter the fact that the ruling was a victory for the administration, and for Americans. After all, Padilla’s counsel raised four arguments for Padilla’s release, all of which failed. Lawyers don’t lose when they lose some of their arguments, they lose only when they lose all of their arguments.
Judge J. Michael Lutting wrote for the three-judge panel. I applaud his ability (and that of his confreres) to see through the legal cant and get it right: An enemy of the United States is an enemy of the United States, even if he happens to be a U.S. citizen. To put it another way, not all non-citizens are enemies of the United States, but some citizens — not just Hamdi and Padilla — are enemies of the United States.
The Marxist take on New Orleans is here (h/t Marginal Revolution):
How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Forewarned that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby effects an optimal outcome for the entire society. Thus does the invisible hand work its wonders in mysterious ways.
In New Orleans there would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island in 2004, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.5 million people, more than 10 percent of the country’s population. The Cubans lost 20,000 homes to that hurricane—but not a single life was lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
And blah, blah, blah, blah.
Actually, the disaster in New Orleans was set up by government, as I explain here. And the failure to evacuate people was surely a government failure. Remember all those school buses and other municipal vehicles that went unused by the unesteemed mayor of NO? What happened in NO was by no means a test of free markets; it was proof that government isn’t the answer.
Moreover, total preparedness for every conceivable disaster is a prescription for impoverishment. But that thought would never cross the mind of a Marxist apologist for Castro’s regime. Cubans have little say in how they live their lives. Sometimes (rarely) that works to the advantage of Cubans; most of the time it works to their detriment. But that concept — namely, opportunity cost — is too subtle for your average Marxist propagandist to comprehend.
Evidently, in l’affaire Katrina, the central government’s “failure” to usurp the responsibilities of individuals, businesses, and local and state governments will lead to something like this:
After all, how else can we possibly be certain that Mother Nature will never again claim as a victim an American or a visitor to the United States (legal or illegal)?
And when the central government is through earthquake-proofing, fire-proofing, and flood-proofing every structure in the United States it will start accident-proofing every vehicle and baby-proofing every bit of furniture and clothing. It would then go on to illness-and-death-proofing every person — perhaps retroactively — but by then it would have long since driven the economy into the ground. And so, as usual, the poor will be left to fend for themselves (as if everyone else doesn’t have to do so). But all will be poor, and the Left will — at last — be happy. A perfect world in which all are equal, and equally miserable.
. . . but Steven Edwards of Wired News cannot be excused for his support of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Act, even though Edwards is paralyzed from the shoulders down. His condition gives him no special standing to hijack taxpayers’ money. Let’s begin with this, from Edwards (whose material I italicize below):
With all the noise over stem-cell research, few people seem to have heard about or understood the importance of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Act. This noncontroversial bill would improve the collaboration and coordination of federally funded paralysis research. . . .
If it’s noncontroversial, why is it “languishing” in Congress (Edwards’s term)?
Once you read the Paralysis Act, it’s almost impossible to oppose it. . . .
Impossible, eh? I guess that’s why it’s sailing through Congress. Or perhaps members of Congress can’t read — which is a possibility.
I believe embryonic stem cells hold tremendous promise as a research tool, and I support such research. . . .
As do I, on both counts, though I have strong reservations about the creation of life in order to destroy it. Such actions are on the slippery slope toward state control of human destiny. (Go here for more on that score.)
In any event, if a thing is worth doing, the private sector will do it, and do it better than government. (I exempt justice and defense only because of the danger that warlords might arise — or get stronger than they are.)
The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act would loosen restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research and establish guidelines giving infertile couples the option of donating their cryopreserved embryos for the specific purpose of deriving new embryonic stem-cell lines that would be eligible for federally funded research.
Loosening restrictions on federal funding is precisely the problem — and it doesn’t matter to me what’s being restricted. It could be free applie pie for all on Mothers’ Day and I would still oppose it. Why? Because it puts politicians and bureaucrats in charge of deciding how we should spend our money. Yes, it’s our money, not theirs, and decidely not Steven Edwards’s.
Many people have many different kinds of health problems. And those people are hurt when government hijacks their money just because some celebrity (or former president) happened to suffer from a particular disability or disease. Or do you believe in free lunches, Santa Claus, and the tooth fairy, Mr. Edwards?
I wrote recently and critically (in “Allan Bloom’s Mind“) about Jim Sleeper’s reconsideration of Allan Bloom’s work. For an authoritative trashing of Sleeper’s NYT article — and of Sleeper’s sleazy brand of Leftism — read this post by Roger Kimball at Armavirumque, the weblog of The New Criterion.
Very clever. . .
One suspects that the White House knew or surmised that Chief Justice Rehnquist was nearing the end when Judge Roberts was picked to succeed O’Connor. There may be a bit more rancor from the Left about Roberts, now that he’s moving up to CJ, but he’s still a very good bet for confirmation. (Unless a bigger skeleton than his opposition to “comparable worth” emerges from someone’s closest.)
Now the question is, who’s the pick for O’Connor’s seat? I stand by what I said here:
[W]ill Bush . . . nominate a limited-government conservative-libertarian like Janice Rogers Brown? If he doesn’t, Bush’s slide toward the accommodationist policies of his father will be confirmed. A sad waste of a Republican majority in Congress.
It’s showdown time. If Bush fails to nominate someone in the mold of Judge Brown I will withdraw everything I have ever said about the GOP being the last, best hope for the restoration of limited government.
I posted this on Labor Day 2004. I stand by it.
Labor Day gives most workers a day off. That’s good because an extra day off now and then is a pause that refreshes. A longish trek to a park or a beach on a hot day with a car full of kids isn’t a refreshing way to spend Labor Day, but those workers who spend the day at home, perhaps reading a book and listening to music, will find their souls somewhat restored.
Now let us consider the significance of Labor Day as a holiday. According to Wikipedia:
The origins of Labor Day can be traced back to the Knights of Labor in the United States, and a parade organized by them at that time on September 5, 1882 in New York City. In 1884 another parade was held, and the Knights passed resolutions to make this an annual event. Other labour organizations (and there were many), but notably the affiliates of the International Workingmen’s Association who were seen as a hotbed of socialists and anarchists, favoured a May 1 holiday. With the event of Chicago’s Haymarket riots in early May of 1886, president Grover Cleveland believed that a May 1 holiday could become an opportunity to commemorate the riots. But fearing it may strengthen the socialist movement, he quickly moved in 1887 to support the position of the Knights of Labor and their date for Labor Day. The date was adopted in Canada in 1894 by the government of Prime Minister John Thompson, although the concept of a Labour Day actually originated with marches in both Toronto and Ottawa in 1872. On the other hand, socialist delegates in Paris in 1889 appointed May 1 as the official International Labour Day.
Labor Day has been celebrated on the first Monday in September in the United States and Canada since the 1880s. The September date has remained unchanged, even though the two governments were encouraged to adopt May 1 as Labor Day, the date celebrated by the majority of the world. Moving the holiday, in addition to violating U.S. tradition, could have been viewed as aligning U.S. labor movements with internationalist sympathies.
In summary (for those of you who didn’t grow up in the North), Labor Day is an invention of organized labor, and the historical roots of organized labor are socialistic.
Labor Day also serves to remind us of one of the “monuments” of FDR’s New Deal (quoting again from Wikipedia):
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (or Wagner Act) protects the rights of workers in the private sector of the United States to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining over wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment, and to take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in support of their demands….
In the first few years of the Wagner Act, however, many employers simply refused to recognize it as law. The United States Supreme Court had already struck down a number of other statutes passed during the New Deal on the grounds that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to enact them under its power to regulate interstate commerce. Most of the initial appellate court decisions reached the same conclusion, finding the Act unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable. It was not until the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the statute in 1937 in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. that the Wagner Act became law in practical terms as well.
Thus Labor Day, in its way, commemorates legislative and judicial infamy. The Wagner Act, at one stroke, deprived business owners of their property rights and thus discouraged investment and business formation; invalidated the freedom of employers to contract with employees on terms acceptable to employers as well as employees; caused artificially high wages and benefits that harmed American workers by making American industry less and less competitive with foreign industry; and set the stage for the use of the Commerce Clause as an excuse for the federal government’s interference in all aspects of business.
So, if you are a worker, enjoy your Labor Day holiday, but don’t thank organized labor or the New Deal for your material blessings.
A portion of the bio of a contributor to the Blogger News Network, in which she notes that “something snapped inside”:
My mother was a Civil Rights activist and a teacher. She passed away in 1998.My father was an Army intel op in the Second World War. He passed away in 1985. I have been writing since I was very young. I have been involved in politics, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement since I was a child. My mother founded the first integrated pre-school for black and white children in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1941. That was 13 years before the official beginning of the Civil Rights movement in America. Every weekend for our coming up years, my mother brought us into Boston for rallies and teach-ins. My early life was filled with the speeches of Martin Luther King. I heard them live, and I read them over and over. His writing had a profound effect on me. Later in life I read about Mahatma Ghandi. I think he might be my vote of the greatest political and religious leader who ever lived. My mother would have told us stories about Mahatma Ghandi and the Salt Marches. When war was declared against Iraq in 2003 I had been living out of the United States for 10 years or more. I lived an idyllic life in Ireland, in a beautiful cottage, with a lovely boyfriend who was one of the greatest musicians in all of Ireland. I played fiddle badly, but I had a supremely happy life. When I heard George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2003, when I heard him outline the “Axis of Evil,” and when I heard him boast that the had sanctioned the summary execution of 3,000 Afghani prisoners, something snapped inside. When war was declared on Iraq I reached a turning point. For years I had been contributing 20% of everything I earned through my painting and writing to Medicins Sans Frontieres. For years I had enjoyed a life that few people could imagine. But it ended when war was declared on Iraq. I had many Iraqi friends, and because of the art and literature and antiquities in Iraq, I just could not countenance any war of agression against that country.
Obviously something “snapped inside” her, but it had snapped long before she heard George Bush inveigh against the “axis of evil.” Listen lady, if you can’t distinguish between enemy states and their people (most of whom are not our enemies), you are too stupid to be taken seriously about anything. If you’re defending the “axis” states of North Korea, Iran, and pre-invasion Iraq, you have forfeited your right to judge anyone else’s morality. And if you simply think that war is inherently “bad” because “it just is” or because civilians sometimes get caught in the crossfire, then you dishonor your father’s memory.
With company like that (and several dozen other nutcases and “liberal” statists), it’s no wonder I recently resigned from BNN. Something snapped.
I am interested here in addressing Burkean conservatives — as opposed to yahoos, opportunistic Republicans, neoconservatives, protectionists, and isolationists, for example. Wikipedia says this about Burkean conservatism:
Edmund Burke [link added: ED] developed his ideas in reaction to the Enlightenment, and the idea of a society guided by abstract “Reason.” . . .
Some men, argued Burke, have more reason than others, and thus some men will make worse governments if they rely upon reason than others. To Burke, the proper formulation of government came not from abstractions such as “Reason,” but from time-honoured development of the state and of other important societal institutions such as the family and the Church. . . .
Burke argued that tradition is a much sounder foundation than “reason”. The conservative paradigm he established emphasises the futility of attempting to ground human society based on pure abstractions (such as “reason,” “equality,” or, more recently, “diversity”), and the necessity of humility in the face of the unknowable. Existing institutions have virtues that cannot be fully grasped by any single person or interest group or, in Burke’s view, even any single generation. . . .
Tradition draws on the wisdom of many generations and the tests of time, while “reason” may be a mask for the preferences of one man, and at best represents only the untested wisdom of one generation. In the conservative view, an attempt to modify the complex web of human interactions that form human society for the sake of some doctrine or theory runs the risk of running afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. Burke advocates vigilance against the possibility of moral hazards. For Burkean conservatives, human society is something rooted and organic; to try to prune and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue is to invite unforeseen disaster.
Burkean conservatives are inherently skeptical of plans to re-model human society after an ideological model. They emphasise ‘continuity with tradition, which does [not] exclude changes within the framework of that tradition. They insist that political change should come about through legitimate political process, and oppose interference with that process, including extra-constitutional reactionary changes. So long as rule of law is upheld, and so long as change is effected gradually and constitutionally rather than [through] revolution, they are, in theory, content. Burkean conservatism is in principle neither revolutionary nor counter-revolutionary.
Now, if this seems familiar to libertarians, it should. Friedrich Hayek takes much the same tack in many of his writings. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), Hayek says:
If it is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place, this is closely connected with the smaller importance which is now attached to change as such. Indeed, there are few points on which the assumptions made (usually only implicitly) by the “planners” differ from those of their opponents as much as with regard to the significance and frequency of changes which will make substantial alterations of production plans necessary. Of course, if detailed economic plans could be laid down for fairly long periods in advance and then closely adhered to, so that no further economic decisions of importance would be required, the task of drawing up a comprehensive plan governing all economic activity would be much less formidable. . . .
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. . . .
The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.
Hayek sums it up in The Constitution of Liberty (1960):
[B]efore we can try to remould society intelligently, we must understand its functioning; we must realise that, even when we believe that we understand it, we may be mistaken. What we must learn to understand is that human civilisation has a life of its own, that all our efforts to improve things must operate within a working whole which we cannot entirely control, and the operation of whose forces we can hope merely to facilitate and assist so far as we can understand them. [Chapter 4, pp. 69-70]
In a postcript to The Constitution of Liberty (“Why I Am Not a Conservative“), Hayek tries to distinguish his brand of liberalism (that is, classical liberalism or what is now minimal-state libertarianism) from conservatism:
This difference between liberalism and conservatism must not be obscured by the fact that in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes. . . .
In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people – he is not an egalitarian – bet he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. . . .
Closely connected with this is the usual attitude of the conservative to democracy. I have made it clear earlier that I do not regard majority rule as an end but merely as a means, or perhaps even as the least evil of those forms of government from which we have to choose. But I believe that the conservatives deceive themselves when they blame the evils of our time on democracy. The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power. . . . The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite.
Admittedly, it was only when power came into the hands of the majority that further limitations of the power of government was thought unnecessary. In this sense democracy and unlimited government are connected. But it is not democracy but unlimited government that is objectionable, and I do not see why the people should not learn to limit the scope of majority rule as well as that of any other form of government. At any rate, the advantages of democracy as a method of peaceful change and of political education seem to be so great compared with those of any other system that I can have no sympathy with the antidemocratic strain of conservatism. It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.
I must point out that Hayek’s disparagement of conservatism is not aimed at Burkean conservatism. One account of Hayek’s life and thought explains that his criticism of conservatism
was aimed primarily at the European-style conservatism, which has often opposed capitalism as a threat to social stability and traditional values. Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use “liberal” in the older sense that he gave to the term. In the U.S., Hayek is usually described as a “libertarian“, but the denomination that he preferred was “Old Whig” (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke).
Burkean conservatism, contra other forms of conservatism, doesn’t insist on the political dominance of a certain class. It insists on a rule of law that doesn’t allow the state to impose change on society but, rather, allows change to come from within society. (A quaint notion that held sway in the United States until the advent of the New Deal.)
Having apologized for Hayek’s position on conservatism, I must object to Hayek’s defense of democracy, which is now quaint. Hayek was writing 45 years ago, when it still seemed possible that we might return to the limited government of the written Constitution. But the forces of democracy-for-its-own-sake have since prevailed. Democracy and unlimited government are now bound together so tightly that Hayek’s fine distinction between the two is no longer valid, if ever it was. With unlimited government now in the saddle, the affairs of Americans are run by inferior men and women who are able — through demagoguery, bread, and circuses — to capture the allegiance of the inferior masses.
The limited government designed by the Framers was conservative, in a Burkean way. It was meant to enable superior persons to thrive — for the benefit of all — not through political dominance so much as through social and economic leadership. That design has long since given way, through extra-constitutional legislation and adjudication, to unlimited government, which disables superiority — to the detriment of all.
Is there not now a viable conservative movement in the United States? How else could Republicans have won seven of the last ten presidential elections and prevailed in the last six congressional elections? The problem is that Republicanism, which was more or less Burkean until the middle of the 20th century, sold its soul when it chose Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon as its standard-bearers in 1952. From that point on, the GOP began to attract more than its share of yahoos, other cranks, and opportunists.
Barry Goldwater, the penultimate major politician of Burkean mien, lost resoundingly in the presidential election of 1964. And it has been downhill ever since. Nixon, an opportunist of the first rank, courted yahoos. Ronald Reagan, the last major politician of Burkean mien, was hampered by a Democrat-controlled Congress and his big-tent view of Republicanism. About Bush 41 and Bush 43, perhaps the best thing one can say is that they are not Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry.
The GOP is no longer reliably Burkean, though it certainly must attract far more Burkeans than the Democrat Party. The question is whether there are still enough Burkean conservatives (of any party) to constitute a viable political movement, one which might be influential if allied with those of us who choose to identify ourselves by other term, such as free-market capitalist or minarchist (minimal-state, Hayekian libertarian). As Austin Bramwell argues at The American Conservative,
one would think that [Russell] Kirk, Hayek, and others (including eccentric outsiders such as R.J. Rushdoony, L. Brent Bozell, and Ayn Rand) had left behind a commanding legacy. One would expect that, like Burke, they had articulated ideas so powerful that they can only be contended with, not refuted. . . .
Has conservatism achieved this exalted stature? If we are honest, we must answer no.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, conservatives sought not just to refute modern liberalism but to obliterate it. . . . Each conservative writer claimed to have uncovered the Holy Grail—the argument or principle that would expose the errors of liberalism (and communism, socialism, feminism, etc.) once and for all. . . .
Yet the Holy Grail has not been found. One can still find lapel-grabbing right-wingers who will argue late into the night that their favorite thinker has figured everything out for all time. (My personal favorite: certain libertarians believe that Alan Gewirth, a now forgotten philosopher of the 1970s, showed how the rightness of limited government derives ultimately from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.) This is not the place to take up the argument with them. I only wish to observe, as an empirical matter, that no one person’s ideas actually define American conservatism. If English conservatism is nothing other than Burkeanism, American conservatism is not Rothbardianism, Randianism, Jaffaism, or Hayekianism.
But Bramwell goes on to say that
[o]n the libertarian side, a small group of academics affiliated with the journal Critical Review [link added: ED] is quietly working a revolution. They forthrightly acknowledge that neither free-market economics nor moral philosophy have produced a comprehensive argument for libertarianism. Nonetheless, they argue, limited government is still preferable because it mitigates the problem of public ignorance.
The majority of voters in a mass democracy, they reason, are stunningly ignorant of even the most basic political information. Moreover, to the extent that their voting behavior can be rationalized, they employ heuristics of the most obtuse sort: “Candidate X cares about people like me.” As for the tiny but relatively well-informed elite, they too have limited intellectual resources for understanding current politics. Hence, they rely on naïve heuristics such as “Republicans are greedy, religious fanatics” or “liberals are hypocrites who only care about making themselves feel better.”
The reliance on such heuristics can perhaps be explained in terms of rational economic decision-making—in that there is not enough time in the day to bother to learn much about politics—but, more deeply, in terms of evolutionary psychology. The human mind is too primitive to understand the complexities of modern politics. Democratic politics thus present a choice between the ideological rigidity of the elites and the sheer incompetence of the masses. We can escape this predicament only by reducing the role of government in our lives.
In sum, if Austin Bramwell is a harbinger, the American conservative movement — the thoughtful branch of that movement, at least — is moving toward its natural ally: minarchist libertarianism. For, as I have tried to show here, Burkean conservatism and minarchism amount to the same thing. Would a working alliance of Burkeans and minarchists constitute an influential critical mass? That remains to be seen, but it’s a possibility to be encouraged.
John Roberts may be a “stealth nominee” for the Supreme Court, but it’s unlikely that Bush’s nominee to replace Rehnquist can be as stealthy as Roberts. For one thing, conservative Senators surely will try to ferret out, if not block, another pseudo-conservative like O’Connor or Kennedy (not to mention Souter).
Knowing that, will Bush decide to placate his conservative base and nominate a limited-government conservative-libertarian like Janice Rogers Brown? If he doesn’t, Bush’s slide toward the accommodationist policies of his father will be confirmed. A sad waste of a Republican majority in Congress.
It’s showdown time. If Bush fails to nominate someone in the mold of Judge Brown I will withdraw everything I have ever said about the GOP being the last, best hope for the restoration of limited government.
Remember academic Allan Bloom, who rode to sudden fame in 1987 on the back of his book, The Closing of the American Mind? It’s been years since I read the book, so I must rely on Jim Sleeper’s essay at NYTimes.com for a refresher:
Who on an American campus could ignore Bloom’s accounts of Cornell faculty groveling before black-power student poseurs, or his sketches of politically correct administrator-mandarins and ditzy pomo professors? What dedicated teacher could dismiss his self-described ”meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education”? Some thoughtful liberals found themselves reading ”The Closing” under their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse or repudiate it but sensing that some reckoning was due. Conservatives championed Bloom then, of course, and they invoke him still.
But, on closer inspection, it seems that
[f]ar from being a conservative ideologue, Bloom, a University of Chicago professor of political philosophy who died in 1992, was an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life. He had to be prodded to write his best-selling book by his friend Saul Bellow, whose novel ”Ravelstein” is a wry tribute to Bloom. Far more than liberal speech codes and diversity regimens, the bêtes noires of the intellectual right, darkened Bloom’s horizons: He also mistrusted modernity, capitalism and even democracy so deeply that he believed the university’s culture must be adversarial (or at least subtly subversive) before America’s market society, with its vulgar blandishments, religious enthusiasms and populist incursions.
In fact, a mistrust of modernity, capitalism, and democracy isn’t an unusual paleoconservative trait. Be that as it may, Bloom was right about the dangers of political correctness, and so Closing became — and still is — a rallying point for those conservatives, libertarians, and (true) liberals who oppose it.
Whatever else Allan Bloom might have opposed is of little moment. He was right about at least one thing, and his rightness about that thing has served us well.
Stephen Bainbridge (ProfessorBainbridge.com) actually says that in this post. Well, “So what?” you may say: No system for organizing human activity is perfect, except in such dream-worlds as anarcho-capitalism (where market forces defeat bullies by the sheer force of theory), Objectivism (which talks a good game about reality but seems unable to grasp it), and socialism (which promises free lunches and destroys incentives).
What Bainbridge goes on to say is almost right, however:
. . . but we’ve known since Adam Smith that economic incentives work. . . .
We also know that the modern public corporation is the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever seen.[*] In The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge demonstrate that the corporation is “the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.”
The capital, product, and labor markets give corporate managers directors incentives to produce goods and services efficiently. What defenders of government regulation often overlook is that regulators are also actors with their own self-interested motivations. The trouble is that the incentives to which regulators and legislators respond are often contrary to the public interest. The incentives of legislators and regulators are driven by rent-seeking and interest group politics, which have no necessary correlation to corporate profit-maximization. Accordingly, government preparation for and response to disasters is likely to be driven by the political concerns of the governmental actors rather than the public good.
In sum, it may be time to try Adam Smith’s invisible hand by outsourcing disaster relief.
But the best way to outsource disaster relief isn’t to have government use our tax dollars to hire private disaster-relief specialists. No, the best way to “outsource” disaster relief is this:
The best way to ensure that people make prudent decisions is to let them knowing that they’re responsible for themselves, require them to “play” with their own money, and allow them to spend their money where they think it will do them the most good.
Though it’s meant to bash the Bush administration, this headline (from Slate) captures the essence of the problem:
$41 Billion, and Not a Penny of Foresight
Why is the New Orleans recovery going so badly? Just look at the DHS budget.
As if government could ever take taxpayers’ money away from them and then spend it better than taxpayers could.** So Bush spends the money on the war (according to the Bush-bashers). Well, Clinton would have spent the money on his pet projects. That’s what happens when politicians get into your wallet. They decide what’s most important to you.
The private sector (i.e., free-market capitalism) is less perfect than everything, except all of the alternatives to it.
P.S. Ignoramuses and die-hard statists will say that free-market capitalism leaves everyone on his or her own. (Oh, how I hate the awkwardness that results from gender-correct writing.) In fact, free-market capitalism is the best vehicle for large-scale cooperation that has ever emerged from human endeavor. Free-market capitalism, among many other things, allows for insurance against risk and provides the wherewithal to combat the elements (e.g., plywood for boarding up windows, concrete for deep footings). What it doesn’t do is offer the illusion that “someone else” will protect you from all harm and immediately make you whole when you come to harm.
Related post: Katrina’s Aftermath: Who’s to Blame?
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* Apologists for the state like to say that public corporations couldn’t exist without the state’s blessing. Balderdash! Insurance markets would do the job of protecting shareholders quite nicely, thank you.
** I argue in “But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” that government should take taxpayers’ money in order to provide for criminal justice and national defense. But that’s for the prudential reason suggested by the title of the post, not because government can necessarily provide such services more efficiently than free-market capitalism.
Politics and Prosperity 