CONTENTS
GOVERNMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
Guy Sorman reviews Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge’s Capitalism in America: A History. Sorman notes that
the golden days of American capitalism are over—or so the authors opine. That conclusion may seem surprising, as the U.S. economy appears to be flourishing. But the current GDP growth rate of roughly 3 percent, after deducting a 1 percent demographic increase, is rather modest, the authors maintain, compared with the historic performance of the postwar years, when the economy grew at an annual average of 5 percent. Moreover, unemployment appears low only because a significant portion of the population is no longer looking for work.
Greenspan and Wooldridge reject the conventional wisdom on mature economies growing more slowly. They blame relatively slow growth in the U.S. on the increase in entitlement spending and the expansion of the welfare state—a classic free-market argument.
They are right to reject the conventional wisdom. Slow growth is due to the expansion of government spending (including entitlements) and the regulatory burden. See “The Rahn Curve in Action” for details, including an equation that accurately explains the declining rate of growth since the end of World War II.
REFLECTIONS ON DEFENSE ECONOMICS
Arnold Kling opines about defense economics. Cost-effectiveness analysis was the big thing in the 1960s. Analysts applied non-empirical models of warfare and cost estimates that were often WAGs (wild-ass guesses) to the comparison of competing weapon systems. The results were about as accurate a global climate models, which is to say wildly inaccurate. (See “Modeling Is not Science“.) And the results were worthless unless they comported with the prejudices of the “whiz kids” who worked for Robert Strange McNamara. (See “The McNamara Legacy: A Personal Perspective“.)
ABORTION: HOW MUCH JAIL TIME?
Georgi Boorman says “Yes, It Would Be Just to Punish Women for Aborting Their Babies“. But, as she says,
mainstream pro-lifers vigorously resist this argument. At the same time they insist that “the unborn child is a human being, worthy of legal protection,” as Sarah St. Onge wrote in these pages recently, they loudly protest when so-called “fringe” pro-lifers state the obvious: of course women who willfully hire abortionists to kill their children should be prosecuted.
Anna Quindlen addressed the same issue more than eleven years ago, in Newsweek:
Buried among prairie dogs and amateur animation shorts on YouTube is a curious little mini-documentary shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The man behind the camera is asking demonstrators who want abortion criminalized what the penalty should be for a woman who has one nonetheless. You have rarely seen people look more gobsmacked. It’s as though the guy has asked them to solve quadratic equations. Here are a range of responses: “I’ve never really thought about it.” “I don’t have an answer for that.” “I don’t know.” “Just pray for them.”
You have to hand it to the questioner; he struggles manfully. “Usually when things are illegal there’s a penalty attached,” he explains patiently. But he can’t get a single person to be decisive about the crux of a matter they have been approaching with absolute certainty.
… If the Supreme Court decides abortion is not protected by a constitutional guarantee of privacy, the issue will revert to the states. If it goes to the states, some, perhaps many, will ban abortion. If abortion is made a crime, then surely the woman who has one is a criminal. But, boy, do the doctrinaire suddenly turn squirrelly at the prospect of throwing women in jail.
“They never connect the dots,” says Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa.
I addressed Quindlen, and queasy pro-lifers, eleven years ago:
The aim of Quindlen’s column is to scorn the idea of jail time as punishment for a woman who procures an illegal abortion. In fact, Quindlen’s “logic” reminds me of the classic definition of chutzpah: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” The chutzpah, in this case, belongs to Quindlen (and others of her ilk) who believe that a woman should not face punishment for an abortion because she has just “lost” a baby.
Balderdash! If a woman illegally aborts her child, why shouldn’t she be punished by a jail term (at least)? She would be punished by jail (or confinement in a psychiatric prison) if she were to kill her new-born infant, her toddler, her ten-year old, and so on. What’s the difference between an abortion and murder? None. (Read this, then follow the links in this post.)
Quindlen (who predictably opposes capital punishment) asks “How much jail time?” in a cynical effort to shore up the anti-life front. It ain’t gonna work, lady.
See also “Abortion Q & A“.
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND THE WELFARE STATE
Add this to what I say in “The High Cost of Untrammeled Immigration“:
In a new analysis of the latest numbers [by the Center for Immigration Studies], from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.
See also “Immigration and Crime” and “Immigration and Intelligence“.
Milton Friedman, thinking like an economist, favored open borders only if the welfare state were abolished. But there’s more to a country than GDP. (See “Genetic Kinship and Society“.) Which leads me to…
PROSPERITY ISN’T EVERYTHING
Patrick T. Brown writes about Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker:
Responding to what he cutely calls “economic piety”—the belief that GDP per capita defines a country’s well-being, and the role of society is to ensure the economic “pie” grows sufficiently to allow each individual to consume satisfactorily—Cass offers a competing hypothesis….
[A]s Cass argues, if well-being is measured by considerations in addition to economic ones, a GDP-based measurement of how our society is doing might not only be insufficient now, but also more costly over the long term. The definition of success in our public policy (and cultural) efforts should certainly include some economic measures, but not at the expense of the health of community and family life.
Consider this line, striking in the way it subverts the dominant paradigm: “If, historically, two-parent families could support themselves with only one parent working outside the home, then something is wrong with ‘growth’ that imposes a de facto need for two incomes.”…
People need to feel needed. The hollowness at the heart of American—Western?—society can’t be satiated with shinier toys and tastier brunches. An overemphasis on production could, of course, be as fatal as an overemphasis on consumption, and certainly the realm of the meritocrats gives enough cause to worry on this score. But as a matter of policy—as a means of not just sustaining our fellow citizen in times of want but of helping him feel needed and essential in his family and community life—Cass’s redefinition of “efficiency” to include not just its economic sense but some measure of social stability and human flourishing is welcome. Frankly, it’s past due as a tenet of mainstream conservatism.
Cass goes astray by offering governmental “solutions”; for example:
Cass suggests replacing the current Earned Income Tax Credit (along with some related safety net programs) with a direct wage subsidy, which would be paid to workers by the government to “top off” their current wage. In lieu of a minimum wage, the government would set a “target wage” of, say, $12 an hour. If an employee received $9 an hour from his employer, the government would step up to fill in that $3 an hour gap.
That’s no solution at all, inasmuch as the cost of a subsidy must be borne by someone. The someone, ultimately, is the low-wage worker whose wage is low because he is less productive than he would be. Why is he less productive? Because the high-income person who is taxed for the subsidy has that much less money to invest in business capital that raises productivity.
The real problem is that America — and the West, generally — has turned into a spiritual and cultural wasteland. See, for example, “A Century of Progress?“, “Prosperity Isn’t Everything“, and “James Burnham’s Misplaced Optimism“.
GOOGLE ET AL. AS STATE ACTORS
In “Preemptive (Cold) Civil War” (03/18/18) I recommended treating Google et al. as state actors to enforce the free-speech guarantee of the First Amendment against them:
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. (Article V.)
Amendment I to the Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech”.
Major entities in the telecommunications, news, entertainment, and education industries have exerted their power to suppress speech because of its content…. The collective actions of these entities — many of them government- licensed and government-funded — effectively constitute a governmental violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech (See Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) and Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).)
I recommended presidential action. But someone has moved the issue to the courts. Tucker Higgins has the story:
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could determine whether users can challenge social media companies on free speech grounds.
The case, Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, No. 17-702, centers on whether a private operator of a public access television network is considered a state actor, which can be sued for First Amendment violations.
The case could have broader implications for social media and other media outlets. In particular, a broad ruling from the high court could open the country’s largest technology companies up to First Amendment lawsuits.
That could shape the ability of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet’s Google to control the content on their platforms as lawmakers clamor for more regulation and activists on the left and right spar over issues related to censorship and harassment.
The Supreme Court accepted the case on [October 12]….
the court of Chief Justice John Roberts has shown a distinct preference for speech cases that concern conservative ideology, according to an empirical analysis conducted by researchers affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Michigan.
The analysis found that the justices on the court appointed by Republican presidents sided with conservative speech nearly 70 percent of the time.
“More than any other modern Court, the Roberts Court has trained its sights on speech promoting conservative values,” the authors found.
Here’s hoping.
THE TRANSGENDER TRAP
Babette Francis and John Ballantine tell it like it is:
Dr. Paul McHugh, the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, explains that “‘sex change’ is biologically impossible.” People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa.
In reality, gender dysphoria is more often than not a passing phase in the lives of certain children. The American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology has revealed that, before the widespread promotion of transgender affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were uncomfortable or distressed with their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. Dr. McHugh says: “At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s.”…
However, in today’s climate of political correctness, it is more than a health professional’s career is worth to offer a gender-confused patient an alternative to pursuing sex-reassignment. In some states, as Dr. McHugh has noted, “a doctor who would look into the psychological history of a transgendered boy or girl in search of a resolvable conflict could lose his or her license to practice medicine.”
In the space of a few years, these sorts of severe legal prohibitions—usually known as “anti-reparative” and “anti-conversion” laws—have spread to many more jurisdictions, not only across the United States, but also in Canada, Britain, and Australia. Transgender ideology, it appears, brooks no opposition from any quarter….
… Brown University succumbed to political pressure when it cancelled authorization of a news story of a recent study by one of its assistant professors of public health, Lisa Littman, on “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Science Daily reported:
Among the noteworthy patterns Littman found in the survey data: twenty-one percent of parents reported their child had one or more friends who become transgender-identified at around the same time; twenty percent reported an increase in their child’s social media use around the same time as experiencing gender dysphoria symptoms; and forty-five percent reported both.
A former dean of Harvard Medical School, Professor Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, defended Dr. Littman’s freedom to publish her research and criticized Brown University for censoring it. He said:
Increasingly, research on politically charged topics is subject to indiscriminate attack on social media, which in turn can pressure school administrators to subvert established norms regarding the protection of free academic inquiry. What’s needed is a campaign to mobilize the academic community to protect our ability to conduct and communicate such research, whether or not the methods and conclusions provoke controversy or even outrage.
The examples described above of the ongoing intimidation—sometimes, actual sackings—of doctors and academics who question transgender dogma represent only a small part of a very sinister assault on the independence of the medical profession from political interference. Dr. Whitehall recently reflected: “In fifty years of medicine, I have not witnessed such reluctance to express an opinion among my colleagues.”
For more about this outrage see “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences“.
Politics and Prosperity 