I wrote “Enough of Amateur Critics” in response to all the finger-pointing and blame-shifting that ensued the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. The principles therein apply to matters other than natural disasters. There’s war, for instance. In that regard, Jay Tea of WizBang! advances my theme in “Everyone makes missteaks.”
Category: Politics – Politicians – Government in Action
American History Since 1900
I have completed Part One of “American History Since 1900.” I am writing the series for my grandchildren, as an alternative to the standard history texts, which extol the virtues of big government and ooze political correctness.
Part One, which is about the Presidents of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries, is organized chronologically. It discusses the major events during each President’s time in office. Part Two will give more details about major world events that have affected the United States, and will then focus on major political, social and economic trends in the United States. Part Three will discuss the major technological advances that enable Americans of today to live much better than Americans of 1900. Part Four will explain how the growth of government power since 1900 has made Americans much worse off than they should be.
A major theme of this history is the role of government in the lives of Americans. The increasing role of government has been the major development in American history since 1900. Many Americans today take for granted a degree of government involvement in their lives that would have shocked Americans of 1900. There are other important themes in this history, but the growth of government power overshadows everything else. Why is that? It is because the growth of government power means that Americans have less freedom than they used to have, which is far less freedom than envisioned by the founding generation that fought for America’s independence and wrote its Constitution.
The Heart of the Matter
From Mark Steyn’s appreciation of the late Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005):
Forty years after McCarthy’s swift brutal destruction of the most powerful Democrat in the second half of the 20th century [LBJ], it remains unclear whether his party will ever again support a political figure committed to waging serious war, any war: Carter confined himself to a disastrous helicopter rescue mission in Iran; Clinton bombed more countries in a little over six months than the supposed warmonger Bush has hit in six years, but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory or Belgrade embassy, it was always desultory and uncommitted. Even though the first Gulf War was everything they now claim to support – UN-sanctioned, massive French contribution, etc – John Kerry and most of his colleagues voted against it. Joe Lieberman is the lonesomest gal in town as an unashamedly pro-war Democrat, and even Hillary Clinton’s finding there are parts of the Democratic body politic which are immune to the restorative marvels of triangulation. Gene McCarthy’s brief moment in the spotlight redefined the party’s relationship with the projection of military force. That’s quite an accomplishment. Whether it was in the long-term strategic interests of either the party or American liberalism is another question. Yet those few months in the snows of New Hampshire linger over the Democratic landscape like an eternal winter.
As I once put it, the
Democrat Party began its veer to the hard left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war candidacy. McCarthy didn’t win the party’s nomination that year, but his strong showing made reflexive anti-war rhetoric a respectable staple of Democrat discourse.
The Democrats proceeded in 1972 to nominate George McGovern, who seems moderate only by contrast with Ramsey Clark and Michael Moore. Since McGovern’s ascendancy, the left-wing nuts generally have dominated the party — in voice if not in numbers. Nominees since McGovern: Carter (a latter-day Tokyo Rose), Mondale (Carter’s one-term accomplice), Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — all well to the left of the mainstream (to borrow some Democrat rhetoric). Bill Clinton (of the failed plan to socialize health care) became a moderate only because he faced Republican majorities in Congress. Clinton lately [in his comments about the war in Iraq] has been showing his true colors.
(Thanks to Ed Driscoll for the pointer to Steyn’s piece.)
An Appropriate Award
Murtha to Receive JFK Profile in Courage Award
Lede:
(CNSNews.com) – Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who was the subject of a recent Cybercast News Service investigation of his military and political record, will receive the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his stance against the Iraq war.
A pertinent analysis of JFK’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, for which the award is named:
The book was published on January 1, 1956, to lavish praise. It became a best seller and in 1957 was awarded the Pulitzer prize for biography. It established Kennedy, till then considered promising but lacking in gravitas, as one of the Democratic party’s leading lights, setting the stage for his presidential nomination in 1960.
But doubts about the book’s authorship surfaced early. In December 1957 syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, interviewed on TV by Mike Wallace, said, “Jack Kennedy is . . . the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him.” Outraged, Kennedy hired lawyer Clark Clifford, who collected the senator’s handwritten notes and rounded up statements from people who said they’d seen him working on the book, then persuaded Wallace’s bosses at ABC to read a retraction on the air.
Kennedy made no secret of Sorensen’s involvement in Profiles, crediting him in the preface as “my research associate,” and likewise acknowledged the contributions of Davids and others. But he insisted that he was the book’s author and bristled even at teasing suggestions to the contrary. Sorensen and other Kennedy loyalists backed him up then and have done so since.
The most thorough analysis of who did what has come from historian Herbert Parmet in Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (1980). Parmet interviewed the participants and reviewed a crateful of papers in the Kennedy Library. He found that Kennedy contributed some notes, mostly on John Quincy Adams, but little that made it into the finished product. “There is no evidence of a Kennedy draft for the overwhelming bulk of the book,” Parmet writes. While “the choices, message, and tone of the volume are unmistakably Kennedy’s,” the actual work was “left to committee labor.” The “literary craftsmanship [was] clearly Sorensen’s, and he gave the book both the drama and flow that made for readability.” Parmet, like everyone else, shrinks from saying Sorensen was the book’s ghostwriter, but clearly he was.
Murtha’s “courage” with respect to Iraq is as bogus as JFK’s Pulitzer. Murtha’s “heroism” in Vietnam — his bona fides for attacking the war in Iraq — may also be bogus.
Occupational Licensing
From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:
Do we need occupational licensing?
Alan Krueger writes:
In a new book, “Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?” (Upjohn Institute, 2006), Morris M. Kleiner, an economist at the University of Minnesota, questions whether occupational licensing has gone too far. He provides much evidence that the balance of occupational licensing has shifted away from protecting consumers and toward limiting the supply of workers in various professions. A result is that services provided by licensed workers are more expensive than necessary and that quality is not noticeably affected.
Read more here. . . . Here is a pdf of part of the book. Here is a home page for the book.
Darn straight. Read these:
Fear of the Free Market — Part I
Fear of the Free Market — Part II
Fear of the Free Market — Part III
K-K-Katrina
UPDATED TWICE
It’s the hurricane that won’t go away. Now we are being told, in so many words, that — with a hurricane bearing down on a New Orleans that was “protected” by levees that were built for failure (many years earlier) because of political graft and bureaucratic ineptness, and with feckless State and local government officials cluttering up the scene* — President Bush was either supposed to divert the hurricane (perhaps through prayer) or leap from his chair, fly to NO and put his finger in the dike, so to speak. (Is it still all right to say “dike”?)
For a sensible view of the hurricane that won’t quit, read this post by Capital Freedom. UPDATE: For more, read this post at Wizbang. SECOND UPDATE: See also the Popular Mechanics article “Now What? The Lessons of Katrina.”
Then go here:
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)
Enough of Amateur Critics (09/13/05)
__________
* E.g., New Video Shows Blanco Saying Levees Safe (AP, via Yahoo! News)
Starving the Beast, Updated
Out-of-control spending is a hot topic of conversation in the blogosphere, especially among those who are disappointed in President Bush’s failure to curb the federal government’s appetite. Bill Niskanen and Peter Van Doren, former colleagues of mine at Cato Institute, published a paper a few years ago (which no longer seems to be available on the web), in which they said this:
For nearly three decades, many conservatives and libertarians have argued that reducing federal tax rates, in addition to increasing long-term economic growth, would reduce the growth of federal spending by “starving the beast.” This position has recently been endorsed, for example, by Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker in separate Wall Street Journal columns in 2003.
It seems to me that the notion of starving the beast is really an outgrowth of an older, simpler notion that could have been called “strangle the beast.” The notion was (and still is, in some quarters) that the intrusive civilian agencies of the federal government, which have grown rampantly since the 1930s, ought to be slashed, if not abolished. There’s no need for fancy tricks like cutting taxes first, just grab the beast by the budget and choke it. There’s more than money at stake, of course — there’s liberty and economic growth. (I have shown here the extent to which the beast of government has strangled economic growth.)
Anyway, Niskanen and Van Doren argue that the “starve the beast” strategy has failed, which is true, but I have serious reservations about their analysis. Their figure of merit is spending as a share of GDP. But it’s the absolute, real size of the beast’s budget that matters. Bigger is bigger — and bigger agencies can cause more mischief than smaller ones. So, my figure of merit is real growth in nondefense spending.
What about defense spending, which Niskanen and Van Doren lump with nondefense spending in their analysis? Real nondefense spending has risen almost without interruption since 1932, with the only significant exception coming in 1940-5, when World War II cured the Depression and drastically changed our spending priorities. Real defense spending, on the other hand, has risen and fallen several times since 1932, in response to exogenous factors, namely, the need to fight hot wars and win a cold one. Niskanen and Van Doren glibly dismissed the essentially exogenous nature of defense spending by saying
that the prospect for a major war has been substantially higher under a unified government. American participation in every war in which the ground combat lasted more than a few days — from the war of 1812 to the current war in Iraq — was initiated by a unified government. One general reason is that each party in a divided government has the opportunity to block the most divisive measures proposed by the other party.
First, defense outlays increased markedly through most of Reagan’s presidency, even though a major war was never imminent. The buildup served a strategy that led to the eventual downfall of the USSR. Reagan, by the way, lived with divided government throughout his presidency. Second, wars are usually (not always, but usually) broadly popular when they begin. Can you imagine a Republican Congress trying to block a declaration of war after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor? Can you imagine a Democrat Congress trying to block Bush II’s foray into Afghanistan after 9/11? For that matter, can you imagine a Democrat-controlled Congress blocking Bush I’s Gulf War Resolution? Well, Congress was then in the hands of Democrats and Congress nevertheless authorized the Gulf War. Niskanen and Van Doren seem to dismiss this counter-example because the ground war lasted only 100 hours. But we fielded a massive force for the Gulf War (it was no Grenada), and we certainly didn’t expect the ground war to end so quickly.
As I was saying, domestic spending is the beast to be strangled. (I’m putting aside here the “sacred beasts” that are financed by transfer payments: Social Security, Medicare, etc.) How has the domestic beast fared over past 70-odd years? Quite well, thank you. It fared best from 1933 through 1969, but it hasn’t done badly since 1969.
The beast — a creature of the New Deal — grew four-fold from 1932 through 1940. Preparations for war, and war itself, brought an end to the Great Depression and stifled nondefense spending: It actually dropped by more than 50 percent (in real terms) from 1940 through 1945.
After World War II, Truman and the Democrats in control of Congress were still under the spell of their Depression-inspired belief in the efficacy of big government and counter-cyclical fiscal policy. The post-war recession helped their cause, because most Americans feared a return of the Great Depression, which was still a vivid memory. Real nondefense spending increased by 180 percent during the Truman years.
The excesses of the Truman years caused a backlash against “big government” that the popular Eisenhower was able to exploit, to a degree, in spite of divided government. Real domestic spending went up by only 9 percent during Ike’s presidency.
The last burst of the New Deal came in the emotional aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent landslide victory in the election of 1964. Real nondefense spending in the Kennedy-Johnson years rose by 56 percent. The decades-long war over domestic spending really ended with the enactment of LBJ’s Great Society. The big spenders won that war — big time. Real nondenfense spending grew at an annual rate of 5.9 percent from 1932 through 1969.
Real nondefense spending has continued to grow since 1969, but at the lower rate of 2.5 percent per annum. What has changed is that nondefense spending has grown more steadily than it did from 1932 to 1969. Each administration since 1969 (aided and abetted by Congress, of course) has increased nondefense spending by following an implicit formula. That formula has two parts. First, there is the steady increase that is required to feed the beast that came to maturity with the Great Society. Second, there is countercyclical spending which is triggered by recessions and unemployment. As a result, there is a very strong — almost perfect — relationship between real nondefense spending and the unemployment rate for the years 1969 through 2005. Using a linear regression with six pairs of observations, one pair for each administration, I find that the percentage change in real nondefense spending is a linear function of the change in the unemployment rate. Specifically:
S = 1.0277 + 0.11346U
where S = real nondefense spending at end of a presidency/real nondefense spending at beginning of a presidency
U = unemployment rate at end of a presidency/unemployment rate at beginning of a presidency.
The adjusted R-squared for the regression is .979. The t-stats are 112.17 for the constant term and 15.26 for U.
What about divided government, of which Niskanen and Van Doren are so fond? Divided government certainly hampered the ability of Republican administrations (Nixon-Ford, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II) to strangle the beast, had they wanted to. But it’s not clear that they wanted to very badly. Nixon was, above all, a pragmatist. Moreover, he was preoccupied by foreign affairs (including the extrication of the U.S. from Vietnam), and then by Watergate. Ford was only a caretaker president, and too “nice” into the bargain. Reagan talked a good game, but he had to swallow increases in nondefense spending as the price of his defense buildup. Bush I simply lacked the will and the power to strangle the beast. Bush II may have had the power (at one time), but he spent it on support for his foreign policy and in an effort to buy votes for the GOP.
Bureaucratic politics (rather than party politics) is the key to the steady growth of nondefense spending. It’s hard to strangle a domestic agency once it has been established. Most domestic agencies have vocal and influential constituencies, in Congress and amongst the populace. Then there are the presidential appointees who run the bureaucracies. Even Republican appointees usually come to feel “ownership” of the bureaucracies they’re tapped to lead. Real nondefense spending therefore has risen steadily from the Great Society baseline, fluctuating slightly in countercyclical response to recessions and unemployment.
Having said all that, how do the presidents from Nixon through Bush II stack up? In spite of all the blather about Bush II’s big-spending ways, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference among the post-Great Society administrations — Democrat or Republican. Using the above regression equation, I estimated the expected growth of real nondefense spending for each administration. I then used that estimate to compute an actual-to-estimated ratio (how much nondefense spending actually rose divided by how much it “should” have risen, according to the equation).* The results:
Nixon-Ford — 1.00
Carter — 1.00
Reagan — 1.00
Bush I — 1.00
Clinton — 1.01
Bush II — 0.99
The lesson is clear: Tax cuts won’t starve the beast — Friedman, Becker, and other eminent economists to the contrary. But tax increases, on the other hand, would only stimulate the beast’s appetite. The best way to cut spending is . . . to cut spending.
In any event, the truly vicious beast isn’t federal nondefense spending, it’s state and local spending. Spending by state and local governments in the United States is five times as large as the federal government’s nondefense spending. Real spending by state and local governments increased by a multiple of 11 from 1945 to 2005. The population of the United States merely doubled in that same period. Thus the average American’s real tax bill for state and local government is more than five times larger today than it was in 1945.
It’s evident that not enough of the loot has been spent on courts and police. No, our modern, “relevant” state and local governments have seen fit to waste our money on such things as free bike trails for yuppies, free concerts that mainly attract people who can afford to pay for their own entertainment, all kinds of health services, housing subsidies, support for the “arts,” public access channels on cable TV, grandiose edifices in which our state and local governments hatch and oversee their grandiose schemes, and much, much, more.
Then there are those public schools . . .
The good news about state and local spending is that its real rate of growth has dropped in the past few years. The bad news is that the slowdown coincided with a recession and period of slow economic recovery. The good news is that state and local spending is a beast with thousands of necks, and each of them can be throttled at the state and local level, given the will to do so.
__________
* By the standards of 1969-2005, here’s how earlier administrations stack up:
Hoover — 0.68
Roosevelt — 3.29 (through 1940)
Truman — 2.30
Eisenhower — 0.85
Kennedy-Johnson — 1.43
There used to be a real difference between Republicans and Democrats. Now there isn’t. That doesn’t make Democrats any better, it just confirms my version of the old adage: The pursuit of power corrupts.
Rating the Presidents, Again
Almost two years ago I commented on ratings of the presidents that were published at OpinionJournal. My own ratings were implicit in my comments, but I didn’t finish the job and produce a top-to-bottom list of presidents. David N. Mayer (MayerBlog) has done so, and done it with brilliance — here. The post is quite long, as Mayer’s posts usually are, and every bit as rewarding. You should read the whole thing, but I cannot resist the urge to give you a preview.
Mayer notes that his “rating system differs from others in deemphasizing “leadership” per se and instead emphasizing fidelity to the Constitution.” By that standard his “Great” presidents are Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. His “Failures” comprise, in descending order, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (tie), Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and (last and least) Bill Clinton. I find no fault with Mayer’s rating scheme or his results.
Mayer’s designation of Lincoln as a “Great” will rankle many libertarians, especially the anarcho-capitalists who hang around the Ludwig von Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com. (My latest disparagement of their anarcho-romanticism is here. See also this piece about slavery.) Mayer says of Lincoln:
[H]e does not warrant the severe criticism that certain libertarian scholars have given him, calling him “tyrant” or “dictator” and erroneously claiming that the modern regulatory/welfare state began with the Civil War. Rather, I maintain, Lincoln did indeed save not only the Union but also the Constitution itself, from the most formidable internal threat it has ever (yet) faced.
In the end, what matters most is whether a president preserves liberty, and even advances it. How he does it is less important than whether or not he does it.
Finally, happy 274th birthday to George Washington.
Source: Wikipedia.
Government’s Role in Social Decline
Americans have come to expect much from government. There is the notion that government is supposed to provide a “social safety net” for ourselves, our children, our elderly parents. Then there is the idea that government is supposed to ban things that are bad for us and force us to do things that are good for us (e.g., smoking bans and mandatory seatbelt laws). Related to that is the use of government to make the world a sightlier and more pleasant place by zoning private property, providing public parks, banning billboards, and suchlike. Finally (for now), there is the idea that government should be “in charge” of certain endeavors, such as education, broadcasting, stock trading, election campaigns, and private voluntary conduct that might affect the “rights” of certain “protected” groups of persons.
The realization of all those expectations (and more) has had these effects:
- Americans have learned dependence, instead of self-reliance.
- Civil society has all but vanished, and with it our ability to solve problems and resolve conflicts cooperatively. Instead, we are forced by government to accept one-size-fits-all solutions.
As someone once said, the symbol of America is supposed to be the eagle, not the clam.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Lincoln
In observance of the 197th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, I am reproducing two earlier posts.
The Young Mr. Lincoln
Thanks to American Digest, I found an article by Claude N. Frechette, M.D., “A New Lincoln Image: A Forensic Study,” in which Dr. Frechette documents his authentication of an early daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln.
Believe it or not — and I believe it after having read Dr. Frechette’s article — the following image is that of Abraham Lincoln in the early 1840s, when he was in his early 30s:
The next image, about which there was no controversy, is that of Lincoln in 1848 at the age of 39:
Finally, we see Lincoln in 1862 at the age of 53:
Lincoln, the Poet President
Abraham Lincoln ended his First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) with these words:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (November 19, 1863) is no less majestic:
…we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln’s poetry soared again in his Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), weeks before Lee surrendered to Grant (April 9, 1865):
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Let us indeed strive on to finish the work we are in, and — as is our custom — make peace with former enemies who seek peace, while remaining vigilant against those who wish us harm.
"Addicted to Oil"
Are Americans “addicted to oil” as President Bush — borrowing a line from environmental extremists — said in his State of the Union message last night? We are “addicted” to many things, for example breathing, eating, and sleeping — which are unavoidable aspects of living. So, let’s boil it down to an “addiction” to living.
President Bush presumably would not deny us the right to live, so he must want to deny us the right to live as well as we can. Of course, living as well as we can should not encompass cheating, lying, fraud, deception, theft, or murder. (I will resist the urge to pronounce here on politicians and the parasites upon whose votes they depend.) Assuming for the moment that Americans generally do not do such things in order to live, it seems that President Bush is telling us that there must be a limit on how well we should live. Moreover, that limit would seem to apply indiscriminately. The relatively poor person who relies on oil (or its derivative forms of energy) for transportation to work, enough light to read by, and enough fuel to cook with is just as “addicted” as the very rich person who relies on oil for jetting about the globe, projecting motion pictures on a home theater screen the size of Rhode Island, and eating food prepared and served by a small army of servants. (Oops, they’re not called “servants” anymore, are they?)
Thus government, in its wisdom, shall punish poor and rich alike for their “addiction” to living — or at least to living as well as they are able. How will it do that? By taxing us all for research into and development of alternative sources of energy. Isn’t it strange that government should have to do that when the “obscene profits” garnered by oil companies will surely call forth from the private sector the very same kinds of research and development?
Not only would private research and development be funded voluntarily, but it would more assuredly pay off. Private actors who have put their own money at risk do not make perfect decisions, but they make better decisions than politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats who get to play with taxpayers’ money. It’s not “real” money to politicians, lobbyists, and bureaucrats — but it’s real money to the rest of us.
And most of the rest of us are not very rich. We’re addicted to living, and trying to live as well as we can. President Bush’s program would punish our addiction and make it harder for us to live as well as we can.
More "McCarthyism"
No, it’s not that we’re having another spate of “McCarthyism” — it’s simply time to revisit the myth of “McCarthyism.” More than a year ago I wrote this:
. . . McCarthy was right, but his methods backfired and caused otherwise sensible people to conclude that the “witch hunt” was nothing more than that. From Wikipedia, here:
In 1995, when the VENONA transcripts were declassified, it was learned that regardless of the specific number, McCarthy consistently underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage. VENONA specifically references at least 349 people in the United States–including citizens, immigrants, and permanent residents–who cooperated in various ways with Soviet intelligence agencies.
It is generally believed that McCarthy had no access to VENONA intelligence, deriving his information from other sources. VENONA does confirm that some individuals investigated by McCarthy were indeed Soviet agents. For example, Mary Jane Keeney was identified by McCarthy simply as “a communist”; in fact she and her husband were both Soviet agents. Another individual named by McCarthy was Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to President Roosevelt. He was confirmed by VENONA to be a Soviet Agent.
And here:
The VENONA documents, and the extent of their significance, were not made public until 1995. They show that the US and others were targeted in major espionage campaigns by the Soviet Union as early as 1942.
The decrypts include 349 individuals who were maintaining a covert relationship with the Soviet Union. It can be safely assumed that more than 349 agents were active, as that number is from a small sample of the total intercepted message traffic. Among those identified are Alger Hiss, believed to have been the agent “ALES”; Harry Dexter White, the second-highest official in the Treasury Department; Lauchlin Currie, a personal aide to Franklin Roosevelt; and Maurice Halperin, a section head in the Office of Strategic Services. Almost every military and diplomatic agency of any importance was compromised to some extent, including, of course, the Manhattan Project. Even today, the identities of fewer than half of the 349 agents are known with any certainty. Agents who were never identified include “Mole”, a senior Washington official who passed information on American diplomatic policy, and “Quantum”, a scientist on the Manhattan Project.
Some known spies, including Theodore Hall, were neither prosecuted nor publicly implicated, because the VENONA evidence against them could not be made public. VENONA evidence has also clarified the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, making it clear that Julius was guilty of espionage while Ethel was guilty of cooperating, while also showing that their contributions to Soviet nuclear espionage were less important than was publicly alleged at the time. In fact, Ethel had been only an accomplice, and Julius’ information was probably not as valuable as that provided by sources like “Quantum” and “Pers” (both still unidentified.)
This is an extremely different picture from the one that which had developed over most of 50 years in the absence of solid evidence. While critics debate the identity of individual agents, the overall picture of infiltration is more difficult to refute. The release of the VENONA information has forced reevaluation of the Red Scare in the US….
Now comes David Berstein of The Volokh Conspiracy, who is reviewing Martin Redish’s book, The Logic of Persecution: Free Expression and the McCarthy Era. Among the many things Bernstein has learned while doing research for his review are these:
. . . .
(2) Hollywood scriptwriters who were members of the Communist Party (CPUSA) were expected to use their positions to promote Communist doctrine and the Party’s agenda, or, if that was not possible, at least to work to exclude anti-Soviet sentiment. (And I already knew, but you might not have, that each of the Hollywood Ten was a member of the CPUSA.)
(3) The first federal prosecution under the Smith Act (later used to prosecute CPUSA leaders) was the prosecution of eighteen leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party 1941. The CPUSA not only applauded this action; Party leaders assisted in the prosecution.
(4) The Smith Act prosecutions of CPUSA leaders were largely a result of the fact that top government officials had recently learned from decoded “Venona cables” between the Soviet Union and its agents and affiliates abroad that the Soviet Union used American Communists to engage in wide scale espionage against the United States. The CPUSA leaders were not prosecuted for espionage and related charges (conspiracy) because that would have involved revealing that the U.S. had deciphered the Soviets’ code, and also much of the additional evidence the government had was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Instead, the government resurrected the Smith Act, and proceeded with prosecutions of highly dubious constitutionality (though upheld by the Supreme Court, which implicitly recognized that these prosecutions were “special”).
(5) Not only did the CPUSA recruit spies for the Soviet Union through its “secret apparatus,” it was prepared to engage in violence on behalf of the Soviet Union.
(6) The Smith Act prosecutions and other government and private anti-Communist activity destroyed the usefulness of the CPUSA to the Soviet Union for espionage.
(7) Many of the questionable tactics used by the government against domestic Communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, including Smith Act prosecutions, were previously used by the government against domestic Nazis and fascists in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Roosevelt Administration.
(8) Alger Hiss was not prosecuted for spying because the statute of limitations had expired.
(9) During the “Red Decade” of the 1930s, Hollywood Communists ran their own blacklist againist their political enemies. Because the studio bosses didn’t support this blacklist, it wasn’t as effective as the 1950s blacklist of Communists, but it seriously harmed careers nevertheless. Also, many in Hollyood boycotted those who testified before HUAC, allegedly as revenge for “naming names”. But is there any serious doubt that the boycotters’ attitudes would be very different if their targets had discussed with Congress Nazi, as opposed to Communist, infiltration of Hollywood?
(10) Then there’s this quote from historian Ellen Schrecker, who is generally sympathetic to the Communists, regarding the blacklist, which conflicts with the theme of a couple of major Hollywood movies: “Most of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists or signed the wrong petitions. …Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentified.” On the other hand, anti-Communist historian Klehr states that “many innocent people were harassed.” But Redish concludes that “for the most part, it seems that the blacklists were accurate.”
(11) Much of what is now labeled “McCarthyism” consisted of spontaneous action by private individuals and groups to boycott Stalinists. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a sound source that persuasively explains to what extent these private actors interacted with the government. For example, I still don’t have a firm sense to what extent the Hollywood blacklist was the result of a fear of bad publicitly and threats to boycott the industry from various anti-Communist groups, and to what extent it was motivated by fear of potential government regulation.
The use of “questionable tactics” should not diminish the fact that the enemy was in our midst. The “scare” wasn’t a scare — it was about the real thing.
Risk and Regulation
Robert Higgs makes this acute observation:
Risk is an inescapable condition. However much people may prefer to live in a world of complete certainty, they simply cannot do so. Just banishing risk, whether by regulation or otherwise, is not a feasible option.
Higgs goes on to argue against the irrationality of drug-safety regulation; for example:
Whether the condition to be treated is life-threatening or simply unpleasant, the [Food and Drug Administration] requires the same rigid, elaborate, and time-consuming testing. Once again, the regulators frustrate the desires of consumers by insisting that one size (testing procedure) fits all (drugs and patients), regardless of the urgency with which consumers desire access to certain drugs. In some cases this regulatory intransigence creates the absurd situation in which the FDA denies dying patients access to a new drug because the manufacturer has not yet established beyond a reasonable doubt that the drug will not harm the users.
Rationality will get you nowhere in the face of massive ignorance. The ability of government bureaucracies to write regulations leads most Americans to believe that those regulations will “solve problems.” When a “problem” is not solved because actually solving it would be prohibitively expensive (as in reducing traffic fatalities to zero), Americans assume that “they” (corporations, for example) have simply found a “loophole” or “bought” someone. That kind of thinking leads, inexorably, to more regulation. It is beyond the ken of most Americans that regulation creates problems rather than solving them. Those unseen problems are the loss of freedom and fortune.
Other related posts:
Fear of the Free Market — Part I
Fear of the Free Market — Part II
Fear of the Free Market — Part III
Clinton Derangement Syndrome
A recent exchange with a reader reminds me of a post from July of last year, in which I said that the “virulence of the anti-Bush crowd (horde, really) reminds me of the virulence of the anti-Clintonistas.” I must say that the anti-Clintonistas had — and have — good cause; for example:
1. Clinton won in 1992 because Ross Perot (or pee-rot, as Texans say it) siphoned votes from G.H.W. Bush. (That’s roughly parallel to what happened in 2000, except that the Nader vote was minuscule compared with the Perot vote.) But that’s only the beginning.
2. Clinton made political hay from the tragedy in Oklahoma City by equating Timothy McVeigh’s violent, anti-government act (a protest of the tragedy in Waco) with conservatives’ legitimate call for less intrusive government.
3. Clinton piled on later in the same year by blaming the (partial) government shutdown on Republicans, though it was Clinton who vetoed the spending bill that caused the shutdown.
4. Clinton lied under oath in a case that was brought under a law that he signed. He escaped removal from office for doing so only because Democrat senators refused to acknowledge the facts of the case.
5. Clinton, as ex-president, lately has been critical of a war that he threatened to wage when he was president. Typical two-faced Bill.
That’s enough for now. Clinton derangement syndrome is beginning to obscure my true, forgiving nature.
A 32-Year Error
An otherwise spot-on post about 12/12 Democrats* opens with this chronological error:
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the birth of the wing of the Democratic Party which now controls the party apparatus. And while the leaders of that wing do not speak all Democrats, they have become the face (and voice) of the Democratic Party in President George W. Bush’s second term.
The Democrat Party began its veer to the hard left in 1968, with Eugene McCarthy’s anti-war candidacy. McCarthy didn’t win the party’s nomination that year, but his strong showing made reflexive anti-war rhetoric a respectable staple of Democrat discourse.
The Democrats proceeded in 1972 to nominate George McGovern, who seems moderate only by contrast with Ramsey Clark and Michael Moore. Since McGovern’s ascendancy, the left-wing nuts generally have dominated the party — in voice if not in numbers. Nominees since McGovern: Carter (a latter-day Tokyo Rose), Mondale (Carter’s one-term accomplice), Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, and Kerry — all well to the left of the mainstream (to borrow some Democrat rhetoric). Bill Clinton (of the failed plan to socialize health care) became a moderate only because he faced Republican majorities in Congress. Clinton lately has been showing his true colors.
__________
* The U.S. Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore on December 12, 2000, thus setting off five years of Bush-hatred on the left.
Mr. Clinton’s Magic Economic Machine
UPDATED BELOW
AP reports on a speech made by the erstwhile president to an audience in Montreal:
With a “serious disciplined effort” to develop energy-saving technology, he said, “we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets in a way that would strengthen and not weaken our economies.”
A free “serious disciplined effort” to develop energy-saving technology? Followed by the free replacement of existing technology?
Well, perhaps the effort could be powered by Clinton’s hot air, which is the only sign of warming — global or otherwise — in Montreal these days.
UPDATE: Follow the money. Always a good bet when it comes to the Clintons. Not that there’s anything wrong with money, but the things some people are willing to do for it . . .
(Hat tip to EconoPundit)
It’s All Truman’s Fault
Harry Truman showed the world that America had lost its will to win. And so, we have gone from Korea, to Vietnam, to Lebanon, to Gulf War I, to Somalia, and — now, it seems — to Iraq. I must quote myself:
Vietnam was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But once we had committed our forces there, we should have fought to win, regardless of the amount of force required for victory. Why? Because our ignominious withdrawal from Vietnam changed the national psyche — especially coming as it did within a generation of the stalemate in Korea. As a result of Vietnam, we went from believing that we could win any war we set our minds to win to believing that there wasn’t a war worth fighting.
Our (incomplete) victory in the Gulf War of 1991 came so quickly and at so little cost that it didn’t really reinvigorate America’s military self-confidence. Our 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo succeeded only in showing our willingness to win a quick victory (if it was that) in a situation that posed little or no threat to American forces.
On the other hand, the new, defeatist American psyche — which most of the mainstream press has been striving for 30 years to perpetuate — manifested itself in our abrupt withdrawals from Lebanon (1983) and Somalia (1993) after the public saw “too many” body bags. Then there was our legalistic response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and our tepid military response to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The sum total of American actions in 1983, 1993, and 1998 — coupled with the obvious ascendancy of American defeatism — surely led Osama bin Laden to believe that he could accomplish his aims through a few spectacular terrorist attacks within the U.S., and the threat of more such attacks.
Thus, although we may be having a hard time in Iraq — and the hard time may continue for a while — we cannot back down. We must redouble our efforts to quell the insurgency and to build a stable Iraq. To do otherwise would be to admit that the American psyche remains defeatist. It would invite our enemies and potential enemies to take bold actions — if not directly against us, then against our interests around the world. We would find it harder and harder to fight back, diplomatically and militarily, against increasingly emboldened enemies and rivals — even if we had the will to fight back. Vital resources would become exorbitantly expensive to us, if we did not lose access to them altogether. America’s economic and military might would descend together, in a death spiral, and with them — very likely — the remnants of domestic civility.
And that is how bin Laden will destroy America, if he can. And that is why we must persevere in Iraq.
Ages of Presidents
UPDATED (03/25/08)
The subtitle of this post might be: Things you never needed to know about the presidents of the United States. To enlarge a graph, right-click on it and select “open in a new tab.”
The following graph highlights gaps between presidential birth years.
The longest gap is the most recent. Carter and G.H.W. Bush were born in 1924; Clinton and G.W. Bush were born in 1946. That’s a gap of 22 years — an entire generation (mine) deprived of a presidency. No fair! What’s worse, my generation is unlikely ever to have a president because by 2008 the youngest member will be 63 — not an impossible age for election to the presidency, but an unlikely age. Perhaps our last (best?) hope is Rudolph Giuliani, who was born in 1944. UPDATE (11/05/05): I suppressed the name of John McCain (born 1936) because I associate him first, last, and always with McCain-Feingold, that unconstitutional piece of incumbent-protecting legislation. McCain, who will be 72 in 2008 may well run for president again, but perhaps by then his age will be held against him. One can only hope. UPDATE (03/25/08): Well, McCain may be the next president. Whether he faces Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in November matters not to me; he will be the lesser of two evils, in either event.
The next graph highlights trends (such as they are) in the age at which presidents have died (or to which they have survived if still living), the age at which they were elected or succeeded to the presidency, and the number of years by which they survived (or have thus far survived) election or succession. (I have omitted assassinated presidents from the data for age of death and number of years surviving, thus the gaps in the first and third series.)
It seems to me that the early presidents were generally “healthy and wise” (and wealthy, by the standards of their time). That is, they were of superior genetic stock, relative to the average person. Their successors have tended to be of less-superior stock, and it shows in the downward trends after 1836.
The general rise in life expectancies since 1900 masks the relative inferiority of twentieth century presidents. The rising age of accession to the presidency after 1932 and the rise in years of survivorship after 1924 (both with wide variations around the trend) should not be taken to indicate that presidents of the twentieth century are on a par, genetically, with the early presidents. They are not.
A Challenge to My Senators
I’m about to send the following message to Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn of Texas:
The Honorable Kay Bailey Hutchison/John Cornyn
United States Senate
Congress of the United States
Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator Hutchison/Cornyn:
I’m writing to you about Hurricane Rita, which may soon strike a devastating blow to Texas. As you know, President Bush has said that the federal government will pick up the tab for rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That tab is estimated to be about $200 billion, or around $700 per American. I hope that the $700 will be funded by cutting “pork” and other unnecessary government spending, as President Bush has suggested.
So, in spite of the prospect of grievous damage to homes and businesses in Texas — and in the expectation that persons who live near the Texas Gulf Coast will evacuate inland — I hope that Hurricane Rita leads to the following results:
1. The President should call for the uninsured damage to be defrayed by taxpayers, as before.
2. The cost of Rita will lead to additional cuts in unnecessary federal spending.
3. This will continue as additional hurricanes and other unavoidable natural disasters occur, depleting all unnecessary federal spending for FY2006, and perhaps beyond.
4. Congress, then facing the prospect of evolving into a sort of disaster-relief agency with the power to appropriate funds, will resist any further spending on disaster relief, by issuing the following joint resolution:
WHEREAS, the legislative power of the Congress of the United States is limited by Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, and
WHEREAS, said Section does not contemplate the provision of disaster preparedness or relief, notwithstanding previous and erroneous interpretations of the Commerce, General Welfare, and Necessary and Proper Clauses of the Constitution, and
WHEREAS, Congress shall therefore no longer be a party to disaster-preparedness and disaster-relief programs that have the effect of encouraging and subsidizing the maintenance of residences and businesses in high-risk areas, and
WHEREAS, such encouragement imposes undue burdens on those persons who sensibly choose not to live in high-risk areas, and
WHEREAS, persons and businesses who choose to live and operate in high-risk areas should be responsible for protecting and insuring themselves and their property, and
WHEREAS, when persons and businesses do not take responsibility for themselves they make economically inefficient decisions that have ramifications for the well-being of all Americans, in addition to the direct costs of disaster preparedness and disaster relief, and
WHEREAS, the functions of disaster preparedness and relief can be provided more effectively and at lower cost through private insurance (if properly deregulated); other cooperative, market-based measures; and private charity, and
WHEREAS, government programs absorb funds that individuals and business could put to better use in such private endeavors, and
WHEREAS, the defense of Americans and their property from armed attacks is a legitimate function of the United States government, therefore
BE IT RESOLVED that from this day forward Congress shall not appropriate or make any other provision for disaster preparedness or disaster relief, except as necessary in the event of attacks upon the persons and/or property of American citizens by enemies of the United States, foreign or domestic.
Respectfully,
Liberty Corner
A Challenge to My U.S. Representative
The text of the following message is exactly as I sent it to my U.S. Representative. I was inspired to write this by N.Z. Bear’s porkbusting project. (I’ve since updated this post, and my message to Rep. McCaul, to get my arithmetic right. I guess I was stunned by the size of the “pork” bill.)
The Honorable Michael T. McCaul
Representative for the 10th District of Texas
United States Congress
Dear Mr. McCaul:
President Bush said in his nationally televised speech last Thursday night that the federal government will pick up most of the cost of rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Then, speaking at the White House on Friday afternoon, President 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 leads me to three observations and a request. First, if the federal government is going to pick up the tab for Katrina (presumably the uninsured damage), that’s likely to set a bad precedent for the owners of homes and businesses in other high-risk areas, who will be tempted to skimp on insurance and let the rest of the nation insure them, through taxation. Second, if the federal budget includes $200 billion in unnecessary spending (a mighty low estimate, in my opinion), that $200 billion shouldn’t be in the budget in the first place. Third, neverthless, if the federal government is to provide something like $200 billion in aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, without raising taxes, members of Congress from all states must be willing to give up some of the “pork” that’s scheduled for their districts.
Here, then, is my request. Please identify — and volunteer for elimination from the FY2006 federal budget — enough “pork” from the 10th Congressional District of Texas to eliminate our district’s “fair share” of unnecessary spending. If you can’t find all of it in “pork,” find it in the federal government’s non-defense operations. If each district were to offer up $500 million in “pork” and other cuts, that would amount to $200 billion, plus some spare change. The pork shouldn’t be too hard to find. I went to the website for Citizens Against Government Waste (http://www.cagw.org/site/), scrolled to “Reports” in the navigation bar, clicked on “Pig Book,” then clicked on “2005,” and came to a page where I selected “Texas” and “all appropriations,” and entered “Austin” as my keyword. That produced a list of projects (for Austin alone) which garnered $13.252 million of federal funding in FY2005. The “pork” bill for the entire 10th District for FY2006 must be much larger than that. Surely the residents of the 10th District — most of whom are like me and do not benefit from “pork” — should be willing to surrender their “pork” and any other unnecessary government spending for the sake of hurricane victims.
Be a leader. Be a fiscally responsible Republican. Show your colleagues in Congress that your constituents are willing to cough up their “pork” — and more besides — to set an example for the rest of the country to follow.
Politics and Prosperity 