Catastrophe Theory at Work

Mike Rappaport at The Right Coast calls it “Rathergate as Agincourt,” but his description of recent events offers a good illustration of catastrophe theory:

…Had the blogosphere not kept the Swiftboat case alive, it is not clear CBS would have been desparate [sic] enough to go with these fraudulent documents. Thus, the CBS story may be the result of main stream media’s frustration at not controlling the news previously….

Think of the Titanic. Think of the blogosphere as the iceberg that the Titanic’s captain refused to heed in his headlong rush to cross the Atlantic in record time.

Me, Too

Arnold Kling of EconLog, quoting from his forthcoming book, says this about the incomprehensibility of what most economists write:

I believe that some of the fault lies with the top graduate schools in economics, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I obtained my Ph.D. The focus on mathematical training in these programs is so intense that they tend to produce a sort of idiot-savant, competent only to publish in academic journals. It pains me to see economists for whom expounding economic principles and speaking in plain English are mutually exclusive activities.

Precisely. I began Ph.D. work in economics at M.I.T. in the early ’60s. I quit, fairly promptly, because I found the program depressingly, deadeningly sterile. I’m sure it only got worse.

Conservative Criticism of the War on Terror

A piece at The American Thinker by Rachel Neuwirth asserts that “The U.S. is not really fighting terrorism.” Actually, it’s not as stark as the title suggests. Here’s the lead sentence: “Claims that America is engaged in a total war against terrorism are greatly exaggerated.”

I’m not sure who’s claiming a total war. We are undoubtedly doing a lot on a lot of fronts, not all of them visible even to the media (thank goodness). The question is whether we should be doing more if we could, absent political and resource constraints.

From that perspective, Neuwirth’s essay is a good checklist of the things we should do (or abet) when it’s politically and economically feasible to do them; for example: take out Arafat and dismantle the PLO, come down hard on the Saudis and Egypt, and seek a U.N. declaration against Islamic terrorism. The value of seeking a U.N. declaration on anything escapes me, but it’s related to Neuwirth’s recitation of two key failures that we could remedy easily, at relatively little cost:

…First, we have not properly defined what we stand for. The Islamic enemy cites examples of Western decadence as justification for their ‘holy war.’ Simply saying that we stand for “freedom” and “free enterprise” has limited value because for many religious Muslims those terms may seem foreign. It suggests that we are simply imposing our system upon them by force….

Surely the U.S. information agencies can do a better job of communicating the alternative that America’s principles of freedom, openness, the rule of law, respect for human rights, equality, and tolerance present to the peoples of the Islamic world, and their manifest superiority to the hate, intolerance, lawlessness and cruelty of the Islamist fanatics.

And second, we have failed to cultivate the truly moderate and responsible Islamic clerics and intellectuals. Those Muslims understand very well the sickness that prevails in so many Islamic societies and how the extremists have twisted the Quran to breed terrorists. It is their voices that need to be heard, boldly challenging the extremists on a religious basis, point for point, to demonstrate to the Islamic masses just how they have been hoodwinked and led down the path to destruction. They must show the way out of this dead end and back towards an enlightened form of Islam. Such actually existed for a time centuries ago, before this current extremism, when there was true creativity and a lively interchange of ideas across different cultures. Once Muslims hear from devout and learned men and women of their own faith that human rights, the rule of law, and respect for other religions and cultures are not incompatible with their Islamic heritage, most will eventually reject the teaching of the extremist hatemongers among them. Why not use our information forums and financial resources to help the courageous and lonely Muslim moderates to get their enlightened message to their own people?

Why not, indeed? Neuwirth keeps going:

However, our own leaders act as if they are unaware of this battle of ideas, and instead allow the extremists to have access to the highest levels of our government. Grover Norquist is a conservative activist who used to be involved in economic issues, but recently has been using his influence to help Muslims with radical and even pro-terrorist ties to gain access to high Administration officials. This in turn has allowed the Council on American Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.) to help place Islamists among those selecting clerics for Muslim inmates in our prisons, selecting clerics for Muslim soldiers in our military and to demand all manner of rights and concessions for Muslims in America while playing the role of victims of discrimination.

I’ve read about this elsewhere. It makes no sense to me. Perhaps a second-term Bush can get himself out of such entanglements. Similarly, perhaps a second-term Bush can more overtly ally with Israel. As Neuwirth says:

…We have betrayed and weakened our loyal ally, Israel, while pandering to Israel’s Arab enemies. And what benefit has it bought us? Except for Israel, how many countries in the world can we count as true and staunch allies? When Tony Blair leaves power, Britain may become like Germany. The same is true for allies such as Italy and Australia, where the current political leadership faces strong public opposition to support of the war in Iraq. We betrayed our principles to pander to the nations and yet we are still hatred and distrusted in much of the world. Playing a double game on terrorism has not bought us friends. Perhaps it is time for us to try some moral consistency….

Neuwirth deserves the last word:

America should at least declare moral clarity even if we cannot actually undertake the impossible task of being the world’s policeman. We, as a superpower, are even more free than other nations to at least speak the truth without having to fear reprisals from powers stronger than ourselves. Unfortunately we have consistently failed to even speak the moral truth, and so we are seriously compromised in our self-declared war on terror.

Hide the Children

Too good not to post:

No, it’s not John Goodman in his “West Wing” role as Glenallen Walken, the wild-eyed “cowboy” Republican Speaker of the House who became acting president (and made a right good job of it):

Left, Right, What’s the Difference?

Michael Rosen at Tech Central Station writes about Pat Buchanan’s mellowing in “Right From the Beginning, Left at the End”:

Buchanan, variously described as an arch-conservative, a paleoconservative, and a populist conservative, has throughout his career shirked the orthodoxies of the Republican party and the prevailing norms of conservatism. In his magazine, The American Conservative, and in his latest book, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency…Buchanan presents his case for an “authentic” conservatism that has been infected by radical, Johnny-come-lately variants. Yet many of Buchanan’s positions, most recently on the War on Terror, have placed him and his supporters in ideological company with the left.

Buchanan has moved slowly but steadily out of the Republican mainstream….[I]n 2000, Buchanan broke with the Republican Party, seemingly for good, and assailed Bush from the right under the confines of the Reform Party.

Buchanan’s policies, too, have strayed from popular conservative dogma. To begin with, much ink has been spilled about the alliance between the far left and the far right with regard to immigration and free trade….In a recent interview with Buchanan, Ralph Nader, the country’s best-known leftist politician, made a bid for the “disenfranchised Right” by referring to NAFTA and the World Trade Organization as “sovereignty-shredding” institutions.

Yet it is the Buchananite right’s recent criticisms of the Iraq War, of the Bush administration, and of the fight against global terror as a whole that have captured the most attention and that reflect a closer intellectual propinquity with the left than previously thought….

[T]he Buchanan approach to Israel is of a piece with his general tilt toward the ideas of the left-wing. Much has been written about Buchanan’s views on Israel and its supporters in the U.S. Yet it should be pointed out that he is better depicted not as an opponent of Israel’s right to exist but as a supporter of the Israeli left. Just as parties of a leftist tilt in Israel believe that the Jewish state must make deep-seated compromises to achieve peace with the Arab world, so has Buchanan castigated successive right-of-center Israeli leaders and their American “amen corner” for their “intransigence.”…

Ronald Reagan, the leader to whom Buchanan pays fealty in his latest book and a Democrat in his acting days, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the party left him. Yet one gets the sense, in Buchanan’s case, that it is he who has abandoned Republican ideology and principles, not the other way around. In comparing Iraqi militants to American revolutionaries, Buchanan is adopting at least the rhetoric of the left. After all, in the breathless words of Bill Maher, “that’s something Michael Moore might say.”

All of which says a lot about the similarities of hard-line leftists and rightists: Both camps are intellectually obtuse — and statists under the skin. To say that Stalin was a leftist and Hitler was a rightist is a supreme mistake: Both were vicious statists who happened to be competitors for power.

The Wrong Path to School Choice

Adam B. Schaeffer offers some advice for “Changing School Choice Strategy” at Tech Central Station:

The legal, regulatory, and political bunkers manned by soldiers from the Democratic coalition make school choice a slow and difficult battle. What little ground reformers gain is constantly under threat of being lost. The school choice movement should step around these obstacles by concentrating their efforts on a drive, in each state with an income tax, for Universal Tuition Tax Credits (UTTCs) that allow all parents a true choice in education.

The idea has several problems:

1. Not every State has an income tax.

2. Even in States with an income tax, the size of the tax credit wouldn’t offset the cost of private schooling for parents whose income tax bill is already low because their incomes are relatively low, they can claim a large number of exemptions, or they have large itemized deductions.

3. States can reclaim lost income-tax revenues by raising marginal rates and/or increasing sales taxes.

I say, keep up the good fight for universal recognition of school vouchers. If Bush is re-elected the fight should become easier.

Why the Minimum Wage Hurts People

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has it figured out:

When I discuss minimum wages in class I tell my students that one of the best ways to get a high-paying job is to get a low-paying job and work your way up. The minimum wage can put the least employable out of work and have permanent negative effects when training and work skills not acquired in youth are difficult to accumulate later on….

The bottom line? If you don’t work at McDonald’s when you are a teenager, don’t expect to manage a McDonald’s when you are middle-aged.

Read the whole thing. It includes useful links, including a link to a recent study to corroborates Tabarrok’s thesis.

A Lefty Offers Advice about Dealing with Terrorism

Jessica Wilson, guest-blogging at The Leiter Reports, instructs us on how to respond to terrorist acts:

I am not a wise person, though I aspire to be. But I know how a wise person responds to aggression. When a wise person faces aggression, they do not immediately and blindly strike back, thus potentially initiating a cycle of endless violence and retribution. Rather, they consider why they have been struck. Have they, perhaps, done something to offend the aggressor? If so, muses the wise person, perhaps they might avoid future aggression by removing the source of the offense.

She isn’t a wise person — that’s for sure. But, at the risk of being offensive, I will recast the rest of her paragraph in terms that she might understand:

I know how a wise woman responds to attempted rape. When a wise woman faces attempted rape, she does not immediately and blindly pull out her pistol and shoot the would-be rapist. Rather, she considers why she is the target of a would-be rapist. Has she, perhaps, done something to offend the aggressor? If so, muses the wise person, perhaps she might avoid future rape attempts by locking herself in her house and leaving the streets to rapists.

That’s the wisdom of the left. The rest of Wilson’s post is just as fatuous, but I’m not going to waste any more time on her musings.

The Origin of Rights

Are rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights, a creation of Nature (God, if you will) or a creation of humans?

Wikipedia‘s article on natural law explains that

natural law is the doctrine that just laws are immanent in nature (that can be claimed as discovered but not created by such things as a bill of rights) and/or that they can emerge by [the] natural process of resolving conflicts (as embodied by common law). These two aspects are actually very different, and can sometimes oppose or complement each other, although they share the common trait that they rely on immanence as opposed to design in finding just laws. In either case, law seeks more to discover a truth that is considered to exist independent and outside of the legal process itself, rather than simply to declare or apply a principle whose origin is inside the legal system.

The concept of natural law was very important in the development of Anglo-American common law. In the struggles between Parliament and the monarchy, Parliament often made reference to the Fundamental Laws of England which embodied natural law since time immemorial and set limits on the power of the monarchy. The concept of natural law was expressed in the English Bill of Rights and the United States Declaration of Independence — and by 19th-century anarchist and legal theorist, Lysander Spooner….

The article later refers to anarcho-capitalism and legal positivism. Regarding anarcho-capitalism, Wikipedia says that

Libertarians in general, and anarcho-capitalists in particular, have developed two different approaches to their theories, from a utilitarian point of view, or from a point of view of natural law. Some of them defend one approach and dismiss the other, whereas some of them, like Bastiat, claim an inherent harmony or correspondence between the two complementary approaches.

The Natural Law approach…argues that the existence of the state is immoral, and that unlimited capitalism is the only ethical political system, or rather anti-political system. The Utilitarian approach…argues that abolition of the state in favour of private businesses is economically more efficient. The Harmonic approach argues both as equivalent statements….

Then, there’s Wikipedia‘s take on legal positivism:

The principal claims of legal positivism are:

• that laws are rules made by human beings; and

• that there is no inherent or necessary connection between law and morality.

Stated this way, it may surprise some that this is a controversial concept. Legal positivism stands in opposition to various contrary ideas that call themselves the tradition of natural law, a body of legal theory asserting that there is an essential connection between law and justice. Legal positivism…incorporates the separation thesis: the idea that legal validity has no essential connection with morality or justice…

I agree with legal positivists that “legal validity has no essential connection with morality or justice.” There’s abundant evidence of the truth of that statement. Much law, today, is a creature of special interests and political correctness — avarice and prejudice masquerading as morality.

However, when it comes to finding the source of rights, I favor the kernel of truth to be found in this statement of the Utilitarian theory of anarcho-capitalism: “abolition of the state in favour of private businesses is economically more efficient.” The kernel of truth is that rights (including, but not limited to, property rights) ought to exist because their existence and enforcement make us better off than we would be in their absence or non-enforcement. Anarcho-capitalists simply go overboard when they assert that rights can exist without the protection of the state. (Whose rights? I must ask.) Unfortunately, of course, the state that recognizes and protects rights is the same state that denies and suppresses them.

A complementary truth about rights lies in the version of the natural law doctrine which says that just laws (the embodiment of rights) “emerge by [the] natural process of resolving conflicts.”

In sum, rights arise out of the process of resolving conflicts because they serve the general good. The role of the state in all of this is (or should be) to recognize our rights and to defend us and those rights from predators, without and within.*

__________

*Another way of arriving at this conclusion can be found in my earlier posts on the origins of modern libertarianism in the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich A. Hayek (here and here), where I said:

Mill instructs us that personal freedoms should be preserved because through them we become more knowledgeable and more capable; therefore, the state should intervene in our lives only to protect us from physical harm. Hayek then makes the case that the personal and the economic are inseparable: We engage in economic activity to serve personal values and our personal values are reflected in our economic activity. Moreover, the state cannot make personal and economic decisions more effectively than individuals operating freely within an ever-evolving societal network, and when the state intervenes in our lives it damages that network, to our detriment. That is the essence of modern libertarianism.

If It Were 1944

The headlines blazoned: “Allies Invade Normandy.”

The critics carped: “France isn’t our enemy.”

The Truth Sinks In

The headline at The Washington Times — “CBS’ bomb turns blooper” — says a lot, but there’s more:

CBS has been blown off stride by its own bombshell, joining several major news organizations that trusted the network’s claim that it finally had the goods on President Bush.

All were essentially bested by Internet bloggers.

Led by anchorman Dan Rather, CBS reported in a “60 Minutes” broadcast Wednesday that it had obtained four old memos asserting that Mr. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard obligations three decades ago — lobbing the claim just as Sen. John Kerry was continuing to sink in public-opinion polls….[The timing is suspicious: ED]

Much of the media had “no reticence about plowing forward and repeating CBS’s loaded charges that they proved President Bush received preferential treatment and disobeyed an order to complete a physical,” Brent Baker of the Media Research Center, a media monitoring group, said yesterday.

The enthusiasm for “Memogate” paled, however, before the persistence of suspicious Internet bloggers and the increasingly powerful amplification loop of alternative press organizations.

“It was like a ‘perfect storm’ that put us here,” said Scott Johnson, the Minnesota-based lawyer behind http://www.powerlineblog.com, one of several Web sites that questioned CBS’ claims through the kind of simple detective work once common to old-fashioned journalism [emphasis mine].

Now “old-fashioned” (read “liberal”) journalism is too busy trying to shovel dirt on its political enemies to do much “simple detective work.”

Sen. Kerry’s Vague Strategy of Denial

From a interview in the latest issue of Time:

KERRY

We can do a better job at homeland security. I can fight a more effective war on terror….

TIME

Is the President being as aggressive as he should be in dealing with insurgent strongholds in Iraq?

KERRY

At this moment in time, I’m not sitting with the generals in front of me for the full briefing. I’m not going to comment on that right now. That is up to the President. It’s his decision to make. But I will tell you this, that we’ve gone backward in Iraq, and we’ve gone backward on the war on terror. I’m not President until Jan. 20, if America elects me. I don’t know what I’ll find in Iraq….

TIME

As President, who would be the first person you would phone?

KERRY

I’m not going to say one, two, three. I will tell you that I have 20 years of experience on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee….

TIME

You can’t be more specific?

KERRY

I know exactly what I’m going to do, but I’m not the President today….

TIME

Will you be more specific about timetables for getting troops out?

KERRY

I have said that I have a goal to be able to bring our troops out of there within my first term, and I hope to be able to bring out some troops within the first year. But what’s important here is that I can fight a more effective war on terror….

TIME

How would you go about winning the war of ideas in the Middle East?

KERRY

What I intend to do is to put in play the economic power, the values and principles, the public diplomacy, so we’re isolating the radical Islamic extremists and not having the radical extremists isolate the United States. It means bringing religious leaders together, including moderate mullahs, clerics, imams -— pulling the world together in a dialogue about who these extremists really are and how they are hijacking the legitimacy of Islam itself….

TIME

Our latest poll indicates that terrorism has become the No. 1 issue for voters.

KERRY

I will fight a more effective war on terror, and over the next weeks the American people will see the phoniness of the Bush efforts….

TIME

Are you surprised at the bounce Bush got out of his convention?

KERRY

I don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of the Bush bounce….

The part about “dialoguing” is preciousness itself:

It means bringing religious leaders together, including moderate mullahs, clerics, imams -— pulling the world together in a dialogue about who these extremists really are and how they are hijacking the legitimacy of Islam itself.

That’ll really impress the Islamofascists. No wonder liberals scare me. Then there’s this:

[O]ver the next weeks the American people will see the phoniness of the Bush efforts.

Is he predicting a major terrorist attack, or positioning himself to say “I told you so” if there is one? Unfair on my part? I don’t think so. The man is desperate. As I said here, “Absent a terrorist attack, the election is now Bush’s to lose.”

The Post Piles On

Continuing the theme of the preceding post about Rather-gate, washingtonpost.com has this:

The End of ‘Network News’

By Tom Rosenstiel

Sunday, September 12, 2004; Page B07

Regardless of who wins the election, the campaign of 2004 has already made history. For the first time, a cable news channel — Fox — attracted more viewers than a broadcast network when they were competing head to head, covering the Republican National Convention.

What happened this summer, and particularly last week, is likely to be recalled as the end of the era of network news. At the very least, mark this as the moment when the networks abdicated their authority with the American public….

Alleluia and amen!

As I Was Saying…

Yesterday I suggested that Howard Kurtz’s Washington Post column about the “documents” used in Dan Rather’s attack on Bush’s National Guard service “signals other serious journalists that they can dump on old Dan, at will.” So, today’s NYTimes.com carries a piece with the headline “An Ex-Officer Now Believes Guard Memo Isn’t Genuine.” Fancy that! Given the source, the article is strikingly balanced:

A former National Guard commander who CBS News said had helped convince it of the authenticity of documents raising new questions about President Bush’s military service said on Saturday that he did not believe they were genuine.

The commander, Bobby Hodges, said in a telephone interview that network producers had never showed him the documents but had only read them to him over the phone days before they were featured Wednesday in a “60 Minutes” broadcast. After seeing the documents on Friday, Mr. Hodges said, he concluded that they were falsified.

Mr. Hodges, a former general who spoke to several news organizations this weekend, was just the latest person to challenge the authenticity of the documents, which CBS reported came from the personal files of Mr. Bush’s former squadron commander at the Texas Air National Guard, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago.

The memos indicated that Mr. Bush had failed to take a physical “as ordered” and that Mr. Killian was being pressured to “sugarcoat” Mr. Bush’s performance rating because Mr. Bush, whose father was then a Texas congressman, was “talking to somebody upstairs.”

But they have been the subject of an intense debate, with some forensic document specialists saying they appear to be the work of a modern word processor and others saying they could indeed have been produced by certain types of Vietnam-era typewriters. Some of Mr. Killian’s family members have stepped forward to question their legitimacy.

CBS News has stood by its reporting, saying that it obtained the documents through a reliable source and that a host of experts and former Guard officials, including Mr. Hodges, helped convince it of their authenticity. It broadcast an interview on Friday night with one of those experts, a handwriting specialist named Marcel B. Matley, who said the signatures on the documents were consistent with those of Colonel Killian on records the White House had given reporters.

Mr. Hodges, 74, who was group commander of Mr. Bush’s squadron in the 147th Fighter Group at Ellington Field in Houston in the early 1970’s, said that when someone from CBS called him on Monday night and read him documents, “I thought they were handwritten notes.”

He said he had not authenticated the documents for CBS News but had confirmed that they reflected issues he and Colonel Killian had discussed – namely Mr. Bush’s failure to appear for a physical, which military records released previously by the White House show, led to a suspension from flying.

A CBS News spokeswoman, Sandy Genelius, indicated that Mr. Hodges had changed his account.

“We believed General Hodges the first time we spoke to him,” Ms. Genelius said. Acknowledging that document authentification is often not an iron-clad process, she said, “We believe the documents to be genuine, we stand by our story and we will continue to report.”

A spokeswoman for the CBS anchor Dan Rather, Kim Akhtar, said that Mr. Hodges had declined to appear on camera. As a result, Ms. Akhtar said, he was read the memos and responded that “he was familiar with the contents of the documents and that it sounded just like Killian.” He made it clear, she added, that he was a supporter of Mr. Bush.

Mr. Hodges said that he had not spoken with anyone from the Bush administration or campaign about his views and that he was basing his belief now that the records are fakes on “inconsistencies” he had noticed.

He specifically pointed to a memo theorizing that the Texas Guard’s chief of staff, Col. Walter B. Staudt, was pressing Mr. Hodges to give Mr. Bush favorable treatment. Mr. Hodges said that was not the case and that Mr. Staudt had actually retired more than a year earlier, though he acknowledged that Mr. Staudt might have remained in the Guard in some capacity after that. Mr. Staudt has not answered his phone for several days.

Mr. Hodges said he had also begun taking a dim view of the memos after hearing disavowals of them from Colonel Killian’s wife and son.

The son, Gary Killian, said Saturday that he initially believed the documents might be real, if only because the signature looked like his father’s. He said he had since been persuaded by the skepticism of some document experts.

The Inside Scoop, with a Partisan Twist

Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy posts about an article in the latest issue of Vanity Fair (not available online), in which a group of law clerks who worked on Bush v. Gore give their take on the case. The article, undoubtedly timed to influence this year’s election, “includes considerable speculation as to the improper motives of the Justices who voted” in the majority to stop the Florida recount.

And precisely whose law clerks does the article cite? Kerr describes them as “most” of the clerks who worked for the four Justices in the dissent and the “occasional” clerk who worked for one of the Justices in the majority.” He adds:

The article acknowledges that the clerks’ story is rather skewed, but justifies publishing it on the ground that it’s better than nothing: “[I]f this account may at times be lopsided, partisan, speculative, and incomplete,” the article states, “it’s by far the best and most informative we have.”

Did the clerks violate confidentiality? Kerr seems to think so:

Then there is the question of law clerk confidentiality. The clerks who spoke to Vanity Fair apparently viewed their duty of confidentiality to the Court as subject to waiver when in their judgment the Court has gone badly astray:

To the inevitable charges that they broke their vow of confidentiality, the clerks [who spoke to Vanity Fair] have a ready response: by taking on Bush v. Gore and deciding the case as it did, the Court broke its promise to them. “We feel that something illegitimate was done with the Court’s power, and such an extraordinary situation justifies breaking an obligation we’d otherwise honor,” one clerk says.

Hmmm. Sounds pretty flimsy to me, for obvious reasons.

The obvious reasons are that most of the clerks cited in the article were on the losing side and they’re sore losers with a partisan axe to grind.

Will we hear from the clerks who worked for the majority in Bush v. Gore, or will they respect their vow of confidentiality?

The Character Issue, in a Nutshell

The last paragraph of a piece by Sydney Smith at Tech Central Station nails the character issue:

Does it matter that George Bush is an alcoholic? Would it matter if John Kerry has post-traumatic stress disorder? It depends on how well they handle it. We know that Bush is an alcoholic, he freely admits it. And that admission is the first and foremost step in the successful treatment of any mental illness. We don’t know if John Kerry left Vietnam with lasting psychic wounds. He only evades the question when asked. And that evasion is the most disturbing aspect of the Teresa Heinz-Kerry anecdote [about Kerry’s nightmares]. It suggests that he has yet to come to terms with the question himself.

If you can’t deal with yourself, you’re ill-equipped to deal with the world.

A Real Economist

No wonder Arnold Kling (EconLog) is such a good economist. He has experienced reality and he understands it:

One of the issues with which I struggle in teaching my [George Mason University] course is integrating my business experience with my academic learning. For example, take the topic of “profit maximization.” In academic economics, it means solving a mathematical optimization problem. In business, you don’t have the equation to work with. You’re guessing about what will sell, to whom you can sell it, and how much it might sell for. You’re guessing about how you can get technology to fit together, and how new developments could affect you.

P.S. Check out Kling’s take on Paul Samuelson, whose never strong grasp of reality seems to have slipped away.

Cars I Have Owned

Owning a car. A boy’s dream. Well, owning a car often turned into a nightmare — rust (a problem from Northern Virginia northward, where I lived most of my life), breakdowns, flat tires, accidents, maintenance, repairs, insurance, and on and on. I remember some of my cars fondly and others with loathing. Here’s an inventory of every car I have owned, save my present auto, which shall remain anonymous.


My first car was a 9-year old 1948 Buick Special, for which I paid $125. It was gray and rusty when I bought it. My father “helped” me Bond-o it and repaint it a shiny black. (My father did most of the work.)


The Buick only lasted a few years. I went through most of my college years without a car. After getting my first “real” job, I bought a red 1963 VW Beetle (used but almost-new). I later owned a green 1963 Beetle as a second car.


This 1965 Rambler American looks a lot like the white four-door sedan I owned for several years. What a piece of trash. It finally succumbed to a fatal disease of the transmission. I nursed it 25 miles to the nearest Rambler dealership, where I asked how much they would give me for the car. The offer was $65. I took the money on the spot.


Before the Rambler died, I bought a green version of this 1969 VW Squareback. It was a peppy little car, one of the first with fuel injection. It survived a round trip from the D.C. area to Austin, Texas, at an average speed of 80 m.p.h.


Next up was the 1975 model of this VW Dasher. (Mine was gold, not red, and a four-door.) It was another piece of trash. In fact, the owner of the local VW repair shop referred to Dashers as Trashers. It died of terminal suspension failure.


Sometime before the Dasher died I bought a Chevette like this as a second car. (Why does such a small car rate such a large photo?)


I enjoyed driving this 1982 Cadillac Cimarron. It got bad reviews, but it worked for me — perhaps because I owned a stick shift model and knew how to get the most from its 4-cylinder engine. (I’ve always owned a stick, and I don’t plan to switch to slush-o-matic.)


I wrecked the ’82 Cimarron and bought an ’84 to replace it. The ’82s were assembled in Cadillac plants. By ’84 — when GM knew the Cimarron wasn’t going to make it — they were assembled in Chevy plants. The difference showed.


My all-time favorite was a red 1988 Acura Legend. I ran it for 13 enjoyable years, beating all comers away from stoplights.


A gold version of this 1989 Mazda 323 served well as a second car for eight years. It survived another seven years in the hands of my son.


As a replacement for the Mazda, I bought a black version of this 1995 Saturn coupe from my daughter when she went off to B-school. It was probably the last American-brand car I’ll ever own (I’m a firm convert to Japanese brands), but it was a reliable car with surprisingly good pickup.

That covers the first 44 years of my history as an auto owner. The remaining years, I trust, will see a far higher peach-to-lemon ratio. They don’t make them like they used to — thank goodness.

The Pack Has Found Fresh Prey

PoliPundit asks “What’s the Source?” of the forgeries used by Dan Rather to “document” Bush’s dereliction of duty while in the Texas Air National Guard. I say it must be Bush’s fault:) Isn’t everything? Dan Rather thinks so, and he’s an objective journalist:)

Actually, a good sign that Rather’s story has absolutely no credibility — except as a rallying point for rabid Bush-haters — is Howard Kurtz’s column in today’s WaPo. Two paragraphs of professional courtesy toward Rather precede 20 paragraphs that mostly damn Rather’s story with straightforward observations about the flimsiness of it.

And Kurtz doesn’t even get into Rather’s interview of former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, in which Barnes claimed to intervened with the head of the Texas Air National Guard to secure a position for Bush at the request of a Bush family friend. Barnes’s daughter has said publicly that the story flatly contradicts what Barnes had told her only four years ago, when Bush’s national guard service became an issue in the 2000 presidential race.

That omission notwithstanding, Kurtz’s objectivity about the matter signals other serious journalists that they can dump on old Dan, at will.

This Says a Lot about France

According to MSNBC.com,

Bonjour paresse (Hello Laziness), a call to middle managers of the world to rise up and throw out their laptops, organigrams and mission statements, is the unexpected publishing sensation of the summer in France.

Sub-titled The Art and the Importance of Doing the Least Possible in the Workplace, the 113-page “ephlet” (part-essay, part-pamphlet) is to France’s managerial class – the cadres – what the Communist Manifesto once was to the lumpen proletariat….

An anarchic antidote to management tomes promising the secrets of ever greater productivity, Bonjour paresse is a slacker’s bible, a manual for those who devote their professional lives to the sole pursuit of idleness…

Herewith, the manual’s “10 commandments for the idle”:

No. 1 You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-check at the end of the month, full stop.

No. 2 It’s pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.

No. 3 What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you’re untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.

No. 4 You’re not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside track.

No. 5 Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You’ll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.

No. 6 Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your ‘contribution to the wealth of the firm’. Avoid ‘on the ground’ operational roles like the plague.

No. 7 Once you’ve found one of these plum jobs, never move. It is only the most exposed who get fired.

No. 8 Learn to identify kindred spirits who, like you, believe the system is absurd through discreet signs (quirks in clothing, peculiar jokes, warm smiles).

No. 9 Be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who do any real work.

No. 10 Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system. The problem is knowning when…

No wonder France is a socialist dystopia.