The Power of Incentives

Teachers hostage to 'success'

by M. Goodwin

The e-mail box runneth over with bad tidings. 

Teachers are reporting that cheating is rampant in New York City schools - and they claim principals are the culprits.

The reports are responding to my column that many schools are denying students the freedom to fail in a misguided bid to help them. To judge from the response, the problem is worse than I feared. Much worse.

First, a professional in a Manhattan high school wrote to say that teachers in her school are "encouraged" to pass 80 percent of students, no matter their grades or attendance. She offered student writing samples filled with glaring errors of spelling and grammar to prove that "social promotion is alive and well."

Now others are revealing shocking examples from their schools about how unprepared kids are being pushed along to the next grade and out the door with a sham diploma. Their disheartening tales deserve attention.

"Our mandated passing rate is 60 percent," one wrote. "We need to explain in detail why this student failed, what methods were used to get him to pass, how much home contact was made.

"The one group that is not called in for interrogation is the students themselves. No blame falls on them . . . The students know what is going on. It has empowered them to feel that they can work less or not at all and still pass the class."

We are doomed

The Dream of the Mont Pelerin Society

by R. Higgs

Just after World War II, classical liberalism reached its lowest ebb. Europe lay in ruins, one-half locked under Soviet domination, the other half drowning in dirigisme. In Britain, a Labor government wielded power, nationalizing basic industries and creating a full-fledged welfare state. In France and Italy, communists and their political allies threatened to take power. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries, welfare states blossomed while free markets withered. Spain and Portugal endured fascist dictatorships.

Germany languished under Allied occupation, with controls choking the revival of its economy and the population struggling to avoid starvation. In the United States, most people had lost their old faith in the free market and gained a new faith in the ability of government to solve economic problems and guarantee social security. Everywhere in the West both masses and elites, especially the intellectuals, plunged waywardly down what Friedrich A. Hayek had just dubbed "the road to serfdom."

Peering into the abyss ahead, Hayek determined to form a society committed to persuading the intellectuals, and hence the masses and their political leaders, to change course. This society would bring together for mutual enlightenment and encouragement the leading figures of classical liberalism. Included would be Englishmen such as Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Michael Polanyi; Austrian émigrés such as Ludwig von Mises, Fritz Machlup, Karl Popper, and of course Hayek himself; Americans such as Henry Hazlitt, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, Aaron Director, and George Stigler; Germans such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken; Frenchmen such as Maurice Allais and Bertrand de Jouvenel; and other Western Europeans.

In April 1947 the men named above and others — 39 persons in all, from 17 countries — met in Switzerland and formed the Mont Pèlerin Society. They adopted a Statement of Aims that briefly described their view of the prevailing crisis:

Over large stretches of the earth's surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power.

The statement avowed that "what is essentially an ideological movement must be met by intellectual argument and the reassertion of valid ideas" and identified six broad areas in which further study and debate would be worthwhile in combating the prevailing intellectual tendencies. The statement concluded,

The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda. It seeks to establish no meticulous and hampering orthodoxy. It aligns itself with no particular party. Its object is solely, by facilitating the exchange of views among minds inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free society.

Fifty years later it appears that, despite individual disagreements and rivalries, personality clashes, and administrative difficulties, the society has prospered and remained steadfast in adherence to its initial statement of aims. It has served essentially as an international club at whose meetings leading classical liberals can exchange and debate ideas in the comfort of a solidary environment.

A Strange Sentence in the Times

by Jeffrey Goldberg'

Does something in this lade from the Times seem strange?

RAFAH BORDER CROSSING, Egypt -- Hundreds of Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip arrived here by the busload on Saturday to pass through the reopened border into Egypt, taking the first tangible steps out of a four-year Israeli blockade.

So: For the first time in four years, Gazans can cross the border into Egypt. This fact suggests that Egypt had blockaded its border with Gaza. But wait -- somehow, it was a four-year Israeli blockade that kept Gazans from crossing into Egypt. According to the Times story, Egypt decided to "stop enforcing Israel's blockade of the Palestinian territory."

It always seemed to me that Israel and Egypt, two independent states, decided jointly to blockade Gaza. Does the Times believe the Mubarak regime decided to participate in the blockade of Gaza because Israel ordered it to participate? Does anyone actually believe that Egypt closed its border with Gaza only because it was in Israel's interest? Or was Egypt's government and military worried about the spread of Hamas ideology into Sinai and beyond?

This sort of question also arose during the flotilla debacle. The world was focused on Israel's closure of Gaza, but the Israeli closure was a closure only because Egypt had also imposed a closure. You can't close three sides of a four-sided territory (Israel controlled the western shore of Gaza, its northern and eastern borders) and expect to have an effective closure. And yet, there was no international pressure on Egypt to open its border. This suggests that Israel was the target of disproportionate animus. 

Progressive "Insights"

Profits of doom

By KYLE SMITH

Ha ha. Harold Camping — what an idiot! He predicted the end of the world on May 21. Last week, the Christian radio station owner said he was kind of right, though no one else noticed, and anyway the judgin’ will continue until (new date!) Oct. 21 of this year, when the world really and truly will be destroyed, probably.

What you didn’t know is that after his loony prediction, Camping was promoted to full professor at Stanford and rewarded with adoring mainstream press coverage, more than a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show,” prestigious awards and praise from the Obama administration’s chief science advisor.

Sorry, I got one detail wrong. It wasn’t Camping who reaped those earthly rewards for his cosmic wackiness. It was Paul Ehrlich.

In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe tract, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis.

He came by this not through Divine Revelation but through Divine Equation, a k a the liberal scripture of pseudo-science. Ehrlich “calculated” using the equation I = P x A x T. This means that Human Impact (I) on environment equals the product of Population, Affluence and Technology.

No room for imprecision there!

Conclusion: “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death . . . nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the human death rate.” Ehrlich predicted England would cease to exist by 2000. (N.B. he meant the whole country, not just that pathetic soccer squad.)

In 1970 he thundered, “In 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” He boomed that by 1980, life expectancy in the US would decline to 42 years.

Not quite getting the message, the world population both a) continued to grow and b) lived longer and healthier than ever.

Ehrlich has groused that he was kinda sorta right, and the worst you can say is that, like preacherman Camping, he was a little early.

President Obama’s point man on science, John Holdren, is an Ehrlich man. A text version of a speech Holdren gave in 2006 was accompanied by a footnote in which he praised Ehrlich’s call to end population growth “a key insight

. . . the elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.”

There are Ehrlich-men everywhere, and that ehrlich is German for honest just makes it so much richer, doesn’t it?

In 1970, when the first Earth Day caused the first spike in atmospheric baloney, Life “reported” that “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution . . . by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half . . .” (Note to younger readers: Visible smog was the thing we were all afraid of before we became afraid of invisible carbon emissions.)

Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote at the time, quoting with approval Dr. S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institute, that “In 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Time quoted ecologist Kenneth Watt as saying there wouldn’t be any crude oil left by 2000. A scientist named Harrison Brown at the National Academy of Sciences said the world would be out of lead, zinc, copper, tin, gold and silver by now.

“Dead Heat” author Michael Oppenheimer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said in 1990 that by 1996, the greenhouse effect “would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” More recently he said, “On the whole I would stand by these predictions.”

Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at England’s climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 that because of global warming, within a few years, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is” and flurries will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Heavy snowfall in England last year was, of course, also attributed to global warming.

Scientists love to see their names in print, don’t they? Coincidentally, they also love grant money, book deals, awards. The easiest way to obtain these things is by alarmism. No one ever made a buck saying, “The situation in the future will be pretty similar to what it is now.”

All Harold Camping has to do to be treated as a genuine visionary is to change the words at the beginning of his doom sermons from “the Bible says” to “science says.”

Socialists of the world unite against that terrible woman from Africa

Meet the People Responsible for Saving Strauss-Kahn

By Ujala Sehgal

The Strauss-Kahn defense, like raising a child, takes a  village. While the law and order team has been leaking statements from the alleged victim, Strauss-Kahn has been quietly assembling a fully loaded crisis dream team, Reuters reports. People consulted or hired so far include ex-CIA spies, private investigators, slick celebrity attorneys, top executives at corporations, and all the PR agents one might ever need. It's quite the cast of characters. Let's see who one of the world's best-connected men reaches out to in a crisis.

The Suits. The legal team is led by prominent New York criminal lawyer Benjamin Brafman, who has represented Michael Jackson, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, and Jay-Z, among other celebrities and high-profile defendants. Known for his wit, preparation, and aggression, according to a 1998 profile in New York magazine, "His detractors see a darker side, accusing Brafman of using underhanded, albeit legal, courtroom tactics to win, and cynically manipulating the press with carefully orchestrated leaks."

The Fixer. While the lawyers are usually the public face, every operation has one mysterious puppet-master that stays behind the scenes, looking at the big picture and pulling strings to make sure everything stays on track. They come with high-power but a very low-profile. In Strauss-Kahn's case, that job belongs the little-known Washington-based "strategic advisory" firm TD International, a source close to the firm told Reuters.

TD International's operations are something of a mystery. The firm's website identifies two of its partners as former CIA officers, and says it offers clients such services as "strategic consulting", "commercial intelligence," "due diligence" and "security services." Former clients include Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" who later served as prime minister, and Strauss-Kahn himself. As TD International, naturally, won't "comment on client relationships," Reuters looked at its Justice Department filings. A contract between the firm and Strauss-Kahn dated July 18, 2007, shows he hired the firm to "conduct a specific public relations campaign" and "work is to begin immediately and continue until ascendancy of client to head of IMF." Read: ensure he gets the job.

You thought that it could never happen

Greek minister commits suicide over bribe allegations 


by our Greek eye witness

Κρεμασμένος βρέθηκε ο 29χρονος Τζέονγκ Τζονγκ Κουάν, ο οποίος ήταν ύποπτος για εμπλοκή σε σκάνδαλο «στημένων» παιχνιδιών.
«Αισθάνομαι ντροπή που είμαι μέρος του “στησίματος” αγώνων», ήταν το σημείωμα που βρέθηκε σε κεντρικό ξενοδοχείο της Σεούλ.
 Για το θέμα αυτό, οι εισαγγελείς της πόλης Τσανγκουόν (400χλμ νοτιοανατολικά της Σεούλ) έχουν συλλάβει ήδη πέντε ποδοσφαιριστές, με τους τέσσερις να είναι της Νταετζόν Σίτιζενς.
 Για το θύμα, υπήρχαν υποψίες πως βοηθούσε στο «στήσιμο» αγώνων με το να δωροδοκεί παίκτες της K-League μέσω ενδιάμεσου. Ο ίδιος, σε υψηλό επίπεδο αγωνίστηκε μόλις μία φορά, συγκεκριμένα στην Τζεονγκμπούκ Χιουντάι Μότορς.
 Ο Κουάν, είχε μεταπηδήσει στην τρίτη κατηγορία του κορεατικού πρωταθλήματος αφού με αυτόν τον τρόπο ήταν δυσκολότερο να εντοπιστεί. Μόλις όμως οι αρχές τον κάλεσαν και τα Μέσα έγραψαν πως ο 29χρονος είναι μέρος της «παράγκας», αποφάσισε να δώσει τέλος στη ζωή του. Εξάλλου, οι Ασιάτες είναι πολύ περήφανοι και οι κώδικες ηθικής που έχουν είναι πολύ διαφορετικοί απ’ότι του υπόλοιπου πληθυσμού του πλανήτη. 

A lost generation in pursuit of the New Socialist Man

Quick Love, Brief Shel

By Yoani Sánchez

“To the warm shelter of 214…” began a song by Silvio Rodriguez which — in my adolescent naivete — I listened to as if it were a riddle. So it was until a friend, who’d lived a little more than I had, unblushingly clarified the phrase. It was simply the address of a well-known Havana motel, where couples could find a place for quick love in a country already gripped by housing limitations. Waiting outside those places were women who covered their faces with scarves and sunglasses, while the men paid the desk clerk and got the key to the room. An insistent knock on the door would warn them that their time was over and others were waiting to enter.

Havana’s inns, scenes of so many infidelities, sudden passions, and even innumerable passions that led to formal matrimony with several children. These places, once flourishing, faced a long period of stigma and then a precipitous decline. They passed from sites of ardor to become cramped housing for victims of building collapses. Put like that, it sounds fair: substituting necessity for pleasure, the rapture of the flesh for the pressing needs of a family. One after the other, the city’s motels were closed to the public and their small rooms were taken up by people who lost their homes to the winds of a hurricane or the ravages of a fire. Informal love began to move to the bushes, dark corners, or, quietly, to the same room where Grandma was sleeping. Those with hard currency could, in turn, seek out private homes that rented rooms for 5 convertible pesos for several hours.

Now, passing through Fraternity Park late at night, it’s not uncommon to hear to a groan in the shadows, the muffled sound of clothes rubbing against each other. The majority of people my age and younger have never had their own roof under which to caress their partner, or a private bed where they can lie wrapped in each other’s arms. People who haven’t known what it is to live in a city where there are motels with neon signs and tiny rooms where you can make love for at least an hour. Nor do they understand the song — outdated now — of that singer-songwriter, and names such as Hotel Venus, 11th and 24th, The Countryside, or Ayestaran Cottages do not awaken any pleasant memories.

Bureaucrats are always behind the curve

Fifteen Things to Despise about Government Regulation

by Richard W. Fulmer and Robert L. Bradley 

Between the current financial mess and the debate over carbon-dioxide emissions controls, there is a lot of talk about regulation these days.  We are told, for example, that the recession would have been prevented if proper regulations had been in place.  While it is true that (by definition) the “right” regulations would have prevented bad and ensured good, it is also true that had an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent dictator been in charge, the recession would have been avoided as well.  The problem, of course, is that God, being otherwise occupied, didn’t run for president during the last election.

Enacting the right regulations is somewhat simpler than electing an omni-everything being to run the world — but not much.  As evidence, consider that it was a lot of the wrong regulations that got us into this mess in the first place.  Also consider the oft-heard argument that financial regulators needed to “get out ahead of the innovators.”  Clearly, a job for the omniscient.  There is, after all, a reason why the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk preceded the establishment of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Any time government regulators try to do much more than lay out the basic rules of the game, unintended consequences and moral hazards rear their ugly heads.  The following list of pitfalls, adapted from our bookEnergy: The Master Resource, is offered as a caution to regulatory enthusiasts.

1.  Laws and regulations may institutionalize the tragedy of the commons. The rule of capture (which stated that oil belonged to whomever pumped it out of the ground) and related regulations led petroleum companies to drill as many wells as possible in order to get the oil before their competitors could. By encouraging companies to drill otherwise unnecessary wells, the rule led to wasted resources and sometimes to reservoir damage.

Groundwater in the United States is still a common-property resource and because no one owns it, no one has an incentive to conserve it.  Farmers in California, enjoying subsidized water prices, have been growing water-intensive crops such as rice and cotton in desert areas despite endemic water shortages.

2.  Special interests lobby the government to get their products or services mandated by regulation. The mandated use of ethanol in automotive fuel is an example.  In the United States most ethanol is made from corn. Farmers who grow corn and companies that make ethanol from it have heavily pressured Congress to require its use.  As a further subsidy the government has banned imported ethanol even though it can be purchased from other countries for less than it costs to make it here.  One unintended consequence has been an increase in food prices.  As the price of corn has risen, so has corn-based animal feed and with it the price of beef, milk, chicken, and eggs.

3.  Regulations can create (or destroy) entire industries overnight. The use of such power adds uncertainty and risk to the market. If risk reaches unacceptable levels, investors put their money elsewhere. The concentration of political power in Washington forces companies to lobby Congress and the White House for protection against its arbitrary use. Corporate lobbying, in turn, increases people’s distrust of the system.

4.  Regulations are often the result of compromise. After concessions have been made to this powerful representative or that influential senator, the resulting law or regulation may be very different from the original proposal and have far different consequences. Politics may be “the art of the possible,” but what is politically possible may be neither practical nor environmentally friendly.

Compromise can also result in laws so vaguely worded that they can be interpreted in any number of ways. In the end it is left up to regulatory agencies and the courts to decide what a bill actually means. Their interpretations may be very different from the original intentions of the bill’s proponents.

The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, for example, stated that only new factories and power plants would have to meet the tighter emissions standards imposed by the act. Existing plants would continue to be regulated under the preexisting standards unless the old plants were “substantially modified.” Unfortunately, Congress did not precisely specify what “substantially modified” meant.

In 1998 the EPA sued the owners of a number of old plants, charging that the upgrades done over the years to these plants had cumulatively added up to “substantial modifications.” The owners responded, with some justification, that the EPA had originally approved their changes and that altering the rules after the fact amounted to passage of a retroactive law, something explicitly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution (Section 9, Article 3).

5.  Lobbyists may support regulations as a way of hurting their competition. Utility companies with “old source” power plants, for example, welcomed the Clean Air Act’s 1977 amendments because it put potential competitors at a disadvantage by raising the cost of market entry.

Other amendments to the Clean Air Act required power companies to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by installing scrubbers. A less expensive way to lower emissions would have been to switch to low-sulfur coal, but eastern labor unions and coal mining companies (which produce high-sulfur coal) successfully lobbied to get the requirement for scrubbers enacted into law. This resulted in a waste of resources since (otherwise unnecessary) scrubbers had to be built, installed, and powered.

In the United States during the twentieth century, government intervention in the energy market was commonly industry-driven. Firms often organized lobbying groups to obtain favorable regulation or special subsidies. Free-market economist Milton Friedman complained, “Time and again, I have castigated the oil companies for . . . seeking and getting governmental privilege.”

6.  Regulations can eliminate or alter feedback. Feedback is an essential component of any activity. Imagine how dangerous the world would be for a person who had lost the ability to feel pain (as happens with certain forms of leprosy). Such a person could do serious damage to himself by continuing to walk on a badly sprained ankle, or putting his hand on a hot stove without knowing it.

Government action can create a sort of institutional leprosy by weakening or even destroying the feedback loops that make it possible for companies to know whether their activities are of any value. For instance, by taxing productive companies in order to subsidize unproductive ones, governments perpetuate the waste of resources.

"Cui bono"

Confusion Masquerading as Science? Taxes and Spending

May 29, 2011

by Mario Rizzo

I am always amazed that when many economists give policy advice the sophistication and logical rigor that the discipline so values gets completely lost.
There are many ways to interpret this. One is that the level of precision appropriate to theory and to applied economics is not appropriate to the “art” of economic policy. Of course, I would suggest that maybe this teaches us something about the ultimate value of sophistication in the theoretical product. Do the precise concepts of theory and applied economics have referents in the “real world”? Or is most of the precision lost when we try to understand the world and recommend policies? This is an important question.
However, here I am interested in the sloppiness of the policy-relevant discussions that even very good and respectable economists produce. One interesting example is a recent “Economix” piece in The New York Times by the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt.
I have two points: first, the confusing mix of science and value judgments; and second, the naïve analysis of the political process.
Let’s examine one of Reinhardt’s conclusions:

“Looking at the Congressional Budget Office’s chart, I came away convinced that Mr. Greenspan had it right: given what we, the people, expect the federal government to deliver – including, once again these days, a social insurance program called “federal disaster relief” — the only way to avoid a looming fiscal disaster would be to return to the higher taxes across the board that prevailed during the Clinton administration. (An alternative would be to bite the bullet and adopt a value-added tax, as other nations have done.)”

The previous charts that Reinhardt discusses portray that absent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, recovery measures (aka “stimulus”), TARP, Fannie and Freddie May, and the economic downturn, the current deficit would be very small. In the foreseeable future the roles of the recovery measures and TARP/Fannie/Freddie shrink. So we are left with primarily with the Bush tax cuts and the lingering effects of the economic downturn. The latter is the permanent reduction in national income and hence in tax revenue caused by the recession.

From 2-to-1 to 1-to-2

Government vs. Production

So it’s just not true that the government bureaucrats aren’t "making things." They've been experts at making expensive jobs for themselves, experts at creating perpetual dependency and everlasting victimhood, experts at creating the road to national bankruptcy.

by Ralph Reiland

Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government. "The United States may soon wind up with the distinction that makes business leaders cringe -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world," wrote New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last week.

"Topping out at 35 percent, America's corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate," reported Kocieniewski.

Include additional taxes imposed at the state level, and the corporate tax rate in the U.S. jumps to more than 40 percent in 19 states.

Leading the pack are Iowa and Pennsylvania with corporate income taxes, respectively, of 12 percent and 9.99 percent, creating the nation's highest barriers via taxation to new corporate investment and associated new jobs.

Similarly in relation to obstacles to business expansion: Create an education system that produces four times more college graduates in social science and history than in engineering and computer science, and we can expect to see too many American firms unable to compete in the global marketplace and too many academics writing papers on America's lack of competitiveness.

In "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers" (The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2011), Stephen Moore, senior economics writer at The Journal, reported that in the U.S. today, "there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)."

In short, we got better at expanding bureaucracies than manufacturing cars, better at making rules and regulations than producing clothes or oil.

It wasn't always this way. The world's first automatic transmission was invented in 1904 in Boston. The year before, Orville Wright became the first person in history to be a passenger in a machine that had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight.

In 1960, the aforementioned 2-to-1 ratio between government employees and manufacturing workers in America was weighted precisely in the opposite direction, as Moore reported, with "15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government."

Add to manufacturing the other key sectors in the American economy where people still make something tangible, something touchable, and the total employment still doesn't equal the bloated payroll levels in the government.

"More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined," explained Moore.

"Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital," reported Moore, "have more government bureaucrats than people making things."

Well, not exactly. It's not fully accurate to say that government bureaucrats aren't "making things."

They made a federal anti-poverty program that's produced a price tag of more than $13 trillion since the mid-1960s, plus trillions more at the local and state levels.

"The federal government now has 122 separate anti-poverty programs" with a cost of "$591 billion in 2009," recently reported the Cato Institute's Michael D. Tanner in Investor's Business Daily. That averages out to "$14,849 for every poor man, woman and child in America," Tanner explained. That's $59,396 for a poverty family of four -- in a nation where the median household income that same year was $49,777. Much of that $59,396 never gets to the poor, of course. It goes to the bureaucrats who “manage” the poor, the poverty experts who’d be out of work if they eliminated poverty.

So it’s just not true that the government bureaucrats aren’t "making things." They've been experts at making expensive jobs for themselves, experts at creating perpetual dependency and everlasting victimhood, experts at creating the road to national bankruptcy.

Without feathers

Midnight in Woodyland

by Christian Toto

If you thought Woody Allen waxed poetic about New York City on film, wait until you settle into your seat to see Midnight in Paris.

Allen’s latest effort, hastily dubbed a return to form by his gooey admirers, is a love letter to the City of Light. It also sees fit to mock Republicans, tea partiers, and anyone who thinks having a mistress might be unethical.

Watching a new Allen movie is akin to seeing the artist’s psyche laid bare. We know too much about the off-screen Allen, from his morally repugnant romance with then-girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter to his support for admitted child rapist Roman Polanski.

It puts his movies in a less flattering light. And, frankly, Allen’s current projects can’t measure up to his older, better films.

In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson plays a flustered screenwriter named Gil visiting Paris with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams).

Gil is entranced by everything Paris has to offer, but he really longs to be in the Paris of the 1920s, a time when some of the greatest writers in history roamed the streets.

“I’m a Hollywood hack who never gave literature a real shot until now,” he wails.

One drunken night, a vintage car drives up to Gil and its passengers insist he hop in. A few minutes later Gil is hobnobbing with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and swapping stories with Ernest Hemingway.

Gil’s initial shock of being next to his literary idols quickly turns to merriment. Why question the time space continuum when you can pester Hemingway for writing tips?

The next day Gil finds himself back in modern day Paris along with his unpleasant fiancée, but every night he makes an excuse to revisit the city block where that magical car escorted him back in time. And, sure enough, the car keeps reappearing right on schedule.

But can Paris’ romanticized past deliver a meaningful future for Gil? And will he find true love with Picasso’s current squeeze (Marion Cotillard, who delivers the most enchanting performance in the movie)?

Midnight in Paris begins like a tourist video, with Allen rotating a series of static shots of the city in action. Yawn. The pedestrian start would be entirely forgivable if that old Allen spark were soon to follow.

It’s progressive, y’see

Burns Night for Israel: Scotland’s Literary Shame

by Ben Cohen

Heinrich Heine’s maxim about people being burned where books are also burned conjures up some of the most hellish images of Nazi rule. Raging bonfires devouring page after page of literature deemed toxic, their flames growing higher with each volume thrown onto the pile. There goes Freud, now it’s Hemingway, next up is Proust, until finally you reach the gates of Auschwitz.

By contrast, a book boycott seems a rather dour affair. Brownshirted thugs burning armfuls of books while surrounded by screaming onlookers is one thing. A bespectacled librarian removing books from the shelves to the warehouse is something else. No?

Actually, no In the case that I have in mind, concerning a provincial Scottish council’s decision to deprive its library users of books by Israeli authors, the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. And I’m not the only person to say so. Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ron Prosor, a man not normally given to bombast, declared: “A place that boycotts books is not far from a place that burns them.” No doubt, those council bureaucrats implementing the boycott will be incensed by his statement. After all, while every Nazi supports a boycott of Israel, not every supporter of a boycott of Israel is a Nazi. Most boycott advocates, sensitive souls that they are, would be sorely wounded by such a suggestion.

Ergo, all the mealy-mouthed qualifications that follow. This is about solidarity with the Palestinians, not hatred of the Jews and their works; it’s progressive, y’see. It’s not a blanket ban, but something that will be decided on a book-by-book basis. And oh yes, according to West Dunbartonshire Regional Council Spokesperson Malcolm Bennie, the boycott doesn’t apply to Israeli books printed outside Israel, just those printed in Israel. In other words, the Harcourt edition I have of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness is OK. My prized English edition of Ahad Ha’am’s Selected Essays, published by Sefer ve Sefel of Jerusalem, is not OK.

The Scots have, ironically, a rather Yiddish-sounding verb for this kind of thing: to “haiver,” roughly translated as talking nonsense, or “bollocks,” as it’s more commonly known throughout the British Isles. It is “haivering” because all the excuses and rationalizations cannot camouflage one basic truth. Just as the German book-burnings aimed at obliterating ideas deemed repellent to Nazi ideology, so its sanitized adaptation, in the form of a book boycott, seeks to quarantine those ideas on the wrong side of anti-Zionist ideology.

The Business of Poverty is booming

Obscene Salaries Dominate at Int’l Development Banks

by Richard Pollock

Many of Washington’s 2,600 technocrats working at the 

International Monetary Fund do not regard Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lavish lifestyle as an anomaly.

Privately they admire it, recognizing it as a description of their own standard of living. They call their many unseen perks “golden handshakes.” At the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, and at the IMF, you find extravagantly paid men and women who masquerade as anti-poverty fighters for the Third World. As one World Bank vice president said upon his resignation: “Poverty reduction is the last thing on most World Bank bureaucrats’ minds.”

These global institutions are supposed to act as non-profits, but big salaries and big perks rule as the norm. And you’re paying for them: as the largest single contributor, American taxpayers pick up the tab.

By now everyone knows about DSK’s extravagant $420,000 employment agreement that included an additional $73,000 for living expenses — a provision explained thusly by the IMF: “To enable you to maintain … a scale of living appropriate to your position.” Most of the non-profit development world remained silent when the Fund announced a $250,000 “golden parachute” severance for the indicted managing director.

A PJM survey found that a common annual compensation package for senior management at the anti-poverty banks exceeds $500,000 — tax-free. World Bank President Robert Zoellick currently receives $441,980 in base salary and $284,500 in other benefits. Strauss-Kahn’s deputy, John Lipsky, receives $384,000 in base salary plus “living allowances.”