Wishful thinking

Gorby Obama and the Collapse of the American Left

By Jeffrey Lord 

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world…. What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. -- President Ronald Reagan addressing the British Parliament, 1982

It's over.

For the American Left -- those who have made it their work to enshrine Leftist or Leftist Lite ideology into American life and law -- the end is nigh. Ronald Reagan accurately predicted a similar fate for their more heavy-handed Communist cousins, and now their own demise is clearly in progress.

 And Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson have left Barack Obama holding the bag.

If in fact Reagan was right about the inevitability of the collapse of Communism -- and to the astonishment of his critics he was -- his "ash heap of history" speech more than applies to those who seriously believed that with a nip here and a tuck there the same left-wing theories could work in America.

By the 1980's Reagan -- and others like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II -- were dealing in a world where the signs of an eventual Communist collapse were apparent in all manner of events large and small. Here are but a few of those signs:

• East and West Germany: The two side-by-side nations, artificial constructs dating from the end of World War II, had become vivid symbols of the successes of a Western-style capitalist democracy versus a Communist Left socialist state. Prosperity oozed from West Germany -- and West Berlin. Germans were constantly trying to flee the East for the West.

• The Berlin Wall: While many in the day saw it as a permanent fixture, in fact it was a literally concrete-and-mortar admission of Communism as a failure. This showcased a society that depended on force to keep its people from leaving.

• Rebellions in the Soviet Empire: From East Germany in 1953 to Hungary in 1956 to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and even in Poland as early as 1970, rebellions against the Communist rulers had broken out.

• Poland and the rise of Solidarity: It was becoming increasingly clear that the Communist government of Poland could no longer hide its economic failures. A prominent Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a leading Polish dissident, disappeared -- his bound body finally discovered in the River Vistula. The leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, became internationally famous as he organized union strikes against the regime. And perhaps most dramatically, the Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, electrifying Poland and those trapped behind the Iron Curtain.

• Failure in Afghanistan: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a failure, stretching an already failing empire for cash and troops.

• The Arms Race: It was becoming increasingly clear that with an economy in tatters, it was impossible for the Soviets to maintain a serious arms race with the United States.

Collectively these facts telegraphed (to those paying attention, at least) that the entire idea of Communism was, in Reagan's words, a "form of insanity -- a temporary aberration" in history.

Famously, Reagan -- against the most assured "wisdom" of the day -- believed that to challenge Communism directly was to win, because the insanity was ultimately unsustainable.

Take a good look around the real world in which President Obama is now operating. What do you see?

• Debt ceiling: A national debt of $14.2 trillion, with no end in sight. This has launched a battle royal over raising the limit yet again without increases and with spending cuts.

• Wisconsin: Angry Wisconsin state workers demanding a continuation of benefits the governor says will drive the state toward bankruptcy. Similar fights have erupted in New Jersey and Ohio.

• Moody's and the U.S. credit rating: Various credit rating agencies warn that to continue on the economic path of Obamanomics is to lose the AAA rating held by the U.S. government since 1917.

• Social Security Trust Fund: The Obama threat not to pay Social Security checks on August 3 is, in the words of our friends at the Wall Street Journal: an "admission, however inadvertent, that the government has spent so much that even its own accounting and political fictions are collapsing."

The Downfall

Europe's Failed Political Class

By Samuel Gregg 

The casualty list from Europe's apparently-endless financial crisis continues to grow. If you're young, a taxpayer, or a German in today's EU, you have good reason to believe you've been dealt a very bad hand.

There is, however, one impending casualty whose demise is fully merited. And that's the credibility of Europe's political class.

Having assured Europeans for the past 50 years that they know what they are doing, Europe's politicians are now helplessly presiding over the continent's worst economic maelstrom since the Depression: a calamity to which their policies have considerably contributed.

And it is a class of European politicians to which I'm referring -- a group that's even developed distinctly familial characteristics.

One European politician who's been in the spot-light since 2009, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, is the son and grandson of former Greek prime ministers Andreas Papandreou and George Papandreou Sr. The word "dynasty" comes to mind.

Likewise, a front-runner for the Socialist party's nomination for French President in the 2012 elections, Martine Aubry, is the daughter of Jacques Delors. Aside from being the eighth European Commission president, Delors served as economics minister under France's late President, François Mitterrand.

Speaking of the Mitterrands, François's nephew, Frédéric Mitterrand, is presently President Nicolas Sarkozy's culture minister. The latter's son, Jean Sarkozy, was elected as a city councilor at the tender age of 22. France's hard-right National Front illustrated just how much it had become a regular part of France's political landscape when its leadership passed from Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine Le Pen (whose first two husbands, incidentally, were party officials) in January this year.

Ireland is a case-study in its own right. Literally dozens of family members -- sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandsons, granddaughters, nephews, nieces, cousins, wives, husbands, in-laws -- have followed each other into the legislature (sometimes into the same legislative seat) since Irish independence in 1922. 

In short, family ties permeate Europe's political landscape in ways that dwarf the Daleys of Chicago, the Bushes of Texas, and the Cuomos of New York.

Further compounding matters in Europe, however, is a professionalization of politics that makes the Cuomos look positively amateurish. Most European political parties with legislative representation have relatively small memberships. Nevertheless, they constitute the basis of a full-time career for many party members.

A good example is Finland's president Tarja Halonen. Her political career began at university when she served as Secretary of the National Union of Students between 1969 and 1970. The following year, Halonen joined the Social Democratic Party (which today has just 50,000 members) and worked as a lawyer for the Social Democrat-affiliated trade union movement. In 1974, she became the prime minister's parliamentary secretary. Two years later, Halonen was elected to the Helsinki city council. In 1979, she was elected to parliament, and served there for 21 years. Halonen went on to hold several ministerial posts until elected President in 2000.

In short, since her time in university, Halonen has done nothing career-wise except politically-related activity or holding government office. Her story, however, is quite typical.

Take today's President of the European Council, Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy. His political career began when he served as chairman of his Christian Democrat party's youth wing at the age of 26. Apart from a three year stint in the early 1970s working at Belgium's central bank and a short time in the 1980s as an academic, Rompuy has continuously held political offices before assuming his current position.

There are exceptions to this pattern (e.g., Germany's Angela Merkel). But you have to search long and hard to find them. That alone makes a mockery of the usual European happy-talk about "openness" and "diversity."

Which brings me to my last point: the diversity -- or rather the lack thereof -- when it comes to ideas among Europe's political classes.

Regardless of whether they're on the left or right, most European politicians share a broad commitment to the European social model.

Broadly-speaking, this model affirms some market institutions (such as free prices), but also heavily emphasizes major wealth-redistributions, large welfare states, and strong labor-market regulation. This is overlaid by a strong stress on top-down coordination by the government (i.e., professional politicians).

The problems proceeding from this mixture -- out-of-control spending, disincentives to be entrepreneurial, soft corruption, excessively large public-sectors -- have been understood since the word "Eurosclerosis" became commonplace in the 1970s. So why, even now, are Europe's politicians so slow to react accordingly by aggressively addressing the causes of sclerosis?

One reason is that market-liberalization would mean lessening their importance in the economy. Less top-down coordination means fewer top-down coordinators.

But another cause of reform-failure is that most European politicians have little-to-no experience of life in the business world.

Five years ago, a survey of the French Senate revealed that a mere 30 of its 331 members had ever worked in the private sector. Not surprisingly, they turned out to know little about hum-drum matters such as how to meet a payroll, why heavy labor market regulation makes you reluctant to hire people, or how high taxes dampens your entrepreneurial enthusiasms.

Hence, no-one should be surprised that so many EU politicians' response to the continent's current problems is to advocate morecentralization of economic policy and more regulation, and all in the name of more European-wide "coordination." Nothing could be more foreign to such mindsets than imagining that they and their rather sheltered outlook on life might be part of the problem.

Time, however, is against them. As Europe's crisis worsens, the ancien régime's efforts to control matters through yet more intergovernmental loans, bailouts, and accounting sleight-of-hands will continue yielding meager results. Unfortunately, like the Bourbons, most of Europe's political class have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. And, as in the past, it will be ordinary Europeans rather than their political masters who pay the price.

The devil made them do it

Education Is Worse Than We Thought

by Walter E. Williams

Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom's essay "Minorities in College – Good News, But...," on Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores "mean that black students aged 17 do not read with any greater facility than whites who are four years younger and still in junior high. ... Exactly the same glaring gaps appear in NAEP's tests of basic mathematics skills." Thernstrom asked, "If we put a randomly-selected group of 100 eighth-graders and another of 100 twelfth-graders in a typical college, would we expect the first group to perform as well as the second?" In other words, is it reasonable to expect a college freshman of any race who has the equivalent of an eighth-grade education to compete successfully with those having a 12th-grade education?

Maybe this huge gap in black/white academic achievement was in the paternalistic minds of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals justices who recently struck down Michigan's ban on the use of race and sex as criteria for college admissions. The court said that it burdens minorities and violates the U.S. Constitution. Given the black education disaster, racial preferences in college admissions will become a permanent feature, because given the status quo, blacks as a group will never make it into top colleges based upon academic merit.

The situation is worse than we thought. U.S. News & World Report (7/7/2011) came out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal," saying that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating scandals in U.S. history, according to a scathing 413-page investigative report released Tuesday by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal." The report says that more than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta schools investigated cheated on the 2009 standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress. Eighty-two teachers have confessed to erasing students' answers. A total of 178 educators, including 38 principals, many of whom are black, systematically fabricated test scores of struggling black students to cover up academic failure. The governor's report says that cheating orders came from the top and that widespread cheating has occurred since at least 2001. So far, no Atlanta educator has been criminally charged, even though some of the cheating was brazen, such as teachers pointing to correct answers while students were taking the tests, reading answers aloud during testing and seating low-achieving students next to high-achieving students to make cheating easier.

Teacher and principal exam cheating is not restricted to Atlanta; it's widespread. The Detroit Free Press and USA Today (3/8/2011)released an investigative report that found higher-than-average erasure rates on tests taken by students at 34 schools in and around Detroit in 2008 and 2009. Overall, their report "found 304 schools where experts say the gains on standardized tests in 2009-10 are so statistically improbable, they merit further investigation. Besides Michigan, the other states (where suspected cheating was found) were Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and California." A Dallas Morning News investigation reported finding high rates of test erasures in Texas. Six teachers and two principals were dismissed after cheating was uncovered.

In 2007, Baltimore's George Washington Elementary School was named a Blue Ribbon School after the number of students who passed state reading tests shot from 32 percent to nearly 100 percent in just four years. Last year, The Baltimore Sun reported thousands of erasures on those tests. Susan Burgess, the school's principal, had her professional license revoked after an investigation by state and city school board officials.

Why is there widespread cheating by America's educators? According to Diane Ravitch, who is the research professor of education at New York University, it's not teachers and principals who are to blame; it's the mandates of the No Child Left Behind law, enacted during the George W. Bush administration. In other words, the devil made them do it.

Bald Chickens

Cut, Cap and Balance: A Chicken Tale

by Karen Kwiatkowski

It is hilarious to observe the most recent preening and fluffing behavior of the national bird in Washington. No, it’s not the bald eagle, or the alleged choice of Ben Franklin, the survival-oriented wild turkey.

The national bird of the federal government, wholly dependent upon a system that feeds it, conveyor-belt style, all the precious fruit of the shrinking American working class it can eat, is the chicken.

And not just any chicken, mind you. The federal government, the elected class in particular, is like the chicken grown in the poultry houses all over the Shenandoah Valley and beyond. These guys and gals look all grown up, but are amazingly immature, inexperienced and ill-informed about the real world. They spend their entire lives closely shielded from the outside world, exposed to little more than others like themselves, with a water drip they take for granted, and a never-empty all-you-can-eat free lunch dispenser. These helpless yet blissfully unaware chickens are a testament to the predictable tendencies of applied central planning, and they are the perfect icon for the government of the United States of America today.

They start out running and chirping, but before a few months pass, these guys are crippled by their own weight. By design, these chickens must be harvested early, before they die of heart failure, or fall down and never get up, trampled and pecked to death by their compadres.

Welcome to the Congress of the United States, analogy courtesy of Perdue, Tyson, and Pilgrim’s Pride.

The latest spectacle of the chickens who run our country comes from the so-called conservatives in the House – who are currently pushing for a Constitutional Amendment to "balance the federal budget," as part of a "Cut, Cap and Balance" package that doesn’t cut, raises the borrowing cap, and continues the ongoing and unsustainable imbalance in government spending. Little of what these Congressmen are doing today, or have been doing for the past twenty years has been even remotely constitutional, so it isn’t clear why amending the Constitution is ever necessary. Most Congressmen haven’t completely read it, don’t understand what they did read, and believe it is a prop best used during election campaigns. Most don’t believe it is the law or binding in any way on their votes and actions.

One side of the Janus-state – the so-called left side, is angry that the Cut, Cap and Balance may interfere with their political base and agendas, while failing to raise tax collections on that part of the country that they do not claim. The so-called right side of the Janus-state believes that as long as defense spending for the corporate empire is nurtured, preserved and expanded, their proposal will appear "conservative" and be welcomed as titillating foreplay for the November elections.

It seems like they take us all for fools, but as usual it is the genuflecting Congress and the emperor who are fooling themselves. While the United States as a functional value has been calmly downgraded (again!) to a C-minus and Americans rapidly seek alternative home bases, passports, ways of making a living off payroll and out of sight, conservatives recall the "glory days" of 1994 and 1995, and as the strutting feather-headed duo of Eric Cantor and Bob Goodlatteproclaim, it might have been so different, if only.

The crux of the Cantor-Goodlatte position is that, in March 1995, if only the Congress had sent a federal balanced budget amendment to the states for ratification, all of their congressional overspending, their lack of personal and institutional principle, their paucity of restraint, their blatant inability to comprehend basic economics, their obsession for power over the less worthy, their obscene vote selling and incessant influence whoring – all of these sins would have been washed away, instantly and permanently.

The whole debate is moot, because it has been demonstrated from the beginning that Congress has never met a law that it couldn’t ignore, modify, or break, starting with the original Constitution.

It is also moot because these congressmen assume that ¾ of the several states would approve such a balanced budget amendment, then, now, or in the future. The states well understand their fundamental relationship to the federal government, that unwritten law of federalism. States exist to bring home the goodies, ideally paid for by other states or by a collective accumulation of shared debt owed by future voters and future taxpayers, again mostly residing in other states. The very idea of a demand to pay the federal bill in a given fiscal year (even 18 months later, as the proposed language has it, allowing time to "measure" the GDP) would be simultaneously laughable and repulsive to state governors and to the people, because they intuitively understand that it would mean both fewer goodies and higher taxation, for the wealthier states first and eventually for even the poorest and smallest of states.

The states would overwhelmingly reject this amendment, even if it had teeth and claws, which it does not. This proposal is the rohypnol in the Constitutional martini, following the tradition of federal government boorishness of the 16^th Amendment and the 1973 War Powers Act. Cap, Cut and Balance should be nicknamed the Roofie Amendment.

Given that most prudent states would immediately just say no, I can envision a contrarian movement among some states to consider the risk and actively support the Balanced Budget Amendment. Counting on staying competitive for business and productivity as people flee ever more federally "owned" states, certain governors might support the Roofie Amendment in order to eventually weaken the DC loyalists and set the stage for real secession. North Dakota, with its questionable legal statehood status may want to go slow in correcting their constitution. A balanced budget amendment, if passed, would bring economic slavery to the more federally integrated states of the union, and place North Dakota in a super-cool position of pre-existing independence from Washington. Republic of Texas flag wavers, Hawaiian revolutionaries, and Vermont secessionists, take note!

American states, of course, cannot print their own money. A smaller group of states, with interests in allowing alternative hard currencies, or even those with a tradition of creative community currencies, might join with the hopeful independents in supporting a Balanced Budget Amendment as a means to ultimate monetary freedom from D.C. Utah's sound money movement and upstate New York community business vouchers, gold and silver holders everywhere, upon ratification of a Balanced Budget Amendment, would become even more valuable, reasonable, popular, and useful.

There are many ways to critique and chuckle at the proposals by Cantor and Goodlatte to somehow rein in federal spending by making a law, but there is one staring God-awful gap in the proposed amendment. No version of the law, past of present, deals with or even mentions the existence and processes of bank of the federal government, the Federal Reserve. For the liars in Washington, D.C., both on the left and right, this failure to address the Federal Reserve is a very good thing. Running out of money? We’ll "do you a favor" and print more!

In 1994, the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was the bank’s Bifrons. Feared and powerful, moving corpses here and there, scaring all the chickens. It is unthinkable that a balanced budget amendment in 1994 would have addressed the Fed. Only Ron Paul, writing of gold and liberty and transparency, boldly spoke of the Bifrons, then and now. Today, a less impressive Bifrons exists, and Dr. Paul chairs the financial services subcommittee. He routinely takes on the corpse carrier – but still, Cantor and Goodlatte and the rest of the chicken-hearted, bird-brained "conservatives" in Congress cannot bring themselves to address the Fed in the language of the Cut, Cap and Balance Amendment.

Our feathered friends in Congress do enjoy their water drip and their never-ending free lunch. There is a solution, and it starts by not listening to dim-witted chickens trying to buy you one more drink before the bar closes. End the Fed and its interest rate fixing, repeal the 16^th Amendment, repeal the 17^thAmendment, bring the troops home, end the empire. Start with just these things, and watch the country’s economy and its attitude soar, the young delighted that they actually have a hopeful and peaceful future, the old embraced and cared for, the middle generations employed and empowered. In parts and pieces, we can take back our country, and most of us will survive when the empire ends. I find myself oddly reminded of Hoover’s purported campaign promise, and FDR’s four freedoms. I, too, see chicken on the menu.

How wages rise

The Central Role of Saving and Capital Goods

By L. V. Mises

As the popular philosophy of the common man sees it, human wealth and welfare are the products of the cooperation of two primordial factors: nature and human labor. All the things that enable man to live and to enjoy life are supplied either by nature or by work or by a combination of nature-given opportunities with human labor. As nature dispenses its gifts gratuitously, it follows that all the final fruits of production, the consumers' goods, ought to be allotted exclusively to the workers whose toil has created them.

But unfortunately in this sinful world conditions are different. There the "predatory" classes of the "exploiters" want to reap although they have not sown. The landowners, the capitalists, and the entrepreneurs appropriate to themselves what by rights belongs to the workers who have produced it. All the evils of the world are the necessary effect of this originary wrong.

Such are the ideas that dominate the thinking of most of our contemporaries. The socialists and the syndicalists conclude that in order to render human affairs more satisfactory it is necessary to eliminate those whom their jargon calls the "robber barons" — i.e., the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and the landowners — entirely; the conduct of all production affairs ought to be entrusted either to the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion, the state (in the Marxian terminology called Society), or to the men employed in the individual plants or branches of production.

Other people are more considerate in their reformist zeal. They do not intend to expropriate those whom they call the "leisure class" entirely. They want only to take away from them as much as is needed to bring about "more equality" in the "distribution" of wealth and income.

But both groups, the party of the thoroughgoing socialists and that of the more cautious reformers, agree on the basic doctrine according to which profit and interest are "unearned" income and therefore morally objectionable. Both groups agree that profit and interest are the cause of the misery of the great majority of all honest workingmen and their families, and, in a decent and satisfactory organization of society, ought to be sharply curbed, if not entirely abolished.

Yet this whole interpretation of human conditions is fallacious. The policies engendered by it are pernicious from whatever point of view we may judge them. Western civilization is doomed if we do not succeed very soon in substituting reasonable methods of dealing with economic problems for the present disastrous methods.

Three Factors of Production

Mere work — that is, effort not guided by a rational plan and not aided by the employment of tools and intermediary products — brings about very little for the improvement of the worker's condition. Such work is not a specifically human device. It is what man has in common with all other animals. It is bestirring oneself instinctively and using one's bare hands to gather whatever is eatable and drinkable that can be found and appropriated.

Nanny state for all

Gardener ordered to remove plants or face fines

By David Hurley

A resident has been ordered by Frankston City Council to tear out plants from a nature strip in front of her home.

Hannah Russell has tended the plants on the nature strip in Seaford Grove, Seaford, for the past 12 years.

Ms Russell, 60, said she had asked the council at the time for permission to brighten up the nature strip and was given an enthusiastic thumbs up.

So she was shocked to receive a letter from the council last month saying she could face a daily $200 fine if she did not remove the plants within 14 days.

Ms Russell has responded by tidying up her front garden and the nature strip, but is refusing to destroy her garden.

"I believe it is a thing of great beauty and it would be a waste to have to destroy it," she said.

"The council has made out it is an eyesore, but it is anything but. It has been a real labour of love."

The council said in its letter to Ms Russell it had no record of her asking for permission to "beautify" the nature strip.

Despite the threat of fines, Frankston chief executive George Modrich said on Friday council had no interest in issuing a fine.

"A standard 'notice to comply' was issued, however, at this stage, council has no interest in fining Ms Russell, as evidenced by the fact that no fine has been issued well beyond July 5," Mr Modrich said.

‘Of course I support a free press, but…’

All-party support for regulating the media threatens to reverse the historic gains of the struggle for press freedom.

by Mick Hume 

You would be hard pressed to know it from the madness of recent news headlines, but there has been an even more important issue at stake in the hacking furore than whether Rebekah Brooks would lose her key to the News Corp executive washroom, or whether a committee of British MPs would get to enjoy an orgasm of outrage in front of Rupert Murdoch this week.

What matters far above and beyond all of that is the future of a free press. And it already seems clear that, no matter who might eventually get convicted of what and how far Murdoch’s shares might fall, the biggest loser will be press freedom.

We have entered the age of ‘I support a free press, but…’ Every leading British politician who has spoken on this subject of late has begun by assuring us that of course they want to see a free, even a ‘raucous’ press, one that ‘can make our lives miserable’, etc. This just the warm-up, going through the motions.

Then comes the punchline: ‘But….’ In the light of recent revelations, they conclude, the ‘culture’ of the press must, of course, be made more responsible, to produce a more ethical servant of the ‘public interest’. And to ensure the raucous Fleet Street Kids behave themselves along these lines, new proposals for more intervention in the news media have been streaming off the presses with the support of all parties – parliamentary hearings, police investigations and a judge-led public inquiry empowered by the government to ‘craft a new system of press regulation’.

The notion that more official regulation of the media is a good thing for the people goes against the tide of history. The fight to free the press from state control has been central to almost every major struggle for liberty and democratic revolution.

It was in the midst of the English Revolution of the 1640s that John Milton wrote his pioneering pamphlet against the system under which nobody could publish anything without a licence from the king, so that ‘unoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title’. Milton asked only for a ‘free and open encounter’ between Falsehood and Truth.

When the American revolutionaries wrote the Bill of Rights into their new Constitution in 1789, the First Amendment could not have been clearer about the principle of the press being freed from state control in a democratic society. ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.’

In the 1840s, the first articles a young Karl Marx had published in a German newspaper were a polemical series against the control of the press by the Prussian state. Marx argued that ‘The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself…. It is the spiritual mirror in which a people can see itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom.’

This is just part of the history of struggle that has brought us to something imperfectly approximating a free press. Yet now, in twenty-first-century Britain, it seems the authorities are agreed upon the project of turning back the clock. More than 200 years after the American Puritans declared that politicians ‘shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press’, our allegedly liberal British politicians appear bent on doing just that. The fact that the new anti-press regulations have this time been justified as a defence of victims rather than of kings, and as an attack on the power of Murdoch rather than on the liberties of the public, does not alter the fact that they represent a poke in the ‘vigilant eye of a people’s soul’.

Worse, as this is the UK 2011, and our elected politicians lack the nerve to do things in their own name, they have handed over the future of press freedom to a judge: the unelected and unaccountable Lord Justice Leveson, who now apparently has the authority to reverse the gains of history. Tory prime minister David Cameron told parliament this week that, although a new legal regulator of the press might be needed, of course he did not personally favour ‘full statutory regulation’. But the judge’s inquiry was free to consider all options, and if m’lud decided to bring the press under full state regulation then, said Cameron, ‘we will have to be guided by what this inquiry finds’.

Goods as rights

A Fling with the Welfare State

From the best of intentions to bankruptcy and recriminations

by Noemie Emery

The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a huge wave of debt swamping all western nations, this is the core of their argument: They want a fair society, and their critics do not; they want to help, and their opponents like to see people suffer; they want a world filled with love and caring, and their opponents want one of callous indifference, in which the helpless must fend for themselves. (“We must reject both extremes, those who say we shouldn’t help the old and the sick and those who say that we should,” quips the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg.) But in fact, everyone thinks that we “should” do this; the problem, in the face of the debt crisis, is finding a way that we can. It is about the “can” part that the left is now in denial: daintily picking its way through canaries six deep on the floor of the coal mine, and conflating a “good” with a “right.”

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt linked “freedom from want” to “freedom of speech” and “freedom of worship,” the left has been talking of everything that it thinks would be nice to have in terms of an utter and absolute right: a right to a job and a right to an income, a right to retire in comfort in Florida, a right to the most advanced health care without paying much for it, and a right to have your children taken care of while you work all day at your job. The problem is that these are all goods and services, though of varying importance, and goods and rights are not the same things. People tend to concur upon rights (except for the speech rights of those who oppose them), and they do not depend upon others to supply and pay for their rights. With goods, there is always a political argument: about the value of the good, who is to get it and who is to pay. And all this comes down to the question of “fairness,” about which there is no end of disputation and grief. 


And on nothing does the rights/goods division loom larger than on the issue of health care. Rights come from nature, and cost no one money, but good health in nature is rare. It is only thanks to human ingenuity over centuries and billions of dollars of effort that we have been able to conquer illnesses not long ago fatal, rebuild bodies broken in war or by accidents, postpone or ameliorate the problems of aging, and bring people back from the dead. The roll call of miracles that surrounds us today—the vaccines and the pills that have vanquished infections, the devices that let amputees run marathons, the organ transplants and the open heart surgeries, the techniques that replace hips, knees, and heart valves, not to mention the treatments that make so many public men cancer survivors, that saved Bob Dole years ago, are saving Dick Cheney, and once kept John Kennedy able to function—all of these are the result of the time, sweat, and strain of doctors and nurses, technicians and scientists, inventors and makers of drugs and devices, administrators of hospitals and large corporations, whose time is expensive, and who need to be paid.

Too much of a Good Thing is bad.

Good Things

By Thomas Sowell

Life has many good things. The problem is that most of these good things can be gotten only by sacrificing other good things. We all recognize this in our daily lives. It is only in politics that this simple, common sense fact is routinely ignored.

In politics, there are not simply good things but some special Good Things -- with a capital G and capital T -- which are considered always better to have more of.

Many of the things advocated by environmental extremists, for example, are things that most of us might think of as good things. But, in politics, they become Good Things whose repercussions and costs are brushed aside as unworthy considerations.
Nobody wants to breathe dirty air or drink dirty water. But, if either becomes 98 percent pure, 99 percent pure or 99.9 percent pure, there is some point beyond which the costs skyrocket and the benefits become meager or non-existent.

If the slightest trace of any impurity were fatal, the human race would have become extinct thousands of years ago.
Not only does the body have defenses to neutralize small amounts of some impurities, some things that are dangerous, or even fatal, in substantial amounts can become harmless or even beneficial in extremely minute amounts, arsenic being one example. As an old adage put it: "It is the dose that makes the poison."

In other words, removing arsenic from our drinking water should obviously be a very high priority -- but not after we have gotten it down to some extremely minute trace. There is never going to be 100 percent clean water or air and, the closer we get to that, the more costly it is to remove extremely minute traces of anything. But none of this matters to those who see ever higher standards of "clean water" or "clean air" as a Good Thing.
One of the things that have ruined our economy is the notion that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington pushed for years, that a higher rate of home ownership is a Good Thing.


There is no question that there are benefits to home ownership. And there should be no question that there are costs as well. But costs get lost in the shuffle.

Among the things that Washington politicians of both parties did for years was come up with more and more laws, rules and pressures on private lenders to lower the qualifications standards required for people to get a mortgage to buy a home.

It was a full-court press from Congressional legislation to regulations and policies created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Reserve, not to mention the buying of the resulting risky mortgages by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the original lenders -- and even threats of prosecution by the Department of Justice if the racial mixture of people who were approved for mortgages didn't match their expectations.

The media chimed in with expressions of outrage when data showed that black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down more often than white applicants. Seldom was it even mentioned that white applicants were turned down more often than Asian American applicants.
Nor was it mentioned that white applicants averaged higher credit ratings than black applicants, and Asian American applicants averaged higher credit ratings than white applicants -- or that black applicants were turned down at least as often by black-owned banks as by white-owned banks.
Such distracting details would have spoiled the story that racial discrimination was the reason why some people did not get the Good Thing of home ownership as often as others.

Even after the risky mortgages that were made under government pressure led to huge bankruptcies and bailouts, as well as disasters for home owners in general and black home owners in particular, home ownership remains a Good Thing. The Justice Department is again threatening lenders who don't lower their standards to let more minority applicants get mortgage loans.

Higher miles per gallon for cars is a Good Thing in politics, even if it leads to cars too lightly built to protect occupants when there is a crash. More students going to college is another Good Thing, even if lowering standards to get them admitted results in lower educational quality for others.