A Hundred Percent of Nothing

Τhe focus on political power doesn't do much for ordinary blacks

by Walter E. Williams

JoAnn Watson, Detroit city council member, said, "Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president, and there ought to be a quid pro quo." In other words, President Obama should send the nearly bankrupted city of Detroit millions in taxpayer bailout money. But there's a painful lesson to be learned from decades of political hustling and counsel by intellectuals and urban experts.

In 1960, Detroit's population was 1.6 million. Blacks were 29 percent, and whites were 70 percent. Today, Detroit's population has fallen precipitously to 707,000, of which blacks are 84 percent and whites 8 percent. Much of the city's decline began with the election of Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor and mayor for five terms, who engaged in political favoritism to blacks and tax policies against higher income mostly white people. Young's successors, Dennis Archer and Kwame Kilpatrick, followed his Third World tyrant policies, but neither had his verbal vulgarity. Kilpatrick (2002-2008) went to jail and is on trial today on charges of corruption. Mayor David Bing is making an effort to revive Detroit. His problem is that he's not God.

Policies that ran whites and other more affluent people out of Detroit might have been Young's and his successors' strategy. After all, why not get rid of people who aren't going to vote for you anyway? The problem is that getting rid of these people left Detroit with a lower tax base, fewer jobs and fewer consumers. Fewer whites might be good for the careers of black politicians, but it's not in the best interests of ordinary blacks. Blacks have political control of Detroit, but the relevant question is whether some control of something is better than 100 percent control of nothing. By most measures, Detroit is one of the nation's most tragic cities, and it's mostly self-imposed.

Vain search for meaning in massacre

The infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow, hyper-narcissistic act of public suicide

By Mark Steyn

"Lullay, Thou little tiny Child

By by, lully, lullay..."

The 16th-century Coventry Carol, a mother's lament for her lost son, is the only song of the season about the other children of Christmas – the first-born of Bethlehem, slaughtered on Herod's orders after the Magi brought him the not-so-glad tidings that an infant of that city would grow up to be King of the Jews. As Matthew tells it, even in a story of miraculous birth, in the midst of life is death. The Massacre of the Innocents loomed large over the Christian imagination: in Rubens' two renderings, he fills the canvas with spear-wielding killers, wailing mothers and dead babies, a snapshot, one assumes, of the vaster, bloodier body count beyond the frame. Then a century ago the Catholic Encyclopedia started digging into the numbers. The estimated population of Bethlehem at that time was around a thousand, which would put the toll of first-born sons under the age of 2 murdered by King Herod at approximately 20 – or about the same number of dead children as one school shooting on a December morning in Connecticut. "Every man a king," promised Huey Long. And, if it doesn't quite work out like that, well, every man his own Herod.

Had my child been among the dead of Dec. 14, I don't know that I would ever again trust the contours of the world. The years go by, and you're sitting in a coffee shop with a neighbor, and out of the corner of your eye a guy walks in who looks a little goofy and is maybe muttering to himself: Is he just a harmless oddball – or the prelude to horror? The bedrock of life has been shattered, and ever after you're walking on a wobbling carpet with nothing underneath. For a parent to bury a child offends against the natural order – at least in an age that has conquered childhood mortality. For a parent to bury a child at Christmas taints the day forever, and mocks its meaning.

A Nation of Singles

US Birth Rate Hits New Low 

by Gary D. Halbert

One of the issues I have been focused on for the last several years has been the trend in demographics in the US and in developed countries in general. Our populations are getting older – we all know that. But the reasons why our populations are getting older are not widely understood by many Americans. Those reasons include the falling birth rate, the falling fertility rate, the falling marriage rate and the explosion in singles – people who never marry.

The US birth rate fell to a record low in 2011. The marriage rate is tumbling as well. And the number of single Americans is now at a record high. The implications of these developments are troubling, not only for the economy, but also for the investment markets and the continual expansion of the federal government.  Government debt has spiraled out of control in recent years, and the demographics suggest that this trend will continue as we care for an aging population.

Today, we will look at some new information on demographic trends in the US and in the West in general that should concern you – and all Americans for that matter. This will be a continuing theme in my E-Letters in the months and years ahead. Let’s get started.

US Birth Rate Falls to Record Low in 2011

The US birth rate plunged to a record low in recent years, with the decline being led by immigrant women hit hard by the recession, this according to a study released in late November by the Pew Research Center. A falling birth rate has major implications for the economy and our aging population, as I will discuss today.

The overall US birth rate decreased by 8% between 2007 and 2010, with a much bigger drop of 14% among foreign-born immigrant women. The overall birth rate is now at its lowest level since reliable records have been kept, falling to 63.2 births per 1,000 women who are of childbearing age in 2011. That is down from 122.7 births at the peak in 1957 during the Baby Boom.

The Party's Just Beginning

Karl Marx has left the London library and is now residing in Washington D.C.

 “For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across--which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidently swallowed by a small dog.”    - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

By Mark Grant

Still here. We are still here. It is true that we have many hours to go before today crosses across all of the time zones and becomes tomorrow and, in any event, the Chateau Petrus will not have been in vain. I am holding classes in deduction now in Nassau on my boat. Other boat owners have dropped by and are all inquiring about the fiscal cliff. “The plunge is at hand,” I tell them as Congress adjourns, the rank and file Republicans turn on the House Speaker and the Lords of Chaos are in charge once again. All of the stuff and nonsense about taxing the wealthy and gibberish about who and when and where to tax is like so much marshmallow spread on a peanut butter sandwich; it just doesn’t matter. The galling omission of not concentrating on what is truly important, the cost of entitlements and social programs and what the nation can and cannot afford shows the true worth of our nation’s leaders which is about equal to a wooden nickel or a three dollar bill. It is the Lost Boys living in Never-Never Land and Wendy nowhere in sight.

“In the first place God made idiots. He did this for practice. Then he made politicians. This was a mistake. Then he tried to correct His mistake by having the people elect the politicians of their own choosing. He then realized that he had made idiots twice and he pondered his miscalculation for seven days. Next he made dogs and finally being satisfied that he had done something correctly he went off on holiday. One day he may come back and finish the exercise.”     -The Wizard

The Auto Bailout Failure Is Now Complete

The Treasury Department has just revised its estimate upward to $25 billion in losses

By David Harsanyi 

You may recall that during the presidential election, the Treasury Department refused requests by General Motors to unload the government's stake in the giant automaker.

Taxpayers had sunk $50 billion into a union bailout in 2009 and were now proud owners of 26.5 percent of the struggling company. Reportedly, GM had growing concerns that the stigma of "Government Motors" was hurting sales in the United States. At the time, any transaction would have come at a steep loss to taxpayers and undermined the president's questionable campaign assertions that the auto union rescue had been a huge success.

Well, now that the election is over and the Treasury Department is freed of political considerations, it plans to sell its 500 million shares of stock over the next 12 to 15 months and ease its way out of the company. GM will buy around 200 million shares at $27.50 per share by the end of the year. GM's buy brings taxpayers back to around $5.5 billion of the $27 billion the company still owes. The special inspector general for TARP estimated in October that the Treasury would need to sell the remaining 500 million shares at $53.98 per share just to break even on its investment.

Spending Other People's Money Part 5

Highest-Paid California Trooper Is Chief Banking $484,000

By Alison Vekshin, Elise Young and Rodney Yap 

California Highway Patrol division chief Jeff Talbott retired last year as the best-paid officer in the 12 most-populous U.S. states, collecting $483,581 in salary, pension and other compensation.

Talbott, 53, received $280,259 for accrued leave and vacation time and took a new job running the public-safety department at a private university in Southern California. He also began collecting an annual pension of $174,888 from the state.

Union-negotiated benefits, coupled with overtime that can exceed regular pay and lax enforcement of limits on accumulating unused vacation, allow some troopers to double their annual earnings and retire as young as age 50. The payments they get are unmatched by those elsewhere, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million employees of the 12 states. Some, like Talbott, go on to second careers.

“I think some of our rules were negligent, and I think people were allowed to build up overtime pay who shouldn’t have been, who accumulated leave time and furlough time,” said Marty Morgenstern, a member of Governor Jerry Brown’s cabinet and secretary of the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency, which oversees labor relations, employment and unemployment.

‘Absolutely Inappropriate’

“Those kind of payments are absolutely inappropriate and we’re doing everything we can to see that does not recur,” Morgenstern said.

Spending Other People's Money Part 4

Texas Pension Manager Paid $1 Million Trails Peers Who Make Less

By Mark Niquette and Martin Z. Braun 

Britt Harris arrived at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas in 2006 from the world’s biggest hedge fund with a mandate to improve the pension’s performance. He also brought a Wall Street attitude about pay.

Harris, the Texas fund’s chief investment officer, made $1 million last year in salary and bonuses, the most of any public pension employee in the 12 most populous U.S. states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Four other employees made at least $500,000, and the fund paid $9.7 million in bonuses in 2011, more than any in those states.

Funds where executives made far less posted better investment results than those produced by Harris and his staff over three and five years. They included, respectively, the Ohio Police & Fire Pension Fund, where the top-paid executive last year was William J. Estabrook, at $231,614, and the New Jersey Division of Investment, where director Timothy Walsh made $185,000 plus $7,500 for moving expenses, data show.

“These guys may claim to be worth their weight in gold,” said Edward Siedle, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission attorney and president of Benchmark Financial Services of Ocean Ridge, Florida. “They absolutely can’t justify it.”

Falling Behind

While Harris says public pension compensation must be competitive with the private sector to attract top talent, the Texas fund -- seventh-largest in the U.S. with $112.4 billion in assets -- is falling further behind in long-term obligations to more than 1.3 million education employees and retired teachers, including Harris’s mother. The pay-and-performance disparities at public pension funds are among the findings of a data review in which Bloomberg compiled payroll records for 1.4 million employees of the 12 largest states.

Of the highest-paid pension executives in those states last year, all but two worked at the Texas fund or the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio, data show. Yet the Texas fund’s 2.12 percent return over five years as of June 30, 2012, net of fees, was less than five other state pensions, including the New Jersey pension plan, which returned 2.46 percent. The Texas fund’s three-year results of 13.17 percent trailed Ohio Police & Fire, which returned 13.25 percent.

Spending Other People's Money Part 3

Gee Takes Jets as $1.9 Million Payday Roils Ohio Students

By Jennifer Oldham and Rodney Yap

The Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee lives in a 9,630-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion that was renovated for him, featuring a great hall, pool, elevator and tennis court.

Gee made $1.9 million last year as the highest-paid public university president in the U.S. He also logged $1.7 million in expenses in fiscal 2011, including trips in private jets, country club dues and fundraising parties at his residence.

“He’s overpaid,” said CJ Jones, 19, a junior public affairs major at Ohio State, whose tuition has risen 9.7 percent during her 2 1/2 years at the university, based in Columbus, the state capital. “You should want that job for a sense of Buckeye pride. Why do you have to suck so many resources from our budget? I know kids graduating from OSU with $90,000 in debt, and it’s a public university.”

Gee was among 47 administrators, athletic officials and hospital faculty who earned more than $1 million in 2011, according to payroll records compiled by Bloomberg for about 216,000 employees at flagship universities in the 12 most populous states. Much of the compensation came from non-public sources. Gee’s expenses and home renovations weren’t funded with taxpayer dollars, and his performance justifies his compensation, said Gayle Saunders, a university spokeswoman.

Salaries for the highest-paid public university employees from California to Virginia rose as state appropriations per student fell to the lowest in a quarter century, faculty pay stagnated and the default rate on student loans hit a 15-year high. Record expenses for higher education are prompting lawmakers to scrutinize how the institutions spend their money.

Pay ‘Mythology’

“There’s a mythology promulgated by people in administration that you have to pay competitive salaries to attract the best people,” saidBenjamin Ginsberg, political science professor at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins University and author of a book detailing how universities are adding administrators even as state funding drops. “In point of fact, no one can show there is any relationship between what these people are paid and the quality of the work they do.”

Spending Other People's Money Part 2

California Psychiatrists Paid $400,000 Shows Bidding War

By Freeman Klopott, Rodney Yap and Terrence Dopp

Mohammad Safi, a graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan, began working as a psychiatrist at a California mental hospital in 2006, making $90,682 in his first six months. Last year, he took home $822,302, all of it paid by taxpayers.

Safi benefited from what amounted to a bidding war after a federal court forced the state to improve inmate care. The prisons raised pay to lure psychiatrists, the mental health department followed suit to keep employees, and costs soared. Last year, 16 California psychiatrists, including Safi, made more than $400,000, while only one did in the other 11 most populous states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The jockeying between agencies for the same doctors demonstrates a payroll system run amok and chronic mismanagement, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale University School of Management and founder of a training institute for chief executive officers.

“Even though this all took place in California, such apparent recklessness is almost too over the top for Hollywood,” Sonnenfeld said. “These irresponsible public officials have artificially constrained the market with an unnaturally limited supply pool, either due to laziness, incompetence, corruption or all of the above.”

17-Hour Days

Safi’s compensation was almost five times as much as Governor Jerry Brown’s last year. The psychiatrist was paid for an average of almost 17 hours each day, including on-call time, Saturdays and Sundays, although he did take time off, said David O’Brien, a spokesman for the Department of State Hospitals, formerly the Department of Mental Health. Safi is under investigation by the department, and he was placed on administrative leave July 12, O’Brien said in an e-mailed statement.

“I made so much because I work a lot,” Safi said in a brief interview at his Newark, California, home.

Spending Other People's Money Part 1

Californian’s $609,000 Check Shows True Retirement Cost

By Michael B. Marois and Rodney Yap 

When psychiatrist Gertrudis Agcaoili retired last year from a state mental hospital in Napa, California, she took with her a $608,821 check for unused leave banked in a career that spanned three decades.

She wasn’t alone. More than 111,000 people who left jobs as employees of the 12 most populous U.S. states collected $711 million last year for unused vacation and other paid time off, according to payroll data on 1.4 million public workers compiled by Bloomberg.

California employees accounted for 39 percent of that total. Since 2005, the state’s workers collected $1.4 billion for accumulated leave, calculated at their last pay rate, regardless of when the time was accrued. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie calls such payments “boat checks” because they can be large enough to buy yachts.

“The people making decisions are clearly letting this happen,” said Steven Frates, research director of Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute on public policy, based in Malibu, California. “It starts with the governor and the legislature and wanders down the line. These people are playing with the taxpayers’ money.”

The lump-sum retirement payments, seldom granted in private industry, mirror a broader trend in which California’s public employees receive far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base salary to overtime. California, the world’s ninth- biggest economy, has set a pattern for lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs, the Bloomberg data show.

Routine Accumulation

Managers and employees throughout California government routinely ignore a rule limiting accrued time off to 640 hours, or 16 weeks. The accumulation of vacation hours accelerated in California from 2005 through 2010, fueled by a state policy forcing workers to take unpaid time off, or furloughs, before using paid leave.

The Upside of the Fiscal Cliff

Facing reality is positive

By Charles Smith

That's the upside to the fiscal cliff.

There are two definite upsides to the fiscal cliff:

1. We are finally starting a national discussion of spending-taxation trade-offs

2. We are at last starting to (grudgingly) accept there is no free lunch, what I call the Free Lunch Fantasy of limitless borrowing at near-zero interest rates: taxes for upper-income wage-earners will revert to previous levels while those drawing Federal dollars must accept reductions in spending.

The last decade's fantasy that we could borrow our way to prosperity while lowering taxes on upper-income earners (because it's so cheap to borrow trillions at near-zero interest rates) is finally running into reality-based resistance: interest on all that debt is starting to squeeze the spending everyone wants, and long-term rates might rise despite the Federal Reserve's constant intervention.

That would eventually raise interest costs paid by the Federal government.

How can interest rates rise if the Fed is buying much of the Federal Debt?

The first part of the answer is to accept the fiscal consequences of the Baby Boom entering Social Security and Medicare at the rate of 10,000 retirees a day: Federal spending will rise far faster than tax revenues, dwarfing the relatively minor spending cuts being discussed.

Falling Towards Entropy

Stubborn Balkans Myths and Realities

by Nebojsa Malic

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” wrote a French columnist back in 1849 – but the witticism applies just as well in 2012. Recall, for example, that Barack Obama became Emperor in 2008 by promising Hope and Change, only to embrace continuity instead. His challenger this year campaigned against Obama’s domestic policies, but on matters foreign he was strangely in sync with the incumbent.

Obama’s easy re-election has, predictably, been termed a mandate to continue the present policies – including, no doubt, the “humanitarian” interventions and social engineering (called “nation-building” when done abroad). The trouble with Empire, however, is that it’s not only bleeding the U.S. dry, but that it manifestly doesn’t work.

Consider, as Gordon Bardos did earlier this week, the situation in the Balkans. Twenty-odd years of Imperial meddling later, and the region has come back to where it was in the early 1990s – though some roles may have been reshuffled in the process:

“…some of the most well-funded international efforts in nation- and state-building in history have in many ways gotten us right back to where we started from two decades ago. Perhaps even further back.”

Ramush Returns

Take, for example, the ICTY, an ad hoc “tribunal” allegedly established – under dubious circumstances – to foster reconciliation by prosecuting those responsible for wartime atrocities. It has manifestly done nothing of the sort, instead serving as a tool of the Empire to eliminate inconvenient politicians, bolster favorites, and rewrite the region’s history, both recent and distant.

Apocalypse now for free speech?

Mayan End Times may not have materialised, but if we’re not careful free speech could be consumed by hellfires

by Patrick Hayes 

We will no doubt survive the Mayan apocalypse this Christmas. But will freedom of speech survive into 2013? This year, the boundaries of what can be said contracted to an unprecedented degree. Here’s a Top 10 countdown of some of the worst erosions of freedom of speech in Britain in 2012.

10) Defamation Bill

In 2012, many of the activists in Britain’s free-speech lobby unwittingly cheered on censoriousness. Consider their response to the government’s Defamation Bill, which is supposed to make England’s ridiculous libel laws ‘fairer’. Index on Censorship excitedly exclaimed ‘We did it!’ when the bill was unveiled. But the bill proposes expanding the remit of the libel laws to cover the internet, and removing the right to trial by jury in defamation cases, which would give judges even greater authority over the question of what is acceptable speech. Fundamentally, the bill enshrines the idea that the state is best placed to decide what should and shouldn’t be uttered.

9) Protest bans

‘Fuck your free speech!’, shouted an anti-fascist campaigner at the far-right English Defence League (EDL) during a march in Walthamstow, London in September. It typified the illiberal outlook of some on the radical left. When the EDL announced it would march through Walthamstow again in October, anti-fascists gave up on the idea of holding a counter-protest and instead successfully campaigned to have the march banned. Home secretary Theresa May also banned every other group, both right- and left-wing, from marching in Walthamstow, to be on the safe side. Which only shows how foolish it is to imbue the authorities with the right to decree who may march and who may not.

8) Plain cigarette packs

This year, it became compulsory in Australia to sell cigarettes in mucus-coloured ‘plain packs’ covered in pictures of dead babies or rotting organs. All company branding is outlawed. Other countries, including Britain, plan to follow suit. But isn’t this an affront to freedom of expression, effectively preventing companies from expressing themselves on their own products? Even worse, such anti-ciggie censoriousness implies that the public at large is incapable of making rational decisions about health and is easily swayed by flashy, colourful packaging. So the state opts to cover our eyes and protect our fragile sensibilities.

End Game in Argentina

Looting: Border Guards deployed to Bariloche

By Buenos Aires Herald

Cabinet Chief Juan Manuel Abal Medina announced yesterday that four hundred Border Guards were deployed to Bariloche, in Río Negro province, following the violent looting that took place in several local supermarkets on Thursday afternoon.

At least 50 masked people showing long sticks broke into two supermarkets in San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro province claiming food and goods for Christmas unleashing a morning of riots and looting as police forces arrived to the scene.

Río Negro province Governor Weretilneck assured that the looting are part of a plan to create upheaval. “We are not seeing incidents related to social conflicts or with survival. Breaking shop windows, Sterling TVs and burning cars is sending another message out,” he said, and added that the vans that carried the people who took part of the looting have been identified.

Reports stated that the thieves, who could have arrived from a neighbouring slum, turned the places over taking mostly appliances and LED TVs.

Police has arrived to the place to be welcomed by a rain of stones. The municipality informed they have not enough personnel to control the situation.

San Carlos de Bariloche Town Hall’s Secretary Oscar Borchici told reporters “We always hear rumours indicating lootings could happen, but this is totally insane. Plus, I don’t understand why they need to take LCD TVs.”

All supermarkets in the area have been closed for the rest of the day. 

Much Worse than Greece

IMF Demands Partial Default for Cyprus

by Spiegel

Euro-zone member state Cyprus badly needs a bailout, but the International Monetary Fund is demanding a debt haircut first, according to media reports. The resulting standoff with Europe has delayed the country's badly needed aid package. To ward off insolvency, Nicosia has raided the pension funds of state-owned companies.

Cyprus did its part on Wednesday night. The country's parliament approved a 2013 budget which included far-reaching austerity measures so as to satisfy the conditions for the impending bailout of the debt-stricken country. While aimed at significantly reducing the country's budget deficit, the spending cuts and tax hikes are likely to result in a 3.5 percent shrinkage of the economy in 2013 along with an uptick in unemployment.

Yet despite the measures, Nicosia's would-be creditors remain at odds over the emergency aid deal, even as the country teeters on the brink of insolvency. According to a report in the Thursday issue of the influential German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, the International Monetary Fund is demanding a partial Cypriot default involving private creditors before it joins the bailout deal.

Citing anonymous sources familiar with the negotiations, the Süddeutsche writes that the IMF is concerned that, despite the austerity measures the country has now adopted, it still wouldn't be able to shoulder the interest payments due on its debt. Several European countries agree with the IMF. Others, however, believe that such a default could be dangerous. After all, when private creditors were pressured to write down a portion of their Greek debt holdings, the euro zone went to great lengths to present the move as one that would not be repeated. Should such a default now be applied to Cyprus, it could severely undermine investor trust in the euro zone.

"The situation in Cyprus is much worse than it is in Greece," one high-ranking EU official told the paper.

In 2013, can we call off the Culture Wars?

The wrong side is winning, in the wrong war

by Brendan O’Neill 

2012 could be characterised as the year when the wrong side, the illiberal liberals, were victorious in the wrong war, the Culture War. In America and much of Western Europe, the cultural values of the so-called ‘left’ came firmly to the fore in this war of attitudes that has been waged for 30-odd years. This is a big problem as we head into 2013 - not only because the ascendant values are elitist, censorious and profoundly cavalier about the traditions and belief systems through which many people live their lives, but also because the Culture War itself is not a useful way to understand the clash of interests and moral divisions in twenty-first-century society.

On numerous fronts, from gay marriage to tabloid culture to gun control, the side in the Culture War that disingenuously defines itself as progressive scored big hits in 2012. President Obama’s ‘coming out’ in support of gay marriage, or his ‘evolution’ as his cheerleaders tellingly put it, signaled a shift not only in one man’s attitude towards homosexuals getting hitched but in the Democratic Party leadership’s attitude towards its support base. The upper echelons of the party were really confirming that the constituency they care most about these days is not the traditionalist or rural blue-collar world, but the apparently more enlightened urban and creative cliques of the new cultural elite. In Britain, too, gay marriage was used as a tool for redrawing the political map, being fervently promoted by Tory PM David Cameron as a means of purging his party of its ‘nasty’ image, and its nasty people, and making real his claims to represent New Conservatism. In Britain, the rise of gay marriage explicitly signals the acceptance by the right of the values of their one-time opponents in the Culture War.

The Geopolitics of Shale

The coming of shale gas era will magnify the importance of geography

By Robert Kaplan

According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism, fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly.

But there is another truth: The reality of large, impersonal forces like geography and the environment that also help to determine the future of human events. Africa has historically been poor largely because of few good natural harbors and few navigable rivers from the interior to the coast. Russia is paranoid because its land mass is exposed to invasion with few natural barriers. The Persian Gulf sheikhdoms are fabulously wealthy not because of ideas but because of large energy deposits underground. You get the point. Intellectuals concentrate on what they can change, but we are helpless to change much of what happens.

Enter shale, a sedimentary rock within which natural gas can be trapped. Shale gas constitutes a new source of extractable energy for the post-industrial world. Countries that have considerable shale deposits will be better placed in the 21st century competition between states, and those without such deposits will be worse off. Ideas will matter little in this regard.

So let's look at who has shale and how that may change geopolitics. For the future will be heavily influenced by what lies underground.

The United States, it turns out, has vast deposits of shale gas: in Texas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and elsewhere. America, regardless of many of the political choices it makes, is poised to be an energy giant of the 21st century. In particular, the Gulf Coast, centered on Texas and Louisiana, has embarked upon a shale gas and tight oil boom. That development will make the Caribbean an economic focal point of the Western Hemisphere, encouraged further by the 2014 widening of the Panama Canal. At the same time, cooperation between Texas and adjacent Mexico will intensify, as Mexico increasingly becomes a market for shale gas, with its own exploited shale basins near its northern border.

This is, in part, troubling news for Russia. Russia is currently the energy giant of Europe, exporting natural gas westward in great quantities, providing Moscow with political leverage all over Central and particularly Eastern Europe. However, Russia's reserves are often in parts of Siberia that are hard and expensive to exploit -- though Russia's extraction technology, once old, has been considerably modernized. And Russia for the moment may face relatively little competition in Europe. But what if in the future the United States were able to export shale gas to Europe at a competitive price?

Modern Wisdom from Ancient Minds

With intellectual progress can come moral regress

by Victor Davis Hanson

The Tragic View

Of course we can acquire a sense of man’s predictable fragilities from religion, the Judeo-Christian view in particular, or from the school of hard knocks. Losing a grape crop to rain a day before harvest, or seeing a warehouse full of goods go up in smoke the week before their sale, or being diagnosed with leukemia on the day of a long-awaited promotion convinces even the most naïve optimist that the world sort of works in tragic ways that we must accept, but do not fully understand. Yet classical literature is the one of the oldest and most abstract guides to us that there are certain parameters that we may seek to overcome, but must also accept that we ultimately cannot.

You Can’t Stop Aging, Nancy

Take the modern obsession with beauty and aging, two human facts that all the Viagra and surgery in the world cannot change. I expect few readers have endured something like the Joe Biden makeover or the Nancy Pelosi facial fix (I thought those on the Left were more inclined to the natural way? Something is not very green and egalitarian about spending gads of money for something so unnatural). Most of you accept wrinkles, creaky joints, and thinning hair. Oh, we exercise and try to keep in shape and youthful, but a Clint Eastwood seems preferable looking to us than a stretched and stitched Sylvester Stallone.

The Greek lyric poets, from Solon to Mimnermus, taught that there is nothing really “golden” about old age. That did not mean that at about age 50-70 one is not both wiser than at 20 and less susceptible to the destructive appetites and passions — only that such mental and emotional maturity come at the terrible price of a decline in energy and physicality. When I now mow the lawn or chain saw, in about 10 minutes a knee is sore, an elbow swollen, a back strained — and from nothing more than a silly wrong pivot. Biking 100 miles a week seems to make the joints more, not less, painful. At 30 going up a 30-foot ladder was fun; at near 60 it is a high-wire act. There is some cruel rule that the more it is necessary at 60 to build muscle mass, the more the joints and tendons seem to rebel at the necessary regimen.

The arc of history bends toward socialism and insolvency

How Leviathan Ate the GOP

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“God put the Republican Party on earth to cut taxes. If they don’t do that, they have no useful function.”

Columnist Robert Novak was speaking of the party that embraced the revolution of Ronald Reagan, who had hung a portrait of Calvin Coolidge in his Cabinet Room and set about cutting income tax rates to 28 percent.

But, to be historically precise, the GOP was not put here to cut taxes. From infancy in the 1850s, its mission was to halt the spread of slavery. From 1865 to 1929, it was the party of high tariffs. Mission: Build the nation and protect U.S. industry and the wages of American workers.

And if the Deity commanded the GOP to cut taxes, the party has had an uneven record. Warren Harding and Coolidge cut Woodrow Wilson’s wartime tax rates by two-thirds, but Herbert Hoover nearly tripled the top rate.

Under Dwight Eisenhower, when the top tax rate was 91 percent, the GOP ratified the New Deal and provided the tax revenue to balance the budget at the elevated levels of spending 20 years of Democratic rule had established.

Richard Nixon followed suit. Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid to education, the Peace Corps, the arts and humanities endowments, all of the Great Society programs grew — with Nixon adding OSHA, EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and Cancer Institute.

Reagan cut tax rates to 50-year lows, but also accepted new gasoline and payroll taxes. George H.W. Bush then raised the top rate back to 35 percent.

George W. cut tax rates, but put two wars, prescription drug benefits for seniors and No Child Left Behind on the Visa card. Speaker Boehner is about to sign on to higher tax rates.

Government Bloat is Not Growth

Real Gross Domestic Private Product, 2000–2011

by Robert Higgs

In the 1930s and 1940s, when the modern system of national income and product accounts (NIPA) was being developed, the scope of national product was a hotly debated issue. No issue stirred more debate than the question, Should government product be included in gross product? Simon Kuznets (Nobel laureate in economic sciences, 1971), the most important American contributor to the development of the accounts, had major reservations about including all government purchases in national product. Over the years, others have elaborated on these reasons and adduced others.

Why should government product be excluded? First, the government’s activities may be viewed as giving rise to intermediate, rather than final products, even if the government provides such valuable services as enforcement of private property rights and settlement of disputes. Second, because most government services are not sold in markets, they have no market-determined prices to be used in calculating their total value to those who benefit from them. Third, because many government services arise from political, rather than economic motives and institutions, some of them may have little or no value. Indeed, some commentators—including the present writer—ultimately went so far as to assert that some government services have negative value: given a choice, the people victimized by these “services” would be willing to pay to be rid of them.

When the government attained massive proportions during World War II, this debate was set aside for the duration of the war, and the accounts were put into a form that best accommodated the government’s attempt to plan and control the economy for the primary purpose of winning the war. This situation of course dictated that the government’s spending, which grew to constitute almost half of the official GDP during the peak years of the war, be included in GDP, and the War Production Board, the Commerce Department, and other government agencies involved in calculating the NIPA recruited a large corps of clerks, accountants, economists, and others to carry out the work.