Tim Nerenz explains the difference among libertarians in the headline:
Libertarians are often described as fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but many of us prefer the term “neutral”, especially when liberals are prone to go fascist over things like someone expressing a personal opinion they don’t’ like. Our attitude about social legislation is the same as most other legislation – we don’t like legislation.
This is often wrongly construed, especially by conservatives, as an endorsement of vice, but the libertarian objection to criminalizing choice is not about sin, it is about crime. Specifically, it is the rejection of the notion that government can invent a crime when there is no victim.
Who is the victim when I possess a firearm, or if I carry one without a government permission slip? That is a victimless crime – and we oppose laws that restrict our right to keep and bear arms.
Who is the victim if you offer me work at $7.00 per hour and I accept your offer of my own free will? That is a victimless crime – and we object to minimum wage and all other laws that restrict our right to work.
Who is the victim when a farmer sells milk directly to a consumer? That is a victimless crime – and we stand against laws that prevent choice in the market.
We have come down to prosecuting lemonade stands and roll your own shops, banning chicken sandwiches, hounding hair braiders, fining the uninsured, and programming aerial drones to seek out insurgents holding large cups of pop. Ok, that last one was exaggerated, but you get the point.
The list of victimless crimes can go on for pages without ever having to get into the juicy stuff, but it is when we confront the lurid that liberty’s mettle is sorely tested. Freedom to choose demands the courage to let some people choose badly some of the time.
If prostitution is the price to pay to have free markets, we are better off to tolerate the whores. If pornography is the price we have to pay to insure that we can always buy “Atlas Shrugged”, then the presence of smut merchants is oddly comforting. The risk of addiction is preferable to government choosing our intoxicants for us.
Tolerance of vice is necessary because the alternative is intolerable – when government can concoct victims at will, or assign victimhood unto itself, then it can justify any action it takes. It has, it does, and it will.
As is often observed, everything Adolf Hitler did was lawful; the millions he killed were criminals according to laws he enacted to “protect the German people”. The only reason a maniac like Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t ban everything he doesn’t like and force you to buy everything he does like is because he can’t. Any reasonable person should like to keep it that way. …
The growing power of the Tea Party rests upon its focus on economic liberty, fiscal responsibility, and allegiance to our Constitution. Those priorities unite conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists, free-thinkers, independents, Republicans and many Democrats who believe in individual rights and individual responsibility – and yes, there are many of them.
It is an unbeatable electoral coalition that can only be defeated if it is divided – and social issues are the liberals’ only hope of dividing us. That’s why they keep fabricating one phony civil liberty “crisis” after another as the election approaches – abortion, contraception, gay marriage, illegal immigration, chicken sandwiches.
There are as many different beliefs about virtue and vice as there are Americans to hold them; that is the diversity that makes us a great nation, not some arbitrary herd assignment based on skin color, genital configuration, or ancestry. God decided to gift us with moral free agency, not the Libertarian Party; His is the higher law we are commanded to follow and His is the judgment we must accept when it comes to sin and salvation. Secular government should stay in its lane.
The Twin Cities’ new Thirty-Two Magazine begins with this long tale of a couple who moved from the Twin Cities to …
For a variety of not-very-well-thought-out reasons, this brought us to Madison, Wisconsin. It wasn’t too far from our families. It had a stellar reputation. And for the Midwest, it possessed what might pass for cachet. It was liberal and open minded. It was a college town. It had coffee shops and bike shops. Besides, it had been deemed a “Creative Class” stronghold by Richard Florida, the prophet of prosperous cool. We had no way of knowing how wrong he was about Madison…and about everything.
Florida’s idea was a nice one: Young, innovative people move to places that are open and hip and tolerant. They, in turn, generate economic innovation. I loved this idea because, as a freelance writer, it made me important. I was poor, but somehow I made everyone else rich! It seemed to make perfect sense. Madison, by that reasoning, should have been clamoring to have me, since I was one of the mystical bearers of prosperity.
Unfortunately, our writer found that Madison doesn’t live up to its promise:
Nonetheless, we tried settling in. I began writing for the local magazine. My first story was based on Richard Florida’s “Gay Index,” one of several measures that was supposed to indicate how wealthy your city can be. The more gays there are, he reasoned, the more tolerant your city is, and the more creative class workers would flock there. My story was called, “How Gay is Madison?” The answer, of course, was “very gay.” …
For some reason, these and most other relationships never quite blossomed the way we’d hoped, the way they had in all the other place we’d lived. For a time, my wife had a soulless job with a boss who sat behind her, staring at the back of her head. I found work in a dusty tomb of a bookstore, doing data entry with coworkers who complained about their neurological disorders, or who told me about the magical creatures they saw on their way home, and who kept websites depicting themselves as minotaurs.
I’m not sure what exactly I expected, but within a year or two it was clear that something wasn’t right. If Madison was such a Creative Class hotbed overflowing with independent, post-industrial workers like myself, we should have fit in. Yet our presence didn’t seem to matter to anyone, creatively or otherwise. And anyway, Madison’s economy was humming along with unemployment around four percent, while back in fun, creative Portland, it was more than twice that, at eight and a half percent. This was not how the world according to Florida was supposed to work. I started to wonder if I’d misread him. Around town I encountered a few other transplants who also found themselves scratching their heads over what the fuss had been about. Within a couple years, most of them would be gone.
The author quotes Penelope Trunk, “a branding expert, a Gen Y prognosticator, and a ruthless, relentless self-promoter,” who moved to Madison, only to escape:
On the phone, she was still brash and bombastic and as she told it, her honeymoon with the city started to end almost as soon as she got there. One day her ex-husband was googling, “sex offenders,” and he discovered there were four registered on their block. Next, she discovered that the public schools were terrible. “I started talking to everyone,” Trunk said. “And I said, ‘Hey, aren’t you upset the schools suck? How is everyone sending their kid here?’ And people said, ‘Oh, no, I really love my school. I make sure for my kid it’s all about values.’ I mean the bullshit that people were telling me was utterly incredible. Then it just became like an onslaught. Tons of lies. Madison is a city full of people in denial. People don’t leave Madison, so they don’t realize what’s good and not good.” I asked her if she had any regrets, or if the move was a wrong one, or if she had any advice for other people looking to relocate. Or maybe, I suggested, life was just messier than research?
“No,” she said. “Life is totally clear cut. It’s exactly what the research is. All the research says go live with your friends and family. Otherwise, you have to look at why you’re not doing that. If you want to look at a city that’s best for your career, it’s New York, San Francisco or London. If you’re not looking for your career, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no difference. It’s splitting hairs. The whole conversation about where to live is bullshit.”
I do not run this to beat upon my home town. (I’ve already done that.) I am happy to repeat this skewering of Florida’s bogus “creative class” theory:
Jamie Peck is a geography professor who has been one of the foremost critics of Richard Florida’s Creative Class theory. He now teaches at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, but at the time Florida’s book was published in 2002, he was also living in Madison. “The reason I wrote about this,” Peck told me on the phone, “is because Madison’s mayor started to embrace it. I lived on the east side of town, probably as near to this lifestyle as possible, and it was bullshit that this was actually what was driving Madison’s economy. What was driving Madison was public sector spending through the university, not the dynamic Florida was describing.”
In his initial critique, Peck said The Rise of the Creative Class was filled with “self-indulgent forms of amateur microsociology and crass celebrations of hipster embourgeoisement.” That’s another way of saying that Florida was just describing the “hipsterization” of wealthy cities and concluding that this was what was causing those cities to be wealthy. As some critics have pointed out, that’s a little like saying that the high number of hot dog vendors in New York City is what’s causing the presence of so many investment bankers. So if you want banking, just sell hot dogs. “You can manipulate your arguments about correlation when things happen in the same place,” says Peck.
What was missing, however, was any actual proof that the presence of artists, gays and lesbians or immigrants was causing economic growth, rather than economic growth causing the presence of artists, gays and lesbians or immigrants. Some more recent work has tried to get to the bottom of these questions, and the findings don’t bode well for Florida’s theory. In a four-year, $6 million study of thirteen cities across Europe called “Accommodating Creative Knowledge,” that was published in 2011, researchers found one of Florida’s central ideas—the migration of creative workers to places that are tolerant, open and diverse—was simply not happening. …
Perhaps one of the most damning studies was in some ways the simplest. In 2009 Michele Hoyman and Chris Faricy published a study using Florida’s own data from 1990 to 2004, in which they tried to find a link between the presence of the creative class workers and any kind of economic growth. “The results were pretty striking,” said Faricy, who now teaches political science at Washington State University. “The measurement of the creative class that Florida uses in his book does not correlate with any known measure of economic growth and development. Basically, we were able to show that the emperor has no clothes.” Their study also questioned whether the migration of the creative class was happening. “Florida said that creative class presence—bohemians, gays, artists—will draw what we used to call yuppies in,” says Hoyman. “We did not find that.” …
Today, Creative Class doctrine has become so deeply engrained in the culture that few question it. Why, without any solid evidence, did a whole generation of policy makers swallow the creative Kool-Aid so enthusiastically? One reason is that when Florida’s first book came out, few experts bothered debunking it, because it didn’t seem worth debunking. “In the academic and urban planning world,” says Peck, “people are slightly embarrassed about the Florida stuff.” Most economists and public policy scholars just didn’t take it seriously.
This is partly because much of what Florida was describing was already accounted for by a theory that had been well-known in economic circles for decades, which says that the amount of college-educated people you have in an area is what drives economic growth, not the number of artists or immigrants or gays, most of whom also happen to be college educated. This is known as Human Capital theory, mentioned briefly above, and in Hoyman and Faricy’s analysis, it correlated much more highly with economic growth than the number of creative class workers. “Human capital beat the pants off creative capital,” Hoyman said. “So it looks like growth is a human capital phenomenon—if you’ve got a lot of educated people. We’re in a knowledge economy, where human capital is worth a lot more than just showing up for work every day.” In other words, if there was anything to the theory of the Creative Class, it was the package it came in. Florida just told us we were creative and valuable, and we wanted to believe it. He sold us to ourselves.
I always thought Baby Boomers were the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people on the planet, beginning with making the mistake of watching a few minutes of “Thirtysomething” when I was twentysomething. Those who believe Florida’s “creative class” claptrap might fall into the same category.
What jobs fit into the creative class? Florida says:
The distinguishing characteristic of the creative class is that its members engage in work whose function is to “create meaningful new forms.” The super- creative core of this new class includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the “thought leadership” of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers. Members of this super-creative core produce new forms or designs that are readily transferable and broadly useful—such as designing a product that can be widely made, sold and used; coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in many cases; or composing music that can be performed again and again.
Beyond this core group, the creative class also includes “creative professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and healthcare professions, and business management. These people engage in creative problem-solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. Doing so typically requires a high degree of formal education and thus a high level of human capital. … They apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways to fit the situation, exercise a great deal of judgment, perhaps try something radically new from time to time.
That is a group so broad as to be nearly meaningless. “Exercise a great deal of judgment”? “Apply or combine standard approaches in unique ways to fit the situation”? It’s also a group whose earnings are on the poles. Some of the professions listed probably fit into the evil 1 percent; as for others, well, Madison is said to have a large number of waiters with doctoral degrees.
Florida has an ideological message here too, as Steven Malanga pointed out:
But most important, to a generation of liberal urban policymakers and politicians who favor big government, Florida’s ideas offer a way to talk economic-development talk while walking the familiar big-spending walk. In the old rhetorical paradigm, left-wing politicians often paid little heed to what mainstream businesses—those that create the bulk of jobs—wanted or needed, except when individual firms threatened to leave town, at which point municipal officials might grudgingly offer tax incentives. The business community was otherwise a giant cash register to be tapped for public revenues—an approach that sparked a steady drain of businesses and jobs out of the big cities once technology freed them from the necessity of staying there.
Now comes Florida with the equivalent of an eat-all-you-want-and-still-lose-weight diet. Yes, you can create needed revenue-generating jobs without having to take the unpalatable measures—shrinking government and cutting taxes—that appeal to old-economy businessmen, the kind with starched shirts and lodge pins in their lapels. You can bypass all that and go straight to the new economy, where the future is happening now. You can draw in Florida’s creative-class capitalists—ponytails, jeans, rock music, and all—by liberal, big-government means: diversity celebrations, “progressive” social legislation, and government spending on cultural amenities. Put another way, Florida’s ideas are breathing new life into an old argument: that taxes, incentives, and business-friendly policies are less important in attracting jobs than social legislation and government-provided amenities. After all, if New York can flourish with its high tax rates, and Austin can boom with its heavy regulatory environment and limits on development, any city can thrive in the new economy. …
Except that …
But a far more serious—indeed, fatal—objection to Florida’s theories is that the economics behind them don’t work. Although Florida’s book bristles with charts and statistics showing how he constructed his various indexes and where cities rank on them, the professor, incredibly, doesn’t provide any data demonstrating that his creative cities actually have vibrant economies that perform well over time. A look at even the most simple economic indicators, in fact, shows that, far from being economic powerhouses, many of Florida’s favored cities are chronic underperformers.
Exhibit A is the most fundamental economic measure, job growth. The professor’s creative index—a composite of his other indexes—lists San Francisco, Austin, Houston, and San Diego among the top ten. His bottom ten include New Orleans, Las Vegas, Memphis, and Oklahoma City, which he says are “stuck in paradigms of old economic development” and are losing their “economic dynamism” to his winners. So you’d expect his winners to be big job producers. Yet since 1993, cities that score the best on Florida’s analysis have actually grown no faster than the overall U.S. jobs economy, increasing their employment base by only slightly more than 17 percent. Florida’s indexes, in fact, are such poor predictors of economic performance that his top cities haven’t even outperformed his bottom ones. Led by big percentage gains in Las Vegas (the fastest-growing local economy in the nation) as well as in Oklahoma City and Memphis, Florida’s ten least creative cities turn out to be jobs powerhouses, adding more than 19 percent to their job totals since 1993—faster growth even than the national economy. …
It’s no coincidence that some of Florida’s urban exemplars perform so unimpressively on these basic measures of growth. As Florida tells us repeatedly, these cities spend money on cultural amenities and other frills, paid for by high taxes, while restricting growth through heavy regulation. Despite Florida’s notion of a new order in economic development, the data make crystal-clear that such policies aren’t people- or business-friendly. The 2000 census figures on out-migration, for instance, show that states with the greatest loss of U.S. citizens in 1996 through 2000—in other words, the go-go years—have among the highest tax rates and are the biggest spenders, while those that did the best job of attracting and retaining people have among the lowest tax rates. A study of 1990 census data by the Cato Institute’s Stephen Moore found much the same thing for cities. Among large cities, those that lost the most population over a ten-year period were the highest-taxing, biggest-spending cities in America, with per-capita taxes 75 percent higher than the fastest-growing cities. Given those figures, maybe Florida should have called his book The Curse of the Creative Class.
My favorite demographer, Joel Kotkin, added after the 2010 election, which reversed much of the 2008 election, which Kotkin called “the triumph of the creative class”:
A term coined by urban guru Richard Florida, “the creative class” also covers what David Brooks more cunningly calls “bourgeois bohemians”–socially liberal, well-educated, predominately white, upper middle-class voters. They are clustered largely in expensive urban centers, along the coasts, around universities and high-tech regions. To this base, Obama can add the welfare dependents, virtually all African-Americans, and the well-organized legions of public employees. …
In contrast, the traditional middle class has not fared well at all. This group consists of virtually everyone who earns the national household median income of $50,000 or somewhat above. They tend to be white, concentrated outside the coasts (except along the Gulf), suburban and politically independent. In 2008 they divided their votes, allowing Obama, with his huge urban, minority and youth base, to win easily.
Since Obama’s inauguration all the economic statistics vital to their lives–job creation, family income, housing prices–have been stagnant or negative. Not surprising then that suburbanites, small businesspeople and middle-income workers walked out on the Democrats last night. They did not do so because they loved the Republicans but because the majority either fears unemployment or already have lost their jobs. Many were employed in the industries such as manufacturing and construction hardest hit in the recession; it has not escaped their attention that Obama’s public-sector allies, paid with their taxes, have remained not only largely unscathed, but much better compensated. …
The middle class is a huge proportion of the population. Thirty-five million households earn between $50,000 and $100,000 a year; close to another 15 million have incomes between $100,000 and $150,000. Together these households overwhelm the number of poor households as well as the highly affluent.
In contrast, the “creative class” represents a relatively small grouping. Some define this group as upward of 40% of the workforce–largely by dint of having a four-year college degree–but this seems far too broad. The creative class is often seen as sharing the hip values of the Bobo crowd. Lumping an accountant with two kids in suburban Detroit or Atlanta with a childless SoHo graphic artist couple seems disingenuous at best. In reality the true creative class, notes demographer Bill Frey, may constitute no more than 5% of the total.
As (apparently) a member of the creative class, I say that any politician who creates an economic development strategy based on 5 percent of the population deserves to be unemployed by the voters. (See Cieslewicz, Dave.) Official Madison has failed to notice that its quality of life is dropping like a rock due to the uncool issues of crime and schools, but on the other hand Madison is also increasingly unaffordable to live in. None of that is particularly friendly for families, regardless of how many parents they have in the house. Nor is substandard job growth.
Critics today often point to the 1950s as the last years before American society became so divided between haves and have-nots. At the end of that decade, America’s “Gini coefficient”—the most common measure of income inequality, running from 0 (least unequal) to 1 (most unequal)—was 0.37. Today it is 0.45.
But in 1959, more than 20% of families fell below the poverty line. In 2010 that figure was just over 13%. Real per capita GDP today is 270% higher than it was in 1959. A family in the bottom fifth of the income distribution today makes the same amount in real terms as a family earning the median income in 1950. So inequality might have increased, but so too—dramatically—has quality of life.
Even over the last two decades, while real income has essentially stagnated for the bottom fifth of earners, basic conveniences have become far more affordable. In 1992, only 20% of American families below the poverty line had a dishwasher—50% had air conditioning and 60% owned a microwave. When the Census Bureau last surveyed these figures in 2005, those figures were 37%, 79% and 91%, respectively. Critics who minimize the importance of these conveniences likely have never had to do without them. …
Certainly there are reasons for concern if lower-income Americans aren’t able to save or acquire sufficient capital to pursue innovative ideas, or to see their children attend decent schools. They will suffer, and the country will lose out on significant intellectual capital and growth opportunities. But this should not be confused with inequality.
Equality is not a good in itself and shouldn’t be analyzed in a vacuum. If we remember that, perhaps a century from now low-income Americans will pity the living standards of today’s 1%.
Today’s blog for Collector Car Appreciation Day is about cars that are not likely to become collectors, combining two themes from my past — the 1980s, and the cars therein:
I graduated from high school and college in the ’80s. I’m a fan of ’80s music. I think ’80s fashion is generally unremarkable, except for leg warmers and really big hair. I am not a fan of ’80s cars, nor should you be.
I’ve written here before that today’s cars are unquestionably more capable than collector cars, though they lack the soul, for lack of a better term, of collector cars. Cars of the ’80s generally lacked both qualities.
Collectible Automobile found two newspaper ads of the day for those wondering what was available:
The reason I have pleasant memories of my own ’80s transportation will be revealed at the end.
Imagine being a Playboy Magazine writer and having to write this for the October 1983 issue:
OK, the thrill is back. The decade of dullness has come and gone. Cars are exciting and driving is fun again. …
There’s a new breed of machine in the land: the pocket rocket – your basic economy sedan or coupe with a massive horsepower and handling transfusion.
What cars was the writer referring to? The 90-horsepower Volkswagen Rabbit GTI, the 110-horsepower Dodge Shelby Charger, the 100-horsepower turbocharged (!) Nissan Pulsar NX, the 116-horsepower turbocharged Ford EXP Turbo, and the 150-horsepower turbocharged Pontiac Sunbird S/E.
Most of the worst examples of ’80s cars were the result of their design during or immediately after the second energy crisis in the late ’70s. Consumers wanted smaller cars, but Detroit didn’t have much ability to design small cars beyond just making them smaller than the cars they were replacing and putting weaker engines in them. Front-wheel drive was starting to appear in showrooms, but those cars mostly demonstrated that you don’t want to purchase the first iteration of a car.
Experience number one was a 1981 Chevrolet Malibu purchased as an upgrade from the car my father had been driving. The Malibu was part of the second wave of GM’s downsizing, which started in 1977 with the full-size Chevy Impala/Caprice, Pontiac Catalina/Bonneville, Oldsmobile Delta 88/98, Buick LeSabre/Electra and Cadillac de Villes. With rebodying in 1991, those cars lasted until GM (stupidly) killed its full-size rear-drive cars in 1996.
The downsizing of GM’s mid-sized cars — the Malibu, Pontiac LeMans, Olds Cutlass and Buick Century, and their personal luxury companion Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, Cutlass Supreme and Regal — didn’t go as well. The genius of the 1977 B- and C-body redesign was that, even though the cars were smaller and lighter, buyers didn’t feel as though they were buying less car.
1978 Buick Century sedan. In 1978, fastback sedans were not popular.
That was not the case with GM’s A-bodies. If you bought a sedan or station wagon, the rear-seat passengers were unable to roll down their windows. GM’s designers (and I use the term loosely for this decade) removed the rear window mechanisms in order to improve rear-seat elbow room. (That is, for those whose arms fit into the indentation in the rear doors. No, mine didn’t.)
Ford also downsized, with equally bad results, such as the early ’80s Thunderbird, or, as an owner called it, “Thunderchicken”:
Chrysler was trying to bore everyone to death with the Plymouth Horizon/Dodge Omni …
… and the Plymouth Reliant/Dodge Aries:
AMC did so poorly that it imported Renaults, such as the Alliance …
… and Fuego:
Chrysler’s purchase of AMC in 1987 could almost be called a mercy killing.
Engines were dropping in power in those days largely because of air pollution regulations. One solution was to equip them with computers to control spark and various other engine functions. Unfortunately, GM’s Computer Command Control was sent into the world with insufficient refinement, resulting in the Check Engine light going on and off for no apparent reason. (Some things never change.) The automakers also hadn’t figured out that electronic fuel injection was a more precise way to send fuel into the engine than carburetors.
The automakers were starting to figure out that one way to improve fuel economy was to reduce highway RPMs through transmission and rear-end gearing. That’s why cars of today are equipped with overdrive top gear(s). Unfortunately, no one had figured out how to put overdrive gears into automatic transmissions, with the result that rear ends were equipped with tall (that is, numerically low) gear ratios. This was good for highway cruising, but not so good for acceleration from a stop with the three-speed non-overdrive automatics of the day.
Cars of most of the decade also featured a prominent reminder of the stupidity of the Carter administration — speedometers with the top listed speed of 85 mph, and 55 mph highlighted to remind drivers that they dare not drive faster than that.
(I believe this was about the time I started to hate government, come to think of it.)
Tip number one that our experience with the Malibu would not be positive was two days into our ownership experience, when the bratty kid up the street started throwing rocks at it, chipping the black paint. (On the other hand, maybe he knew more than we did about the car.)
Within days of the car’s arrival, we took it on what I dubbed the Rust Belt Vacation, a route that included Chicago, Gary, Ind., Detroit, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo. (Not that I didn’t enjoy the vacation, because I did, but one could not better plan a better tour of industrial blight than Interstate 94 east from Madison and Interstate 90 coming back.) Everything that happened with the car nicely accidentally symbolized what was happening to the Rust Belt in those days.
On day 2 in Toronto, our car got rear-ended by a driver who gave a false name and address to the Toronto police. (Perhaps the hit-and-runner knew something about our car too.) The Check Engine light went on and off for no apparent reason. The air conditioner started making odd noises, which you don’t want to hear in the summertime. Enough things went wrong that I was commissioned to make a page-long list for the dealer upon our return to Madison. The last thing on that list was the front seat, which broke on the New York State Thruway, leading to the seat’s sliding back upon acceleration (which did not amuse the back-seat passengers) and sliding forward upon braking (which did not amuse the driver).
Similar experiences followed for nearly six years. (On the next vacation, to Florida and Louisiana, the car ran right every other day.) The end came right after my father woke me up one morning to have me take him to work because the Malibu had died one house down the street. I interrupted my father’s streak of, uh, colorful metaphors about the car by asking why didn’t he just get rid of the damn car. A couple months later, he did, succeeding in getting someone else to buy the piece of crap so he could buy a new Honda Accord sedan.
As bad as the GM A-body cars were, they paled in comparison to GM’s next brilliant idea, its first front-drive cars, the X-body Chevy Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Olds Omega and Buick Skylark. Popular Mechanics explains why “X” stood for “execrable”:
These four awkwardly proportioned “X-Body” front-drivers directly replaced GM’s rear-drive compacts (of which the Chevy Nova was the most prominent) and promised a revolution in how the corporation designed and built cars. Chevy alone sold an incredible 811,540 Citations during that prolonged 1980 model year based on that promise. Unfortunately, the reality was that these four- and six-cylinder cars probably suffered more recalls and endemic problems than any other GM vehicle program.
The problem wasn’t so much the basic engineering of the X-Body cars as it was that no one apparently spent any time doing the detailed engineering that determines a car’s success. So customers complained of disintegrating transmissions, suspension systems that seemed to wobble on their own mounts, and brakes that would make the whole car shudder every time they were applied. There were so many niggling faults and a seemingly endless series of recalls that sales of the car almost tanked by its third year. Still, through 1985, a few million escaped to the public, souring hundreds of thousands on GM.
The father of a girlfriend and our next-door neighbor had one. My father’s bank did too, and he occasionally drove it, and that one apparently wasn’t much of a problem. My experience, though, came as a passenger when the next-door neighbor’s daughter from his first marriage briefly lived with them, resulting in a carpooling arrangement to our high school. I got in the back seat and put my hand on the B-pillar, just in time to have her slam the front door on my hand. The irony was that she had slammed it on three knuckles, and it didn’t even hurt after a couple minutes.
GM had some engine issues during the 1980s, to say the least. One was the infamous Olds diesel V-8, a modified 350 V-8 that wasn’t sufficiently redesigned for diesel fuel’s requirements. Car industry observers claim that Americans 30 years later won’t buy diesel-powered cars because of the Olds diesel. (You can buy diesel full-size pickups from Chevy, GMC, Ford and Dodge — I mean Ram — but you can buy neither a diesel compact pickup nor a diesel car of any kind from them.)
Not to be outdone, Cadillac tried to improve fuel economy with its V-8–6–4, an attempt to disable two or four cylinders on their V-8s based on how they were being driven. It is nearly impossible to find a working V-8–6–4 because nearly every owner had their favorite mechanic disable the controls. Popular Mechanics calls it “one more half-developed, cynically marketed technology that GM just couldn’t make work.”
Cadillac also foisted on the buying public a luxury small car, or so it thought, the Cimarron, which earned, if you want to call it that, the honor, if you want to call it that, of making Time Magazine‘s 50 Worst Cars list:
Everything that was wrong, venal, lazy and mendacious about GM in the 1980s was crystallized in this flagrant insult to the good name and fine customers of Cadillac. Spooked by the success of premium small cars from Mercedes-Benz, GM elected to rebadge its awful mass-market J-platform sedans, load them up with chintzy fabrics and accessories and call them “Cimarron, by Cadillac.” Wha…? Who? Seeking an even hotter circle of hell, GM priced these pseudo-caddies (with four-speed manual transmissions, no less) thousands more than their Chevy Cavalier siblings. This bit of temporizing nearly killed Cadillac and remains its biggest shame.
By the time Johnny Z. got the factory in Northern Ireland up and running — and what could possibly go wrong there? — the losses were piling up fast. The car was heavy, underpowered (the 2.8-liter Peugeot V6 never had a chance) and overpriced. And De Lorean was having a few dramas of his own, resulting in one of law enforcement’s more memorable hidden-camera tableaux: the former GM executive sitting in a hotel room with suitcases on money, discussing the supply-and-demand of nose candy. The Giugiaro-designed DMC-12 sure was cool looking, though. In August of this year, the Texas company that controls the rights to the name announced it will build a small number of new DMC-12’s. How’s that for time travel?
The ’80s were also a demonstration of the maxim that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. (See “DeLorean.”) If you purchased a 1984–1989 Corvette, this is what stared back at the driver:
The switches to the right of this cluster (I can add four letters to that term to more accurately describe it) allowed the driver to select between oil pressure and oil temperature, and between engine temperature and volts, when most drivers would prefer to be able to see all that information. GM instead felt drivers would be more interested in the Corvette’s fuel economy. And while this Vette had a digital trip odometer, it had a conventional regular odometer. (And a butt-ugly steering wheel.)
You’ll be shocked — shocked! — to know that fixing these instrument clusters drains your wallet quickly, because the circuit board died and the lights would fade. C4 owners can replace the digital gauges with analog gauges, which leaves the owner with the choice of originality or function. (Choose the latter.)
The Corvette was not the only car with an instrument panel of regrettable design. Late ’80s buyers of Chevy S-10s and GMC S-15s had to choose between, as Car & Driver put it, something designed by Playskool …
… or this:
How about some Fun with Fonts:
Detroit wasn’t the only creator of automotive dreck in the ’80s, as MArooned lists:
1. 1988 Suzuki Samurai – I had a friend growing up who traded in a 1983 Pontiac Trans Am, Daytona 500 25th Anniverary edition on a Suz. Worst. Trade. Ever. Not only was the Samarai notoriously underpowered, poorly engineered, and slow; it was also prone to rollover crashes at moderate speeds. Bad, bad, bad.
2. 1985 Yugo GV – this one’s masquerading as a GTI, but failing. What can you say about the Yugo other than, well, you get what you pay for? Manufactured by Soviet bloc comrades, this car was as ugly as a CZ-52 but nowhere near as reliable or durable. …
6. Volkswagen pick-up. Whoever thought of this concept should be dragged off and shot. A front-wheel drive pickup truck? WTF? Uh, guys, the idea of a pickup truck is that you put extra weight in the back. When the drive wheels are in the front, extra weight in the back means that it’s a LOT harder to move… Duh! …
10. Nissan Pulsar. All the aerodynamics of a door wedge. All the frightening raw power of a weedwhacker. Pop-up headlights that broke within weeks. The only way this car could possible have gotten worse would have been to give it a restyle with a modular ass end. Oh, wait, that’s what they did…
Two facts about the Yugo: The engines on the first Yugos failed shortly after purchase, requiring a replacement engine that cost a few hundred dollars less than the car. A couple years ago, a caller to WTMJ radio’s Charlie Sykes reported that his parents had purchased a Yugo in the ’80s. When they contacted their bank to get a car loan, the bank told them it would make the loan, but would not accept the Yugo as collateral.
The first car I purchased was a 1988 Chevy Beretta GT.
It was a manufacturer buyback, which should have been my first warning; I assumed that GM had fixed the problem in question. The problem was mysterious indications of overheating; as I discovered, the car’s temperature gauge would peg at H, and the Low Coolant light would light up, even though the car didn’t act as if it was overheating, and it wasn’t low on coolant. Two car dealers and one repair shop could not determine whether or not the car was in fact overheating, and could not repair the problem.
Beyond its generally cheap design, the Beretta (which I think is Italian for “lemon”) developed other problems. The car got into and out of tune to the point where when I pushed in the clutch, the engine would quit, necessitating either starting the car or letting it back out so the momentum of the car reengaged the engine. There were also mysterious electrical gremlins. I didn’t impress my then-girlfriend (now wife) when the turn signals stopped working and I had to purchase a fuse, only to have it immediately pop, in the Quad Cities of Illinois and Iowa. I was wondering if I brought enough money for replacement fuses, but the second one didn’t pop. I had to replace the exhaust system, the first and only exhaust system I’ve ever had to replace before or since then. The last straw (because I concluded that making simultaneous car and car repair payments sucked), was when, four years into its life, I had to have the front disc brakes completely replaced because they were rusting from the inside.
It’s amusing to me that any car built in the 1980s can now be licensed in Wisconsin as a collector car … not that you’d want to. Yet I still have fond vehicular memories of the ’80s. That’s because I didn’t own an ’80s car for more than a year of the ’80s. (In fact, I should have kept the car I had, 11 mpg or not.)
Oh, fine, it doesn’t cure cancer, but it might help prevent cancer:
Drinking more than two cups of coffee per day, or any other combination of caffeinated beverages, may lower your chances of developing skin cancer, a new reports says. The results included other caffeinated products such as soda, tea and chocolate.
The report in the journal Cancer Research found that caffeine potentially reduced the risk of developing basal cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer though generally considered less serious than melanoma.
“Our data indicate that the more caffeinated coffee you consume, the lower your risk of developing basal cell carcinoma,” said Jiali Han, Ph.D., associate professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health.
Just look how long it took them to introduce Dr. Han. It must be true!
According to a recent review of more than 18 studies on booze, beer is just as good for your heart as vino. Drinking a little more than a pint of beer a day could make you 30 percent less likely than non-drinkers to suffer from stroke, heart attacks, and heart disease, researchers found. Credit heart benefits to the alcohol itself, and polyphenols (antioxidants) in beer. And make sure to drink that beer with a smile.
I’m not going to get into the beer vs. wine argument. As you know, Benjamin Franklin spoke fondly of wine …
“We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
… though he and other Founding Fathers clearly enjoyed ale as well, most notably Thomas Jefferson:
“Beer, if drank in moderation, softens the temper, cheers the spirit, and promotes health.”
By the end of today, I suspect I will have ingested both.
Tim Nerenz isn’t happy about the state of the United States of America one day before Independence Day. Nor should he (nor you) be:
Our elected officials all talk about “the American people” like we were undifferentiated; they would have us believe what is good for us is just one thing and they happen to know exactly what it is. They no longer make their laws conform to our liberty; they make our liberty conform to their laws.
This is exactly wrong; us having to conform to their laws is the same unbearable circumstance that led us to revolt in 1776, only now our tax burden is even higher.
It is easy to become confused and think that we and the government are inseparable. Our government has enacted public housing, public education, public health care, public libraries, public transportation, public debt; and we have been told all of those are “ours”.
We hear about the public good, the public interest, and the public trust so often we start to hallucinate and see the mirage ourselves; we begin to think there might actually be such things. We have been taught that we are dependent on government for our security and prosperity; many have come to believe that we cannot possibly exist independent from it.
With each generation we drift farther and farther away from the nation’s first principle – liberty. We have lost sight of what it means to be free and we have forgotten what it is that we are to be liberated from – namely, government. …
We have foolishly accepted the idea that government is our master and we must obey its commands. We view with suspicion those who demand that our Constitution be respected and that our individual liberties be restored; we fear the truly independent among us; we envy those who succeed on their own.
So let’s have some truth in advertising and celebrate Dependence Day this 4th of July. Let us marinate in our dull conformity and revel in our meek compliance.
Let’s all drive exactly the posted limit, don’t put any grams of CO2 in the air firing up those backyard grills, make sure the kids check with Bloomberg about how much pop they can have, and let’s allow MADD to ration the beer. No boats, jet skis, or water-skiing on Dependence Day either – you need a truck to pull that kind of gear and we are supposed to be Volt-dolts now, haven’t you heard? …
And put away all that red, white, and blue, because someone somewhere somehow will find a way to get themselves offended at the flags, and we can’t have that.
Speaking of offended, vegans don’t like you eating brats, either, so it’s going to be a broccoli day; and without our pets in public – PETA types don’t like pets or pet owners. Parades? I don’t think so. Somebody might sue us because they had to wait to cross their favorite street. Worse yet, they might need health care somewhere over there on the other side of the marching bands and horse clubs and politicians working the crowds.
So have a ball, all you dependents and collectivists who think the key to your happiness is compliance. Yes, have yourselves a fabulous Dependence Day, with your safe little sparklers and uncooked broccoli, and “Mandy” purring out at volume two in your Volts as you sip your O’Douls and 8 ounces of Coke and wait for your government to light off its fireworks (waivers, naturally) so you can thank your lucky stars we have statists who care about us enough to entertain us once a year.
Or here is a better idea: throw off your dependence and come and join us in the liberty movement. Take back your independence and live as a self-sovereign in a nation where government is limited and liberty is not. Play Manilow because you want to, not because you have to; wave your sparklers because it pleases you, not because it pleases some bureaucrat in a city far away. Liberty is the absence of government in choice; it is independence from government.
Ripon College, a private residential liberal arts college, is holding its Alumni Weekend this coming weekend.
Chris Rickert of the Wisconsin State Journal feels the need to defend the liberal arts (including a journalism and political science graduate with a history minor whose work you read in this space):
I can’t open the paper lately without reading about how the American economy is doomed unless we get more kids into the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math. …
As a graduate and employee in two fields ranked among the most useless of college majors — English and journalism, respectively — I admit I’m a little envious of all the love being showered on STEM.
My personal bias is also that STEM skills started succumbing to the law of diminishing returns some time shortly after the invention of indoor plumbing.
Nevertheless, it’s clear STEM isn’t nearly as important to solving the world’s problems — economic or otherwise — as the so-called “soft” skills: compromise, empathy, the ability to understand different viewpoints, etc. …
A lot of people were opposed to [Gov. Scott] Walker not necessarily because they were pro-collective bargaining but because they felt violated by “lack of process,” said Lisa Derr, who as president of the Wisconsin Association of Mediators knows something about process.
Conflict-resolution consultant Harry Webne-Behrman said it’s important to identify not just the details of a conflict, but how the need for respect, empathy and understanding fuel the behavior of conflict participants.
The STEM fields don’t always teach that, he said. “You’ve got to learn these soft skills.”
And don’t forget the world-saving power of all those non-STEM degrees — literature, philosophy, history and others of the oft-maligned humanities.
“Skills and methods associated with the humanities aren’t soft, despite the convention of referring to them as such,” said Sara Guyer, director of the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities. “The importance of the humanities … is not just about empathy or imagining others, but it is about deepening our real understanding and fostering rigorous, critical analysis.”
This is not to say STEM is irrelevant to the (maybe-not-so) soft skills. …
But personally, I’ve learned more about humanity and its discontents from Jane Smiley novels and David Foster Wallace essays than from any STEM course I ever took.
The path to prosperity may well be paved with STEM graduates — but only if they learn the soft skills and read a few decent books along the way.
One of my goals in life is to be compensated more than once for the same piece of work.
I first pulled this off during my college days, when stories I wrote for the Monona Community Herald were stories I also turned in for my public affairs reporting class. The instructor, a New York Times foreign correspondent, knew I was doing this. It strikes me now as having been professionally judged twice — by the Herald, which paid me every two weeks to write; and by someone who had covered the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. (Which is not the same thing as the Town of Cottage Grove board, but that’s not the point.)
Then after I started in southwest Wisconsin, I announced games for the local radio station that I also wrote about for the newspaper. Later on, I was a stringer for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald covering meetings I would also write about for the Grant County Herald Independent. Think of it as early multitasking.
The persistently weak economy is at the core of [voter] uneasiness: Thirty-five months after the recession technically ended, economic growth remains anemic, and unemployment remains very high. But Americans are nervous not only because the economy has yet to bounce back, but also because we have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all—that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared.
To say that we are not, in fact, on the verge of the triumph of welfare-state liberalism is of course a gross understatement. We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism. But at the same time, American capitalism is not exactly ready to bloom once the shadow of Obama is lifted at last. While our welfare state has grown bloated and bankrupt, our economy has grown increasingly sclerotic—weighed down by a grossly inefficient public sector, the rise of crony capitalism, demographic changes transforming the workforce, and a general loss of focus on productivity and innovation. The American economy still has great stores of strength, but it is not well prepared to make the most of those strengths or to address its deficiencies as a global competitor.
This is not the fault of conservative plutocrats or of Barack Obama. It is not the fault of income inequality or of the Federal Reserve. It is the fault of our country’s failure to adequately modernize its governing institutions and its economy—its public sector and its private sector. This failure exposes us to a grave risk of stagnation, and, therefore, decline. And it is that risk, which we all have been sensing in our bones in recent years, that has Americans exceptionally anxious. …
It is more difficult, however, to see why Mitt Romney would not be laying out the nature of America’s predicament before the public. He has begun to offer an agenda that speaks to some key elements of the predicament, but he has not made a coherent case for that agenda as a whole, and so ends up presenting voters with laundry lists of policy ideas wrapped in general criticisms of Obama. He has yet to state clearly the problem to which he offers up his economic policies as a solution.
The problem is that America is unprepared for the future, and Barack Obama is not so much the cause of that problem as the embodiment of it. He stands for what has gone wrong, and his ideological views, his party’s most powerful constituencies, and his policy commitments stand in the way of America’s future prosperity. …
The story of our public finances is the story of the collapse of the liberal welfare state. The edifice of the Great Society entitlement system, poorly constructed in a time of plenty and shielded from reform ever since by a bipartisan conspiracy of political convenience, is crumbling all around us. At its core are the health care entitlements—Medicare and Medicaid—which between them are responsible for essentially all of the growth of government as a share of the economy over the last four decades, and all of its projected unsustainable growth in the next four. At its periphery is an approach to discretionary spending that has left us with a broken budget process and an array of bloated and ineffective public programs. It all adds up to an explosion of the national debt—which has nearly doubled in just the past four years—and to a course of spending and borrowing that we could not hope to chase with tax increases even if we wanted to, and that our creditors know we cannot sustain. This is not the government of a lean, efficient, 21st-century economic power.
And it is not just government spending but government work that is holding us back. The two sectors of our economy that have seen the most job growth in the past decade have been the two most government-dominated sectors: health care, and government employment itself (especially in education). In both cases, that growth has decidedly not been matched by improvements in productivity. Our health care system—largely as a result of Medicare and Medicaid and of the poor design of the tax treatment of employer-purchased health insurance—is horrendously inefficient, inflating costs without any relationship to outcomes and playing a central role in an economy-wide wage stagnation. In education at all levels, meanwhile, we have been paying more and more for less and less—the very opposite of productivity improvement—while much-needed reforms have been prevented by powerful unions and their allied politicians.
The private economy is not exactly getting geared for efficiency either. The failure of education reform makes it difficult for too many younger Americans to gain the skills they will need to compete with foreign workers in tomorrow’s economy, and our immigration policy imports low-skilled foreigners to compete with low-skilled American workers while denying employers the high-skilled workers they lack. It is the worst of all worlds for building American human capital and driving productivity and innovation. …
To help voters see that fact, Republicans this year will have to show that they are not similarly disconnected from what worries Americans. Rather than beginning from Obama’s failures, or from vague if well-meaning allusions to the importance of liberty, Mitt Romney should begin his appeal by explaining the sources of public concern. He should be frank about the danger of stagnation, clear about identifying President Obama with precisely the difficulty we face, and then explicit in offering his own alternative and his own qualifications.
That alternative should aim not simply to remove obstacles to prosperity, but to cultivate the sources of strength and growth in the American economy—to help enable the kind of productivity boom necessary to get us back on a trajectory of growth.
Ironically, one plausible source of the next productivity boom is American health care. Today’s health sector is horrendously inefficient—thanks largely to poorly conceived federal policy—and yet demand for care is great and growing in our aging society, which makes health care primed for an efficiency revolution. …
A second and perhaps no less surprising potential source of strength is the energy sector. While the president has indulged in embarrassing fantasies about solar and wind power and electric cars, America’s domestic energy supply has undergone an utter revolution in the past few years. Advances in technologies for recovering oil and gas from previously inaccessible sources now look increasingly likely to make available astonishing quantities of domestic fossil fuels. …
While promoting reforms to encourage these two potential boom sectors in particular, Romney should also seek to modernize the federal government’s approach to the economy more generally, to make it supportive of the productivity improvements we need. One obvious target for reform is the tax code, which, as nearly everyone by now agrees, needs to be made broader and flatter to raise more revenue more efficiently. The daunting maze of credits and deductions should be pared back to serve just a few essential ends (like charitable giving, health insurance, and child rearing), rates should be lowered where they can be, and the corporate income tax rate in particular must be brought into line with those of our competitors abroad. …
Governor Romney should also shine a light on the disturbing expansion of regulatory power that has accompanied the growth of the liberal welfare state (under Republican and Democratic presidents alike). Regulation obviously has a crucial role to play in governing free markets, but as bureaucratic discretion has increasingly replaced clear and predictable rules approved by elected officials, our regulatory system has become an obstacle to innovation. Romney should call for rebalancing our constitutional separation of powers by requiring all major regulations (judged to carry costs of $100 million or more) to be approved by Congress, along the lines of legislation passed by the House last year, and for pulling back the unprecedented regulatory discretion granted by Dodd–Frank. …
But the real heart of a human capital agenda must be education reform, which for the most part is not the federal government’s purview. Romney should propose to put Washington on the side of serious reformers in the states working to modernize K-12 education by breaking the stranglehold of the teachers’ unions, permitting more choice and variety, and beginning to think beyond our 19th-century system of school districts and local boards of education. He should also not be afraid to put the weight of the federal government behind efforts to reduce the costs of college—using the leverage of federal dollars (not only the billions in subsidized loans, but even the billions in academic research grants) to deflate the higher education bubble, rather than vigorously pumping it up as federal dollars now do, and encouraging alternatives to the traditional four-year degree.
And as he pursues pro-growth reforms like these, Romney should also lay out a new vision of the American safety net, understood as a way to make the benefits of a thriving economy available to all—of making the poor less dependent, not making everyone else more so. Productivity and efficiency need not come at the expense of financial security and social cohesion; indeed, they have often gone hand in hand throughout our history. Only in a stagnant economy, in which redistribution is the only means of bettering the condition of the needy, is the good of employers and producers fundamentally at odds with that of workers and consumers, or with that of the poor. …
America needs more than economic growth. But without growth, we cannot hope to take up our other priorities. With the crumbling of the liberal welfare state and the passing of the postwar economic order, we are badly in need of a new vision for growth. Barack Obama stands for the old order. If Mitt Romney chooses to stand for the new one—for American principles, drive, and ingenuity applied to our novel circumstances—America’s anxious electorate might just stand with him.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
