I am told there is another Republican presidential debate tonight. I won’t be watching, because debates have nothing to do with being president, and I have better things to do with my time anyway.
GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker, whose campaign is floundering according to the experts despite not a single vote having been cast yet, plans to stand out from the 432 other GOP presidential candidates by taking his biggest Wisconsin accomplishment national, according to RightWisconsin:
Ahead of a Wednesday debate with GOP rivals, Scott Walker will announce a major plan to overhaul and reform labor laws in the United States. Reid Epstein at the Wall Street Journal reports:
The Republican presidential candidate’s proposal, which he plans to announce at an afternoon speech in Las Vegas, would eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, prohibit federal employee unions, institute right-to-work laws nationwide and repeal the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which requires the payment of local prevailing wages to workers on federal construction projects, often boosting pay and project costs.
No question, the plan is big and bold.
At Hot Air, Walker explained why the end of federal employee unions will be good for taxpayers.
As president, I will work with Congress to prohibit federal employee unions because it’s the right thing for workers, taxpayers and the future of the American government. I have no illusions that this effort will be easy. Opponents will say that we’re robbing federal workers of their rights and workplace protections. Nothing could be further from the truth. Total compensation for federal employees is already 30 to 40 percent higher than their civilian counterparts and they already enjoy strong workplace protections and high job security rates.
The vast majority of federal workers do an outstanding job and deserve our appreciation and protection, which they will receive under a Walker administration. But taxpayers deserve the same thing. One of the ways I will achieve that is by removing the corrosive influence of federal unions from our government.
This proposal does a couple of things for Walker as his candidacy seeks to find some momentum.
First, it provides more substance to Walker’s candidacy as he seeks to move beyond his reputation as reform governor in the Midwest to a national candidate. With how quick Walker rose in the early part of 2015, he was slow to develop serious proposals to reform federal policy. This, along with his healthcare proposal, are very serious proposals that ought to find favor among conservative pundits, wonks, and the grassroots.
Second, Walker pokes the eye of an old foe. In many ways, big labor made Scott Walker. And he’s hoping they might give him a boost once again. This proposal will draw out big labor into a full-fledged freakout. The reaction will be swift and over the top. In an unsubtle way, Walker is begging for more union protests to bolster the “unintimidated” brand, and he is likely to get exactly what he wants.
Third, this is Scott Walker’s sweet spot. While immigration has been something of a nightmare, and foreign policy has been a work in progress, tackling federal labor policy is right up his alley. This will be framed as an “Act 10” for the federal government. But in many ways, it’s bigger than that. For a candidate who has struggled with driving the agenda, this ought to be a good moment for Walker as he attempts to reset the narrative of his campaign.
What is the one thing all conservatives should agree upon? The excessive scope and cost of government, particularly a government that has managed to generate tens of trillions of dollars in debt that will never be repaid.
Labor costs, both direct (salaries and benefits) and indirect (government projects made more expensive because of Davis-Bacon), have a lot to do with our bloated Govzilla. It remains unclear to me why we overburdened taxpayers should watch our wallets drain further to, ultimately, pad the wallets of government employee union heads, such as anyone who gets a paycheck from the Wisconsin Education Association Council. Government employee unions never have the taxpayer’s interest as a priority.
This also is an issue where Walker stands out from his fellow candidates, because none of them took on unions and won. Ohio Gov. John Kasich tried Act 10-style reforms, only to have them defeated by voters. No one else in the GOP field did what Walker did.
The political problem, though, is whether this will help Walker, who should have introduced union-neutering well before now. Sticking it to a Democratic constituency full of criminals (see Hoffa, James) is well and good, but not probably as important as disassembling the bad effects of Barack Obama in, for instance, his foreign policy of surrender and his other efforts to destroy our country in such areas as crippling environmental-policy idiocy.
Well, if this is the conservative movement now, I guess you’re going to have to count me out.
No, I’m not making some mad dash to the center. No, I’m not hoping to be the first alternate to Steve Schmidt on Morning Joe, nor am I vying to become my generation’s Kevin Phillips. I will never be a HillaryCon. And I have no plan to earn “strange new respect” from the Georgetown cocktail-party set I’m always hearing about but never meeting. But even if I have no desire to “grow” in my beliefs, I have no intention to shrink, either.
The late Bill Rusher, longtime publisher of National Review, often counseled young writers to remember, “Politicians will always disappoint you.” As I’ve often said around here, this isn’t because politicians are evil. It’s because politicians are politicians. Their interests too often lie in votes, not in principles. That’s why the conservative movement has always recognized that victory lies not simply in electing conservative politicians, but in shaping a conservative electorate that lines up the incentives so that politicians define their self-interest in a conservative way.
But if it’s true that politicians can disappoint, I think one has to say that the people can, too.
And when I say “the people” I don’t mean “those people.” I mean my people. I mean many of you, Dear Readers. Normally, when conservatives talk about how the public can be wrong, we mean that public. You know the one. The “low-information voters” Rush Limbaugh is always talking about. The folks we laughed at when Jay Leno interviewed them on the street. But we don’t just mean the unwashed and the ill-informed. We sometimes mean Jews, blacks, college kids, Lena Dunham fans, and countless other partisan slices of the electorate who reflexively vote on strict party lines for emotional or irrational reasons. We laugh at liberals who let know-nothing celebrities do their thinking for them.
Well, many of the same people we laughed at are now laughing at us because we are going ga-ga over our own celebrity.
Yes, I know that there are plenty of decent and honorable people who support Trump. For instance, my friend John Nolte over at Breitbart is one. He constantly celebrates Trump because Trump has all the right enemies and defies the conventional rules governing politics and media …
But this is not an argument for Trump as a serious presidential candidate. It is really no argument at all. It is catharsis masquerading as principle, venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument. Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.
I’ve written many times how the phrase “power corrupts” has been misunderstood. Lord Acton’s original point wasn’t that power corrupts those who wield power, it was that it corrupts those who admire it. In a letter to a historian friend who was too forgiving of the Reformation-era popes, Acton wrote:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Popularity — which in democracy is a very important kind of power — works the same way. We routinely forgive the rich and famous for sins we would condemn our neighbors for. Trump’s popularity apparently trumps all standards we would apply not just to our neighbors, but to our leaders. A small example of what I am talking about can be found in Ted Cruz’s vow not to criticize other Republicans — if by “Republicans” you mean “Donald Trump.” I have a lot of respect for Cruz, but this doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Texan has been lambasting the entire Republican party for his entire time in office. Some of his critiques are valid, of course. But he has shown not an iota of reluctance to criticize fellow Republicans when it’s in his interest. Cruz isn’t criticizing Donald Trump because, as a smart politician, he wants to woo Trump’s followers when/if Trump eventually falters. Similarly, I’m constantly hearing from Trump fans that it’s “disrespectful” for me to criticize the Republican front-runner — as if these fans would refrain from criticizing Jeb or Rubio or Kasich if they were in the lead.
If I sound dismayed, it’s only because I am. Conservatives have spent more than 60 years arguing that ideas and character matter. That is the conservative movement I joined and dedicated my professional life to. And now, in a moment of passion, many of my comrades-in-arms are throwing it all away in a fit of pique. Because “Trump fights!”
How many Republicans have been deemed unfit for the Oval Office because of comparatively minor character flaws or ideological shortcomings? Rick Perry in 2012 saw his candidacy implode when he couldn’t remember the third item on his checklist of agencies he’d close down. Well, even in that “oops” moment, Rick Perry comes off as Lincolnesque compared with Donald Trump.
Yes, I know Trump has declared himself pro-life. Good for him — and congratulations to the pro-life movement for making that the price of admission. But I’m at a total loss to understand why serious pro-lifers take him at his word. He’s been all over the place on Planned Parenthood, and when asked who he’d like to put on the Supreme Court, he named his pro-choice-extremist sister.
Ann Coulter wrote of Newt in 2011: “If all you want is to lob rhetorical bombs at Obama and then lose, Newt Gingrich — like recent favorite Donald Trump — is your candidate. But if you want to save the country, Newt’s not your guy.” Now Ann leads a chorus of people claiming that Trump is our only savior. Has Trump changed, or have Ann and her followers? Is there a serious argument behind the new thinking, or is it “because he fights!”? …
In his embarrassing interview with Hugh Hewitt Thursday night, Trump revealed he knows less than most halfway-decent D.C. interns about foreign policy. Twitter lit up with responses about how it doesn’t matter and how it was a gotcha interview. They think that Trump’s claim that he’ll just go find a Douglas MacArthur to fix the problem is brilliant. Well, I’m all in favor of finding a Douglas MacArthur, but if you don’t know anything about foreign policy, the interview process will be a complete disaster. Yes, Reagan delegated. But he knew enough to know to whom to delegate.
If you want a really good sense of the damage Donald Trump is doing to conservatism, consider the fact that for the last five years no issue has united the Right more than opposition to Obamacare. Opposition to socialized medicine in general has been a core tenet of American conservatism from Day One. Yet, when Republicans were told that Donald Trump favors single-payer health care, support for single-payer health care jumped from 16 percent to 44 percent.
I’ve written a lot about my problems with populism. One of my favorite illustrations of why the populist mindset is dangerous and anti-intellectual comes from William Jennings Bryan. “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver,” Bryan announced. “I will look up the arguments later.” My view of conservatism holds that if free silver is a bad idea, it’s still a bad idea even if the people of Nebraska are for it. But Trumpism flips this on its head. The conservatives of Nebraska and elsewhere should be against single-payer health care, even if Donald Trump is for it. What we are seeing is the corrupting of conservatives. …
In 2012, Mark Steyn wrote that a President Gingrich would have “twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined.” If that (quite brilliant) line resonated with you three years ago, why doesn’t it for a President Trump?
I understand the Noltean compulsion to celebrate anyone who doesn’t take crap from the mainstream media. But when Newt Gingrich brilliantly eviscerated the press in 2012, there was a serious ideological worldview behind it. Trump’s assaults on the press have only one standard: whether the journalist in question is favorable to Trump or not. If a journalist praises him, that journalist is “terrific.” If the journalist is critical of Trump he is a “loser” (or, in my case, a loser who can’t buy pants). Not surprisingly, Hugh Hewitt is now “third rate” because he made Trump look bad. I’m no fan of Arianna Huffington or Gail Collins, but calling them “dogs” because they criticized you is not a serious ideological or intellectual retort. (It’s not even clever.) I think Trump did insinuate that Megyn Kelly was menstruating during the debate. He denies it. Fine. But what in the world about his past would lead someone to give him the benefit of the doubt? This is the same man who said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
Trump’s glass-bottom id lets the whole world see his megalomania. He talks about himself in the third person all the time. He explains that Trump is great because Trump is rich and famous. He’s waxed profound on how he doesn’t want blacks counting his money (he prefers Jews in yarmulkes). He makes jokes on national TV about women fellating him. He pays famous people to attend his wedding and then brags about it as if he got one over on them. He boasts in his books how he screwed over business associates and creditors because all that mattered was making an extra buck.
If your neighbor talked this way, maybe he’d still be your friend, because we all have friends who are characters. But would you want him to be your kid’s English teacher? Guidance counselor? Would you tell your kids you want them to follow his example? Would you go into business with him? Would you entrust him with nuclear weapons?
To no surprise, Goldberg got a lot a response, which will be in this spot tomorrow.
After two decades of the most remarkable crime drop in U.S. history, law enforcement has come to this: “I’m deliberately not getting involved in things I would have in the 1990s and 2000s,” an emergency-services officer in New York City tells me. “I won’t get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; I will if there’s a violent felony committed in my presence.”
A virulent antipolice campaign over the past year—initially fueled by a since-discredited narrative about a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.—has made police officers reluctant to do their jobs. The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. The media amplify that message on an almost daily basis. Officers now worry about becoming the latest racist cop of the week, losing their job or being indicted if a good-faith encounter with a suspect goes awry or is merely distorted by an incomplete cellphone video.
With police so discouraged, violent crime has surged in at least 35 American cities this year. The alarming murder increase prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association last month. Homicides were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore through mid-August, compared with the same period in 2014; murder was up 47% in Minneapolis and 36% in Houston through mid-July.
But something more fundamental than even public safety may be at stake. There are signs that the legal order itself is breaking down in urban areas. “There’s a total lack of respect out there for the police,” says a female sergeant in New York. “The perps feel more empowered to carry guns because they know that we are running scared.”
The lawful use of police power is being met by hostility and violence, often ignored by the press. In Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene, where a 4-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. Bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants, according to a witness I spoke with.
During anticop demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, 18-year-old Tyrone Harrisopened fire at police officers, according to law-enforcement officials, and was shot and wounded by police in response. A crowd pelted the cops with frozen water bottles and rocks, wounding three officers, while destroying three police cars and damaging businesses, Ferguson police said. “We’re ready for what? We’re ready for war,” some protesters reportedly chanted.
In Birmingham, Ala., an officer was beaten unconscious with his own gun last month by a suspect in a car stop. There was gloating on social media. “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” read one Twitter post. The officer later said that he had refrained from using force to defend himself for fear of a media backlash.
Officers are being challenged in their most basic efforts to render aid. A New York cop in the Bronx tells me that he was trying to extricate a woman pinned under an overturned car in July when a bystander stuck his cellphone camera into the officer’s face, trying to bait him into an argument. “You can’t tell me what to do,” the bystander replied when asked to move to the sidewalk, the cop reports. “A few years ago, I would have taken police action,” he says. “Now I know it won’t end well for me or the police department.”
Supervisors may roll up to an incident where trash and other projectiles are being thrown at officers and tell the cops to get into their cars and leave. “What does that do to the general public?” wonders a New York detective. “Every time we pass up on an arrest because we don’t want a situation to blow up, we’ve made the next cop’s job all the harder.”
Jim McDonnell, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the nation’s largest, tells me that the current anticop animus puts the nation in a place where it hasn’t been since the 1960s. “The last 10 years have witnessed dramatic decreases in crime,” Sheriff McDonnell says. “Now, in a short period of time, we are seeing those gains undone.”
Even the assassination of police officers doesn’t appear to cool the antipolice rhetoric. A day after a Houston police deputy, Darren Goforth, was murdered while filling his gas tank last month, Black Lives Matter protesters—as online video chillingly attests—marched in St. Paul chanting: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.”
An organizer with the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis refused to apologize for the tenor of the movement, while denying that it condoned violence. “Until the police aren’t the dangerous force that black people fear, the rhetoric won’t change,” she told theNew York Times, after Houston Sheriff Ron Hickman, in the wake of Deputy Goforth’s murder, pleaded for antipolice protesters to temper their language. A Texas legislator, state Sen. Garnet Coleman, assailed Sheriff Hickman for showing “a lack of understanding of what is occurring in this country when it comes to the singling out of African-Americans.”
The irony is that the historic reduction of U.S. crime since the 1990s was predicated on police singling out African-Americans—for protection. Using victims’ crime reports, cops focused on violent hot spots; since black Americans are disproportionately the victims of crime, just as blacks are disproportionately its perpetrators, effective policing was heaviest in minority neighborhoods. The cops were there because they believe that black lives matter.
Thousands of African-Americans are alive today because of a law-enforcement achievement that now is in danger of being squandered. In the current eruption of violent crime, the overwhelming majority of victims have been black. The Baltimore Sun reported that July was the bloodiest month in the city since 1972, with 45 people killed in 30 days. All but two were black.
Police officials I have spoken with in recent months say that they long to hear America’s leaders change the tone of the national conversation before respect for the rule of law itself deteriorates further. They’re still waiting.
George Will, who is employed by the Washington Post:
Autumn, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, also is the time for The Washington Post and other sensitivity auditors to get back on — if they will pardon the expression — the warpath against the name of the Washington Redskins.
The niceness police at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office have won court approval of their decision that the team’s name “may disparage” Native Americans. We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name Oklahoma, which is a compound of two Choctaw words meaning “red” and “people.”
Connecticut’s state Democratic Party has leapt into the vanguard of this movement, vowing to sin no more: Never again will it have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. Connecticut Democrats shall still dine to celebrate their party’s pedigree but shall not sully the occasions by mentioning the names of two slave owners.
Because Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners long have been liturgical events for Democrats nationwide, now begins an entertaining scramble by states’ parties — Georgia’s, Missouri’s, Iowa’s, New Hampshire’s and Maine’s already have taken penitential actions — to escape guilt by association with the third and seventh presidents.
The Post should join this campaign for sanitized names, thus purging the present of disquieting references to the past. The newspaper bears the name of the nation’s capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was — trigger warning — a tobacco farmer. Washington, D.C., needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, D.C. She had nothing to do with her husband’s World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.
Hundreds of towns, counties, parks, schools, etc. are named for Washington. The name of Washington and Lee University is no mere micro-aggression. It is compounded hate speech: Robert E. Lee probably saluted the Confederate flag.
Speaking of which: During the Senate debate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, when Virginia’s Willis Robertson waved a small Confederate flag on the Senate floor, Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, liberal hero and architect of the legislation, called this flag a symbol of “bravery and courage and conviction.” So, the University of Minnesota should seek a less tainted name for its Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Princeton University can make amends for its Woodrow Wilson School, named after the native Virginian who aggressively resegregated the federal workforce.
Jacksonville, Fla. — a state where Andrew Jackson honed his skill at tormenting Native Americans — Jefferson City, Mo., Madison, Wis., and other places must be renamed for people more saintly. And speaking of saints: Even secularists have feelings. And the Supreme Court says the First Amendment’s proscription of the “establishment of religion” forbids nondenominational prayers at high school graduations.
What, then, of the names of St. Louis, San Diego, San Antonio and numerous other places named for religious figures. Including San Francisco, the Vatican, so to speak, of American liberalism. Let the renaming begin, perhaps for liberal saints: Gore City, Sharpton City. Tony Bennett can sing, “I left my heart in Pelosi City.”
Conservatives do not have feelings, but they are truculent, so perhaps a better idea comes from Joseph Knippenberg, who is an American rarity — a professor with good sense and a sense of humor. He suggests that, in order to spare everyone discomfort, cities, buildings and other things should be given names that are inoffensive because they have no meaning whatsoever. Give things perfectly vacuous names like those given to car models — Acura, Elantra and Sentra.
Unfortunately, Knippenberg teaches at Atlanta’s Oglethorpe University, which is named for James Oglethorpe, who founded the colony that became the slave state of Georgia. So, let us move on.
To Massachusetts and Minnesota, which should furl their flags. Massachusetts’ flag shows a Native American holding a bow and arrow, a weapon that reinforces a hurtful stereotype of Native Americans as less than perfectly peaceful. A gimlet-eyed professor in Wisconsin has noticed that Minnesota’s flag includes the state seal, which depicts two figures, a pioneer tilling a field, and a Native American riding away — and carrying a spear.
A weapon. Yikes.
The farmer is white and industrious; the Native American is nomadic. So, Minnesota’s seal communicates a subliminal slander, a coded message of white superiority. Who knew that Minnesotans, who have voted Democrat in 10 consecutive presidential elections since 1972, are so insensitive?
Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a beautiful day, in Wisconsin, New York City and Washington, D.C.
I remember almost everything about the entire day. Sept. 11, 2001 is to my generation what Nov. 22, 1963 was to my parents and Dec. 7, 1941 was to my grandparents.
I had dropped off our oldest son, Michael, at Ripon Children’s Learning Center. As I was coming out, the mother of one of Michael’s group told me to find a good radio station; she had heard as she was getting out with her son that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I got in my car and turned it on in time to hear, seemingly live, a plane hit the WTC. But it wasn’t the first plane, it was the second plane hitting the other tower.
As you can imagine, my drive to Fond du Lac took unusually long that day. I tried to call Jannan, who was working at Ripon College, but she didn’t answer because she was in a meeting. I had been at Marian University as their PR director for just a couple months, so I didn’t know for sure who the media might want to talk to, but once I got there I found a couple professors and called KFIZ and WFDL in Fond du Lac and set up live interviews.
The entire day was like reading a novel, except that there was no novel to put down and no nightmare from which to wake up. A third plane hit the Pentagon? A fourth plane crashed somewhere else? The government was grounding every plane in the country and closing every airport?
I had a TV in my office, and later that morning I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. So as I was talking to Jannan on the phone, NBC showed a tower collapsing, and I assumed that was video of the first tower collapse. But it wasn’t; it was the second tower collapse, and that was the second time that replay-but-it’s-not thing had happened that day.
Marian’s president and my boss (a native of a Queens neighborhood who grew up with many firefighter and police officer families, and who by the way had a personality similar to Rudy Giuliani) had a brief discussion about whether or not to cancel afternoon or evening classes, but they decided (correctly) to hold classes as scheduled. The obvious reasons were (1) that we had more than 1,000 students on campus, and what were they going to do if they didn’t have classes, and (2) it was certainly more appropriate to have our professors leading a discussion over what had happened than anything else that could have been done.
I was at Marian until after 7 p.m. I’m sure Marian had a memorial service, but I don’t remember it. While I was in Fond du Lac, our church was having a memorial service with our new rector (who hadn’t officially started yet) and our interim priest. I was in a long line at a gas station, getting gas because the yellow low fuel light on my car was on, not because of panic over gas prices, although I recall that one Fond du Lac gas station had increased their prices that day to the ridiculous $2.299 per gallon. (I think my gas was around $1.50 a gallon that day.)
Two things I remember about that specific day: It was an absolutely spectacular day. But when the sun set, it seemed really, really dark, as if there was no light at all outside, from stars, streetlights or anything else.
For the next few days, since Michael was at the TV-watching age, we would watch the ongoing 9/11 coverage in our kitchen while Michael was watching the 1-year-old-appropriate stuff or videos in our living room. That Sunday, one of the people who was at church was Adrian Karsten of ESPN. He was supposed to be at a football game working for ESPN, of course, but there was no college football Saturday (though high school football was played that Friday night), and there was no NFL football Sunday. Our organist played “God Bless America” after Mass, and I recall Adrian clapping with tears down his face; I believe he knew some people who had died or been injured.
Later that day was Marian’s Heritage Festival of the Arts. We had record attendance since there was nothing going on, it was another beautiful day, and I’m guessing after five consecutive days of nonstop 9/11 coverage, people wanted to get out of their houses.
In the decade since then, a comment of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has stuck in my head. He was asked a year or so later whether the U.S. was more or less safe since 9/11, and I believe his answer was that we were more safe because we knew more than on Sept. 10, 2001. That and the fact that we haven’t been subject to another major terrorist attack since then is the good news.
Osama bin Laden (who I hope is enjoying Na’ar, Islam’s hell) and others in Al Qaeda apparently thought that the U.S. (despite the fact that citizens from more than 90 countries died on 9/11) would be intimidated by the 9/11 attacks and cower on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Al Qaeda to operate with impunity in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Bin Laden is no longer available for comment.) If you asked an American who paid even the slightest attention to world affairs where a terrorist attack would be most likely before 9/11, that American would have replied either “New York,” the world’s financial capital, or “Washington,” the center of the government that dominates the free world. A terrorist attack farther into the U.S., even in a much smaller area than New York or Washington, would have delivered a more chilling message, that nowhere in the U.S. was safe. Al Qaeda didn’t think to do that, or couldn’t do that. The rest of the Middle East also did not turn on the U.S. or on Israel (more so than already is the case with Israel), as bin Laden apparently expected.
The bad news is all of the other changes that have taken place that are not for the better. Bloomberg Businessweek asks:
So was it worth it? Has the money spent by the U.S. to protect itself from terrorism been a sound investment? If the benchmark is the absence of another attack on the American homeland, then the answer is indisputably yes. For the first few years after Sept. 11, there was political near-unanimity that this was all that mattered. In 2005, after the bombings of the London subway system, President Bush sought to reassure Americans by declaring that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” Any expenditure in the name of fighting terrorism was justified.
A decade later, though, it’s clear this approach is no longer sustainable. Even if the U.S. is a safer nation than it was on Sept. 11, it’s a stretch to say that it’s a stronger one. And in retrospect, the threat posed by terrorism may have been significantly less daunting than Western publics and policymakers imagined it to be. …
Politicians and pundits frequently said that al Qaeda posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. But governments can’t defend against existential threats—they can only overspend against them. And national intelligence was very late in understanding al Qaeda’s true capabilities. At its peak, al Qaeda’s ranks of hardened operatives numbered in the low hundreds—and that was before the U.S. and its allies launched a global military campaign to dismantle the network. “We made some bad assumptions right after Sept. 11 that shaped how we approached the war on terror,” says Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. “We thought al Qaeda would run over the Middle East—they were going to take over governments and control armies. In hindsight, it’s clear that was never going to be the case. Al Qaeda was not as good as we gave them credit for.”
Yet for a decade, the government’s approach to counterterrorism has been premised in part on the idea that not only would al Qaeda attack inside the U.S. again, but its next strike would be even bigger—possibly involving unconventional weapons or even a nuclear bomb. Washington has appropriated tens of billions trying to protect against every conceivable kind of attack, no matter the scale or likelihood. To cite one example, the U.S. spends $1 billion a year to defend against domestic attacks involving improvised-explosive devices, the makeshift bombs favored by insurgents in Afghanistan. “In hindsight, the idea that post-Sept. 11 terrorism was different from pre-9/11 terrorism was wrong,” says Brian A. Jackson, a senior physical scientist at RAND. “If you honestly believed the followup to 9/11 would be a nuclear weapon, then for intellectual consistency you had to say, ‘We’ve got to prevent everything.’ We pushed for perfection, and in counterterrorism, that runs up the tab pretty fast.”
Nowhere has that profligacy been more evident than in the area of homeland security. “Things done in haste are not done particularly well,” says Jackson. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in his new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, the creation of a homeland security apparatus has been marked by waste, bureaucracy, and cost overruns. Gartenstein-Ross cites the Transportation Security Agency’s rush to hire 60,000 airport screeners after Sept. 11, which was originally budgeted at $104 million; in the end it cost the government $867 million. The homeland security budget has also proved to be a pork barrel bonanza: In perhaps the most egregious example, the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Dept. received $36,000 to prevent terrorists from raising money at bingo halls. “If you look at the past decade and what it’s cost us, I’d say the rate of return on investment has been poor,” Gartenstein-Ross says.
Of course, much of that analysis has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It is interesting to note as well that, for all the campaign rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama that we needed to change our foreign policy approach, president Obama has changed almost nothing, including our Afghanistan and Iraq involvements. It is also interesting to note that the supposed change away from President George W. Bush’s us-or-them foreign policy approach hasn’t changed the world’s view, including particularly the Middle East’s view, of the U.S. Someone years from now will have to determine whether homeland security, military and intelligence improvements prevented Al Qaeda from another 9/11 attack, or if Al Qaeda wasn’t capable of more than just one 9/11-style U.S. attack.
Hindsight makes one realize how much of the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented or at least their worst effects lessened. One year after 9/11, the New York Times book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers points out that eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, New York City firefighters and police officers still could not communicate with each other, which led to most of the police and fire deaths in the WTC collapses. Even worse, the book revealed that the buildings did not meet New York City fire codes when they were designed because they didn’t have to, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And more than one account shows that, had certain people at the FBI and elsewhere been listened to by their bosses, the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have caught our intelligence community dumbfounded. (It does not speak well of our government to note that no one appears to have paid any kind of political price for the 9/11 attacks.)
I think, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek argued, our approach to homeland security (a term I loathe) has overdone much and missed other threats. Our approach to airline security — which really seems like the old error of generals’ fighting the previous war — has made air travel worse but not safer. (Unless you truly believe that 84-year-old women and babies are terrorist threats.) The incontrovertible fact is that every 9/11 hijacker fit into one gender, one ethnic group and a similar age range. Only two reasons exist to not profile airline travelers — political correctness and the assumption that anyone is capable of hijacking an airplane, killing the pilots and flying it into a skyscraper or important national building. Meanwhile, while the U.S. spends about $1 billion each year trying to prevent Improvised Explosive Device attacks, what is this country doing about something that would be even more disruptive, yet potentially easier to do — an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, which would fry every computer within the range of the device?
We haven’t taken steps like drilling our own continent’s oil and developing every potential source of electric power, ecofriendly or not, to make us less dependent on Middle East oil. (The Middle East, by the way, supplies only one-fourth of our imported oil. We can become less dependent on Middle East oil; we cannot become less dependent on energy.) And the government’s response to 9/11 has followed like B follows A the approach our culture has taken to risk of any sort, as if covering ourselves in bubblewrap, or even better cowering in our homes, will make the bogeyman go away. Are we really safer because of the Patriot Act?
American politics was quite nasty in the 1990s. For a brief while after 9/11, we had impossible-to-imagine moments like this:
And then within the following year, the political beatings resumed. Bush’s statement, “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” was deliberately misconstrued as Bush saying that Americans should go out and shop. Americans were exhorted to sacrifice for a war unlike any war we’ve ever faced by those who wouldn’t have to deal with the sacrifices of, for instance, gas prices far beyond $5 per gallon, or mandatory national service (a bad idea that rears its ugly head in times of anything approaching national crisis), or substantially higher taxes.
Then again, none of this should be a surprise. Other parts of the world hate Americans because we are more economically and politically free than most of the world. We have graduated from using those of different skin color from the majority as slaves, and we have progressed beyond assigning different societal rights to each gender. We tolerate different political views and religions. To the extent the 9/11 masterminds could be considered Muslims at all, they supported — and radical Muslims support — none of the values that are based on our certain inalienable rights. The war between our world, flawed though it is, and a world based on sharia law is a war we had better win.
In one important sense, 9/11 changed us less than it revealed us. America can be both deeply flawed and a special place, because human beings are both deeply flawed and nonetheless special in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ is quoted in Luke 12:48 as saying that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” As much as Americans don’t want to be the policeman of the world, or the nation most responsible for protecting freedom worldwide, there it is.
How much criminal legal trouble is Hillary Clinton in? Charles Lipson says …
There’s a bigger story hidden inside the New York Times report that “a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — . . . contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.” The review was undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which presumably originated the material. They concluded that the material had originally been given the U.S. government’s highest secrecy classification. Even if one of Clinton’s aides stripped the markings (a felony), Secretary Clinton surely knew satellite intelligence and North Korean nuclear deployments are the U.S. government’s most highly classified information.
The media correctly saw the news as political trouble for Hillary, but they missed two other crucial elements of the story. Somebody high up in the intelligence community leaked that story. And Hillary faces far more than political trouble. She’s being fitted for an orange jumpsuit.
The NYT story came from anonymous sources. For Camp Clinton, the most ominous words are “senior intelligence officials said.” They signal just how furious the intelligence community is at the gross mishandling of their crown jewels. Since the intelligence agencies must now sort through everything Hillary has given to the State Department, plus whatever the FBI can scrape from the server, you can expect the leaks to keep on coming. Worse yet for her, the spy agencies must conduct a full-scale damage assessment, based on the high likelihood her server was hacked by foreign governments (and perhaps some 17-year-old in his parents’ basement in Belgrade).
The intelligence services remember how seriously the Department of Justice dealt with former CIA directors John Deutsch and David Petraeus, who mishandled documents. They will demand equal treatment here. They will keep the heat on by leaking to the press. The Times story shows the faucet is already open.
Hillary’s legal problems stem from the “gross mishandling” of security information, which is a serious crime. It doesn’t matter whether the materials are stamped or not. It doesn’t matter whether you intended to violate the law or not. It is a violation simply to put them anywhere that lacks adequate safeguards. Like a private server. Nobody stamped Gen. Petraeus’ personal calendar, which he kept in an unlocked drawer at home. John Deutsch was just trying to catch up on work by taking his CIA laptop home. Those mistakes are trivial compared with what Clinton is already known to have stored on her private server in Chappaqua.
It’s just hand waving to keep saying the documents were not stamped. Satellite intelligence is always classified. So are private diplomatic discussions with foreign officials. They are born that way. Secretary Clinton is expected to know that, and she has said she was well aware of the classification rules. The straightforward conclusion is that she repeatedly violated laws for handling of national security materials.
As the investigation proceeds, Secretary Clinton should also be wondering how loyal her aides are. So far, they have marched in a solid phalanx with her. But whoever removed the classification markings on incoming satellite data faces years in jail. The FBI will be in a strong position to encourage them to speak “fully and frankly,” as they say in the State Department.
Valuable as the New York Times story is, it also misses a third crucial element. Although it highlights Hillary’s private email, it glosses over her private server. Reluctantly, she has begun to answer questions about the email account and even issued a limp apology. But she never mentions the server. When Fox’s Ed Henry asked her if she knew of any other government officials who had one, she refused to answer.
Why would a public official go to the time, trouble and expense of setting up a private server and paying her own IT people to run it? Simple: to keep the contents under her control even if the email account was discovered. She managed to keep the email account secret throughout her tenure at the State Department and for two years after that, avoiding legitimate Freedom of Information Act requests. When she was finally caught, she took full advantage of the extra layer of insulation her server provided. She reviewed her own records, turned over what she wanted, deleted everything else, and hunkered down. If her account had been at Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, the federal judges overseeing the FOIA lawsuits would have ordered the Internet companies to turn over everything. The FBI could sort it out, and Hillary would have no way to delete the records. On the bright side, with a private server, she didn’t get a lot of pop-up ads for North Korean vacations.
The State Department is still doing its best to protect her, stonewalling and slow-walking requests for materials. To supervise the document releases, they hired Catherine Duval, who moved over from the IRS. Anybody who cannot find Lois Lerner’s emails has the right kind of experience for John Kerry. On Tuesday, Kerry announced he was beefing up his department’s FOIA office by naming Ambassador Janice Jacobs as “transparency coordinator.” Now, it looks like Jacobs just donated $2,700 to Hillary’s campaign. Was the State Department too dumb to even ask her about possible conflicts of interest?
The stonewalling won’t help. The reluctant apologies won’t help. The FBI investigation will keep grinding on, and the intelligence agencies will keep passing out any nuggets they find. If Hillary’s political troubles keep piling up, she won’t make it to the general election. If her legal troubles keep piling up, she’s going to wish the next president was Gerald Ford.
The apparently imminent Joe Biden presidential campaign suggests that, as in 2008 for different reasons, Hillary Clinton is not the slam-dunk Democratic presidential nominee.
If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like “doesn’t drive,” “needs food prepared,” “needs help with the remote control,” “needs people to bring her beverages,” “has trouble remembering things,” and “doesn’t pay her own bills” about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures.
But, as we now know courtesy of the ongoing FOIA e-mail dump, all of these traits accurately describe the current Democratic front-runner and (as she is always eager to remind us) doting grandmother, Hillary Clinton. Amidst the e-mail revelations, an alarming pattern is developing about Clinton’s personal dependency on those inside her inner bubble. She isn’t just delegating important tasks to underlings, as any executive might; these aren’t urgent matters of national security, such as aides’ fetching satellite intelligence or the latest reports relevant to a managing executive. Rather, it appears that Hillary is either helpless or unwilling to perform even the most menial and trivial of daily tasks. In a recently released e-mail from January 3, 2010, she personally messaged an assistant, wishing her a Happy New Year, and then offered a demand list to start the year off:
I’d like to work w you to prepare a menu for Jason. Also does he give me a monthly bill for the food he buys and prepares for me? Could you or he buy skim milk for me to have for my tea? Also, pls remind me to bring more tea cups from home . . . Can you give me times for two TV shows: Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife?
Yes, this is the delightful paradox that is Hillary: a woman who claims she will fight for the shrinking middle class but who also happens to employ a personal chef (or Visiting Angel) that she’s not even sure she pays. A candidate who Understands People Like You but apparently isn’t familiar enough with the strange Google machine to look up television listings (I found it in one click after searching “The Good Wife times” and going to the official CBS homepage). A person who was actually in the habit of e-mailing her drink orders to aides at the State Department: “Pls call Sarah and ask her if she can get me some iced tea.”
Ponder that one again for a moment: She e-mailed one person to call yet another person with an order to bring her a beverage. A normal person, incapacitated and laid out in a hospital bed, can usually get beverage service in fewer steps than what Hillary was requesting.
The Washington Free Beacon has repeatedly raised concerns about Hillary’s inability to remember basic details such as names, dates, and meetings. Now these are normal occurrences for senior citizens and nothing to be ashamed of, but combined with Hillary’s medical history of strokes and concussions (one of which, according to her husband, took almost six months to recover from and was serious enough to prevent her from testifying in front of a House committee), we have reason to be uneasy. Questions must be answered before we entrust the most stressful job on the planet to someone who, by all appearances, can barely walk from one side of a room to the other without outside assistance. …
This goes beyond ageism, e-mail jokes, and japes about basic mobility and dependency. Democrats under Barack Obama have moved further and further left, to the point where they are seriously considering, as an alternative to Mrs. Clinton, a ranting socialist who thinks women have rape fantasies and that more than one choice of deodorant on the market is a bit too extreme. Key to this is their class-warfare rhetoric, in which they pose as Tribunes of the People, guarding against the depredations of evil plutocrats like Mitt Romney who sprinkle Bain cancer upon the wives of helpless, destitute workers. And now crashing through this carefully constructed story comes Hillary — who trudged joylessly through the Iowa State Fair earlier this month, dressed like a Romulan visitor from just outside the Neutral Zone and accompanied by an entourage preventing the filthy voters from getting too close. After a few grudging handshakes, she departed, refusing to take the traditional soapbox and answer questions or even give a simple stump speech. (Donald Trump, who remarkably comes off as far more down-to-earth in comparison with Hillary, was the only other candidate to refuse.)
No, the choice of Hillary’s wardrobe ultimately doesn’t matter (even if to media it suddenly does when the subject is the price-tag on a Sarah Palin or Ann Romney outfit). But optics to middle-class voters do. If Hillary Clinton wants to run a class-warfare election and pretend she’s a champion of the little people who buy their own milk for their tea, then middle-class voters have a right to know when the last time was that she prepared her own meals. When was the last time Hillary Clinton drove her own car? (Spoiler Alert: 1996.) When was the last time Hillary Clinton operated a television remote control?
When was the last time Hillary Clinton paid her own bills?
This is the dilemma the Democratic party faces as they are forced to rebrand themselves in a Buzzed-out, youth-obsessed viral-media age (an age encouraged in part by the cunning pop-culture sensibilities of Barack Obama). Now they are forced to be the party of crotchety elders telling young whippersnappers that they know what’s best for them because they walked uphill both ways in the snow (or in Hillary’s case, were driven up the hill by a chauffeur).
When Republicans of years past were the target, Hollywood and the mainstream media could barely contain their glee at jokes about out-of-touch elder statesmen. During the 2008 election, in a sit-down interview to promote a new film, famous Team America puppet Matt Damon lamented the age and health of then–Republican presidential nominee John McCain (72 at the time) as it related to his paralyzing fear of a President Sarah Palin: “Do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be President Palin.”
The Associated Press asked and answered their own question in July of 2008: “So how old is John McCain? Six-packs, automatic transmissions, and the American Express card were all introduced after he was born — not to mention computers, which McCain admits he doesn’t use.”
David Letterman joked during the 1996 cycle, “Bob Dole is calling himself an optimist. I understand this because a lot of people would look at a glass as half-empty. Bob Dole looks at the glass and says, ‘What a great place to put my teeth.’” Keith Olbermann (still at MSNBC in 2008) quipped, “McCain could easily transition from talking about the economy or foreign affairs to talking about ‘buying more Depends’ or something like that.”
Do the same rules not apply to the Democrats’ aged and anointed oligarch, who comes across more like the last of the three knights left guarding the Holy Grail than the sharp yoga-routine addict she claimed to be in e-mails (e-mails that just happened to be deleted)? Apparently not. Now, as the country and culture heads into a new election season — longer, more rigorous, and faster-paced than any that have preceded it — we’re once again faced with questions of the competence and health of an old white candidate. Except this time — despite the questions raised in Hillary Clinton’s own e-mails — actors, comedians, and media commentators are strangely silent.
Instead of telling his supporters to stop shooting police officers, Barack Obama spent last week in Alaska claiming to have discovered climate change.
Patrick Moore discovered Alaska’s climate change dates far before Obama was inflicted on this country, though:
If only the president had consulted the history of Glacier Bay, where the Huna Tlingit people have lived for more than 4,000 years, he would have found a different story.
It is a historical fact that the glacier in Glacier Bay began its retreat around 1750. By the time Capt. George Vancouver arrived there in 1794 the glacier still filled most of the bay but had already retreated some miles.
When John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, visited in 1879, he found that the glacier had retreated more than 30 miles from the mouth of the bay, according to the National Park Service, and by 1900 Glacier Bay was mostly ice-free.
All of this happened long before human emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, could have had any impact.
In the oral tradition of the Huna Tlingit people, it is said that the glacier has advanced and retreated a number of times during their occupation of the area. Each time the glacier advanced they would move to the village of Hoonah in Icy Strait outside Glacier Bay. When the glacier retreated, many of them would move back into the bay. These multiple migrations were certainly caused by climate change, but it had nothing to do with human activity.
The fashionable tendency to blame every change in climate and every extreme-weather event on human emissions is doing a grave disservice to the scientific tradition. We know that the climate has been changing for millions of years due to a multitude of perfectly natural factors. There is no reason to believe that those factors have suddenly disappeared and now humans are the all-powerful shapers of global climate destiny. Yet this entirely unproven hypothesis of catastrophe is compelling to those who would control our beliefs.
Politicians want us to believe they are saving us from ruin; religious leaders want to reinforce original sin and the need for repentance; some business leaders want us to subsidize their expensive “green” technologies; and the climate activists want their money-machine to keep on giving.
This powerful convergence of interests ignores the fact that carbon dioxide is essential for all life on Earth, that plants could use a lot more of it, and that the real threat is a cooling of the climate, not the slight warming that has occurred over the past 300 years.
While Obama was in Alaska, he flew over Kovalina, which reportedly is sinking into the Pacific Ocean due to rising sea levels. Back in the late 1970s, Soldiers Grove had a similar issue — yearly flooding of the Kickapoo River into its downtown. Soldiers Grove moved its downtown. Moving seems like an obvious response, because contrary to what Obama wants to believe, the federal government is not more powerful than nature.
As usual, if I have to work, it’s not a holiday, and I have to work Labor Day.
Labor Day is the American parallel to May Day, the world socialist workers’ day. May Day used to be the day that the Soviet Union would try to scare the rest of the world by rolling its tanks, missiles and so on in a big parade past the Kremlin. The Soviet Union is dead, but Vladimir Putin seems to want to bring back the Soviet Union without communism.
About bad ideology of the past and present, Megan McArdle writes:
At the New Republic, Malcolm Harris asks an interesting question: Was the Soviet Union’s problem that Communism can never work? Or did the Soviets just need a lot more MacBook Airs?
Actually, Harris is channeling Paul Mason, the author of the book he is reviewing, and unfortunately, he doesn’t really try to answer the question. Instead he makes the stridently timid argument that this won’t happen because the capitalists won’t let it, at least without a healthy dose of revolutionary action.
I’ll swing for the fences and argue that no, even with better computers, Communism isn’t going to work. Nor some gauzy vision of post-capitalism that looks like Communism, but with YouTube videos.
In retrospect, Communism seems wildly stupid, or at least, incredibly naive. Did the people who dreamed up this system not understand the enormous incentive problems they were creating? As Ayn Rand dramatized the problem in Atlas Shrugged: “It’s miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm — so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done?” The incentives of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” drive toward falling production, which means there won’t be enough to cover the needs.
Or as a former colleague who fled Communist Poland once told me, “They pretended to pay us, and we pretended to work.” There is a reason that basically all the Communist and Socialist regimes ended in some degree of authoritarianism.
How could anyone who had, y’know, met some people in their visit to our planet, not see that this was coming? Large swathes of Communist and Socialist writing was naive and impractical. But the idealists weren’t entirely unaware that when monetary incentives disappeared, they would need to find other ways to get people to do things.
They were also aware, however, of a point that has eluded some of their cruder critics, which is that monetary incentives are far from the only reasons that people do things. People don’t take care of their kids because they’re getting paid for it. Nor were the millions of Americans who headed off to World War II mostly chasing those princely military paychecks. Most of the folks who volunteer to help the homeless, or just to make a casserole for the local potluck, are not thinking “There’s a buck in it for me somewhere.” The idealists behind Communism thought that using non-monetary incentives could compensate for the loss of the money motive — and that there would also be great efficiency gains from eliminating wasteful competition and no longer goading consumers to generate superfluous consumer demand.
They were quite wrong. Competition turns out not to be so wasteful; it makes a system resilient. That misunderstanding was a symptom of a larger issue called the socialist calculation problem. We think of prices largely in reference to ourselves, or other individuals, which is to say that we mostly see them as the highest barrier to getting something we want. But as we pull back to look at society, or the globe, we see that they are in fact an incredibly elegant way to allocate scarce resources.
This was best explained by Friedrich Hayek in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Some good like tin becomes scarce, perhaps because a large tin mine has failed, or perhaps because there is a new and very profitable use for tin that is soaking up much of the supply. The price rises, and all over the world, people begin to economize on tin. Most of them have no idea why the price of tin is rising, and if they did, they wouldn’t care; they just switch to another metal, or start recycling old tin, finding a way to bring global demand closer in line to global supply. A lot of that is possible only because of price competition.
You can think of this as something like a distributed computer network: You get millions of people devoting some portion of their effort to aligning consumption with production. This system is constantly churning, making billions of decisions a day. Communism tried to replace this with a bunch of guys sitting around in offices, who occasionally negotiated with guys sitting around in other offices. It was a doomed effort from the start. Don’t get me wrong; the incentive problems were real and large. But even if they could have been solved, the calculation problem would have remained. And the more complex an economy you are trying to manage, the worse a job you will do.
The socialist calculation problem is not fundamentally an issue of calculating how to produce the most stuff, but of calculating what should be produced. Computers can’t solve that, at least until they develop sufficient intelligence that they’ll probably render the issue moot by ordering our toasters to kill us so that they can use our bodies for mulch.
The most important piece of information that the price system provides is “How much do I want this, given that other people want it too?” That’s the question that millions of people are answering, when they decide to use less tin, or pay more for tin and use less of something else. Computers are not good at answering this question.
How would a computer even get the information to make a good guess, in the absence of a price system? Please do not say surveys. You know what did really well on surveys? New Coke. Also, Donald Trump, who is not going to be president. We are, in fact, back to some version of the incentive problem, which is that when the stakes are low, people don’t put too much thought into their answers.
In many cases, people are interested in getting rid of prices precisely because they don’t like the signal that it is sending — that the best possible medical care is a scarce good that few people are going to get, or that other people do not value your labor very much. People are trying to override that information with a better program.
But even if we decide that the planners know best, we still have to contend with the resistance that will arise to their plan. Just as Communism’s critics need to remember that money is not the only reason people strive, post-capitalists need to remember that they will be dealing with people — cantankerous, willful and capable of all manner of subversions if the plan is not paying sufficient attention to their needs.
It’s possible that we’ll see versions of a “post-scarcity” economy in things like music and writing, since these are basically versions of activities that people have been doing for free for thousands of years. But when it comes to unpleasant labor like slaughtering animals, mining ore and scrubbing floors, even an advanced society needs to figure out exactly how badly it wants those things done. And so far, nothing beats prices for eliciting that information.
The Wall Street Journal writes about the presidential campaigns of former political friends Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump:
Hillary Clinton favors higher taxation, heavier regulation, more political shackling of business, and centralizing more economic control inside the White House. So does Donald Trump—at least as far as we can tell.
Mrs. Clinton is promising Obamanomics Plus: continue the agenda of the last eight years, with bonus corrections toward the left as necessary. She’s proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on some capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, for example, up from 15% as recently as 2012.
On energy, one of the few U.S. growth areas of the Obama era, she is even further to the left. The green elites used to tolerate support for the U.S. oil and natural gas boom if gas could be levered as a transition fuel toward a post-carbon future. Now they favor massive subsidies for wind and solar today and no fossil-fuel drilling, and Mrs. Clinton is moving their way.
About the only growth component of Mrs. Clinton’s agenda is immigration, and there she beats Mr. Trump in a romp. A larger workforce adds to GDP, and economists of all political persuasions agree that increasing human capital drives prosperity and offsets an otherwise aging population.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy is more attitude than substance, and his quicksilver positions change day to day, even minute to minute in the same interview. But he has been consistent about rounding up illegal immigrants and deporting them to their home countries—if they have one, in the case of kids born on U.S. soil. He supports “a pause” in legal immigration too.
The real-estate tycoon is also running as the most antitrade candidate since Herbert Hoover. He has assailed the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and the pending Pacific Rim pact as “disasters” that are “killing us.” Mr. Trump promises to reopen these agreements and do better, though without saying how, apart from his alpha-male negotiating skills. He’s proposing tariffs as high as 30% on imports, and he has already promised to punish Ford and Nabisco for expanding production south of the border.
On taxes, Mr. Trump promises to release a “comprehensive” reform plan soon. So far, though, his only specifics have been some kind of tax relief for the middle class coupled with class warfare. He said in a recent interview that “I would take carried interest out, and I would let people making hundreds of millions of dollars a year pay some tax, because right now they are paying very little tax and I think it’s outrageous.”
Carried interest is the accounting term for a share of profits from investments in general partnerships—private equity, hedge funds, (ahem) real-estate outfits. Congress taxes this at-risk capital at a lower rate than ordinary wages because it only pays out if a fund invests wisely, but this treatment should be reconsidered as part a larger tax reform.
Mr. Trump doesn’t engage these facts, much less anything else that might help the real economy. Carried interest is a sideshow. Much like Mrs. Clinton and President Obama, he’s trying to stoke resentment of the rich, or the merely affluent, or foreigners, people dumber than he is, whoever.
***
This makes it all the passing stranger that some conservatives are embracing Mr. Trump as a truth-teller speaking to the anxieties of middle-American voters. On this view, he’s a hero for challenging the GOP policy consensus of low marginal tax rates, free trade, less regulation and entitlement reform.
Thus instead of modernizing the tax code for the 21st century, offer tax relief that does nothing to reduce complexity and distortion or to improve the incentives to work and invest. Rather than fixing a broken immigration system to attract the hard-working and ambitious, distract low-wage American workers by scapegoating illegal workers. Instead of making the U.S. economy more competitive, attack foreigners and adopt a divisive platform and rhetorical style designed to polarize a justifiably frustrated electorate.
But following Mr. Trump down these cul de sacs—a Canadian border wall?—is a formula to lose and deserve to. After seven years of slow growth and stagnant incomes, the GOP is well positioned to make the case against liberal economic policies while stumping for an optimistic agenda that offers disaffected voters the opportunities that faster growth and tight labor markets create.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 