March 28, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Moynihan Tribute
I've written a piece on Tech Central Station bidding farewell to my favorite senator.
From the desk of Jane Galt:I'm not a fan of the Larry Lessig "information wants to be free" school of thought on file sharing. I'm worried by the implications for intellectual property, and I think that many of the writers who think that music sharing is just dandy are going to be somewhat less enthralled when the same thing happens to the written word and they have to try to make up their income on lecture fees. This has gotten me labeled, in several online and offline arguments, as a "shill for the recording industry".
Ha! As early as 1999, way back in business school, I was writing papers, now seemingly prescient, on the inability of the paranoid troglodytes at the major labels to adapt to the reality of file sharing. I'm completely horrified by copyright extension, although I also think it's constitutional. And I'm very worried about the legislation they push, like this gem proposing to ban firewalls so that the recording industry can spy on us. Yes, that's right, the recording industry, with less sense of proportion than my manic-depressive college roommate on a handful of crystal meth, and total disregard for the fact that the citizens of this country, while not fortunate enough to be recording executives, are nonetheless real live human beings who should not be expected, in any rational universe, to open their computers to hackers, stalkers and spies in order to make sure that Vivendi collects its revenues, is trying to make their whim into law. It makes you want to pick them up by their ankles and shake them until their brains fall back into place.
The worst thing is that this sort of legislation could pass.
Most really dreadful rent seeking doesn't pass -- the kind that wreaks a large amount of havoc on the many in order to enrich the few. It's common to talk about the California disaster as a pure product of energy industry rent-seeking, but that's ludicrous. Politicians are first, last, and always keenly alive to their prospects of re-election, and the political fallout from the California energy crisis was enormous. It doesn't help to have a cushy campaign war-chest if the voters are marching on the gubernatorial mansion with torches and pitchforks, screaming for your head. No doubt rent seeking played a part, but only a part, in that crisis. The arrogance of the politicians, and the intervention of consumer activist groups, played their part as well.
But I digress. The point is that most rent-seeking behavior is one group trying to advantage itself at the expense of another group, or to procure from the body politic a sum so trivial in relation to overall tax revenues that no one individual will notice it. Farmers get $1.00 apiece from each of us for their corn; large auto rental companies team up with consumer activists to put in new, "consumer beneficial" insurance requirements that hurt the big companies a little but put their smaller competitors out of business, allowing them to raise rates.
In this case, however the industry is advocating something that will be very bad for everyone in America with a broadband connection. (I assume -- perhaps incorrectly -- that there will be some sort of corporate exemption.) The benefits to the record companies are all out of proportion to the costs. How can this happen?
Because there's no organized natural opposition. Most of the companies that make the home products the RIAA is targeting don't have the war chest to go up against the recording industry, and anyway, you don't build a lobbying effort overnight. The ISP's are probably in favor of it, since eliminating those popular home routers means they can charge consumers for each IP address. (Being the honest citizen that I am, I actually pay Time Warner $5 a month for our extra IP address. The lady who took the order seemed surprised as hell.) And unlike the energy crisis, the issue is unlikely to mobilize voters. Most people who have home broadband connections don't realize this is going on, and wouldn't understand the issue if they did; they'll only know about it five years from now when they want to replace their router. There's only one natural constituency against it: young people, who like to share files, and who understand what the funny box with the lights on it does.
The problem is, they don't vote. And their legislators know it.
Well, we do. And whether or not you think file sharing is a good thing, you have to be horrified at the RIAA's idea that we should all eviscerate our home security so that they can make sure we're not swapping hot cuts of the new Brittany Spiers album. If you live in one of the states where this stuff is being considered, I urge you to find out who your state representatives are and get on the horn, early and often, to let them know what you think of this idea. Get your friends to call too. For five minutes on the phone, you could save everyone's computers from the imprecations of the RIAA.
March 27, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Interesting item from Ted Barlow:
The Canadian Liberal party angrily debates censuring or even expelling the American ambassador from the country for his threats that the US would punish them for failing to back the war on Iraq. Be sure to click the second link; some of the comments are good. From Canadian Reader:
Yep, we trade a lot with the US. Sure do. In fact, we're your single largest trading partner. In January 2003, we sold you 17.8 billion dollars worth of goods. We also bought 12.8 billion dollars worth.Notice... those numbers are per month. Even for the USA, that's not peanuts. Try to shut down the border, and just see how many nanoseconds it would take for all of the big-business Republican campaign contributors to get on the phone to the White House!
So, sorry, lua, a shutdown is not going to happen. What might happen is a bit of heavy-handed leaning. I guess Chretien figures we can survive whatever spitefulness Bush dreams up (my God though, isn't the man petty!) until the end of 2004.
Interesting, but wrong. It is peanuts, oh Canadian reader. For us, not you.
Annualizing those trade figures gives us $213.6b purchased by the US from Canada, while we purchase roughly $153b from them.
Canada's GDP is, according to the CIA world book, an estimated $923b in 2002. What we buy from them is, in other words, 23.1% of their economy, nearly a quarter.
Our GDP is around $10t. That $153b is 1.5% of our GDP. That's less than we spend on fast food.
That's not to say that our ambassador should have been threatening y'all. Personally, I love you guys, at least when you're not buttonholing me to tell me how you're nothing like us awful Americans, what with Molson and national health care and all. But if you want to look realistically at the results of worsened relations between our two nations, I think it's instructive to look at the softwood lumber dispute.
Because right now any Canadians reading this are going "Yeah, let's look at it, you filthy protectionist bastards!" And I'm with you.
But all the Americans reading this are saying, I promise you, "What the %@#! is softwood lumber?"
From the desk of Jane Galt:Department of Number Inflation
This piece by Deanne Stillman on the guy who tossed grenades into his commanders tents is a little -- ahem -- overconfident:
The episode is unsettling for a number of reasons, most of all because it exposes a fact about our military that commanders have tried their best to ignore: the presence of radical, anti-American Muslims in the ranks. Akbar, a convert to Islam, reportedly said when he was captured: "You guys are coming into our countries and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." It's increasingly clear that there is a small group of soldiers for whom anti-American fatwas issued in mosques around the world supercede the oath of loyalty they took to their nation.
Say what? So far it's clear that there's one, and he's in the stockade.
It's certainly disturbing, if an American born muslim is identifying himself with Saddaam Hussein. But to generalize from there to a secret cabal of muslims in the military poised for terrorist action is more than a little bit of a stretch.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Marvelous piece by Jack Shafer on the coverage of the war:
In Part 1 of the wartime news cycle, the press stands slack-jawed at the withering display of U.S. air power and high-technology battle gear (Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq). Bombs have gotten smart! the press writes. In Iraq, the bombs have become so smart, many of them have earned advanced degrees in their spare time. Geniuses at the Pentagon are revolutionizing warfare with amazing tactics. Special ops are the ultimate force multiplier. The locals are about to rebel. And so on.Having exhausted that vein, the press demands a new angle, and the vagaries of war supply them with Part 2 of the cycle. Victory wasn't as instant as we were led to believe! U.S. forces have "bogged down"! The early blitzkrieg could not be sustained, and U.S. forces are increasingly vulnerable to counterattack. The uprising has failed to gel. You can't win a war from the air; you need lots more troops on the ground.
After bogging down in the "bogged down" angle, the press stages a rally in Part 3. They discover that Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, et al., are the real geniuses. The enemy commanders are cum laude graduates of the international war college and masters of the art of asymmetrical warfare as practiced in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and Israel. The enemy is fighting the battle on its terms. Unnamed sources in the Pentagon fret about the previously lauded American tactics. Apple furnishes the boilerplate:
"We underestimated the capacity of his paramilitary forces," said a senior uniformed officer at the Pentagon. "They have turned up where we did not expect them to, and they have fought with more resourcefulness than we expected them to demonstrate."
In Part 4 the press informs us with great surprise that Saddam wasn't the only warrior who learned from past battles. Unconventional warfare turns out to be unconventional for a reason: It is a superb form of suicide. Reporters pretend they never doubted the outcome. The United States wins and promptly loses interest in the region. So does the press—until the next war cycle and Johnny Apple's prognostications.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Here's another estimate of the cost of the war, from some of the leading lights of the University of Chicago Business School, which estimates that the direct costs to teh US taxpayer of reconstructing Iraq would have to exceed $500b before it became a net economic loss.
There are some very good things about the essay. For one thing, it attempts to weigh the cost of the war against the likely alternative -- containment -- which the Nordhaus estimate doesn't. It uses appropriate discounting of future expenditures at the 2% real interest rate implied by the pricing of TIPS (inflation-adjusted US securities). It generally uses conservative estimates -- for example, it takes the CBO's worst case price on the invasion as its starting point, which is more than twice the amount Bush has requested. And it attempts to account for the direct costs of domestic as well as foreign expenditures.
There are a couple of things that bother me. Most notable is its treatment of the increased risk of a 9/11 type event from Iraqi containment, which they estimate at 5% a year. While it's indisputable that 9/11 was a byproduct of containing Iraq, they don't offer a rationale as to why invading Iraq would reduce that threat. It's certainly conceivable to me that it would, but they don't tell me why, or how they arrived at 5%, which stands in contrast to the extensive explanations at their methodology for deriving the cost of containment. The other major issue one must take into account when comparing it to the Nordhaus numbers is that they don't attempt to account for the two major components of the Nordhaus paper: macroeconomic effects and the effects on the price of oil. The latter is absolutely correct, since we now know that Saddaam has not succeeded in destroying his oil fields (their paper was written last week); the former makes it hard to compare the numbers, although I have a feeling that they have excluded it because the impact is impossible to quantify given current uncertainties, and likely to be trivial in the long run. Nonetheless, it would be nice to see it discussed, if only to dismiss it.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Nice Artwork
The image below was found by Marines in military headquarters in Nasariya.
NASIRIYA, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. Marines searching Iraqi military headquarters in this southern city that was the site of intensive fighting came across a mural depicting a plane crashing into a building complex resembling New York's twin towers, a news agency photograph showed Wednesday.The plane's logo and coloring resembled that of Iraqi Airlines, said Getty Images News Service executive Brian Felber, based in New York.
The photograph, showing two rifle-toting Marines in front of the mural, was shot by staff photographer Joe Raedle, who is accompanying the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Task Force Tarawa.
Getty is a news photo agency that distributes about 500 photographs from around the world each day and has 10 staff members embedded with U.S. forces in the Iraq conflict.
Felber said this photo was "causing a bit of a stir."
No kidding. I wonder if they hired Ted Rall to decorate their offices.
From the desk of Jane Galt:The telemarketers are claiming that the industry-wide devastation from the new national do not call list will send ripples throughout the economy. I, for one, am prepared to withstand any economic losses stemming from the failure to sell sufficient flowbies and Florida time-shares. As Americans, we must all pull together and shoulder the burden of making the world safe for dinnertime conversation.
March 26, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Daniel Patrick Moynihan has died.
We will never see his like again, and the world is a poorer place for it.
From the desk of Jane Galt:AI: Your One-stop Shop for Economic News of the War
Swen Swenson of Coyote at the Dogshow forwards this interesting link: seems Boots & Coots, the company that put out the Kuwait oil fires during Gulf I, is the target of a "shadowy group of Texas oilmen", incorporated in Panama, who are attempting to perform what we used to call a "reverse LBO" in banking: lend or buy the company's debt, and then pull the assets debt free out of bankruptcy. Halliburton does business with them, so their name is mentioned too.
Brace yourselves for a raft of conspiracy theories, all silly. People will no doubt speculate that Cheney or Bush gave the "shadowy oilmen" some insider information -- as if they needed it, when the President was saying that he was going to invade Iraq right on the news, where everyone could hear it. Moreover, the company's been in trouble for years, apparently due to an oil-well fire deficit and some piss-poor management. And no matter how shadowy these oilmen are (though if they're so mysterious, how come we know they're Texas oilmen?), their numbers do not include the President, his family, or the VP & same, because their assets are held in blind trusts.
From the desk of Jane Galt:For a good article on a potential economic cost of the war, read Robert Shapiro's piece in Slate on whether the war will cause the dollar to collapse.
From the desk of Jane Galt:How much is the war going to cost?
I've seen a number of claims like this one from Eric Alterman:
The first $75 billion is just a downpayment. Expect to pay hundreds of billions in the short-term, trillions in the long run. Expect it to come out of your schools, your police forces, your highways, your future and your children’s future
Anyone who's sat through a budget meeting knows that almost everyone overestimates their successess, underestimates their costs; it's easier to go back for money later, when you can wave a nice hunk of sunk costs around, than say up front that you think whatever it is you're proposing will be expensive as hell.
But trillions? US GDP is roughly $10 trillion. Alterman is saying that over the long run, this war is going to cost us at least 20% of GDP. That's nuts, and it's not the first time I've seen those sorts of numbers around.
Reality check: the entire US military budget is in the range of $350b. Saying that this war will cost trillions in any term short enough for us to care about (I mean, he's probably right, if we use a timescale of several hundred years, but that's not very useful), is saying that this war is going to cost nearly as much as the entire military budget, year in and year out, for decades. For reference, the next six months are estimated to cost $60b on military spending. (I'm excluding the humanitarian and domestic segment of the budget submitted by the President.) Even with a fudge factor of 50%, that's $90b over the next six months, $180b a year. At that rate, assuming you do absolutely no discounting at all, it would take us over 10 years to get to $2t, thus meeting the "trillions" criteria. Which is madness. By that logic, we were spending as much on WWII in 1953 as we were in 1943. If you don't know, military spending during WWII was over 50% of GDP; it was in the 10% range during Korea, and dropped sharply thereafter. This while we were still occupying Japan, still garrisoning Germany, had a mandatory draft, and were building up for the Cold War. Even if you attribute the entire cost of the Cold War to WWII, and none of it to Stalinist imperialism, you still don't get the kind of numbers required to make the occupation cost as much as the battle. The difference is even more stark now, for you must remember that we have an all-volunteer army, which gets paid whether or not they're in Iraq. The extra, non-labor cost of the war is heavy on things like ordnance, which we won't be expending once we control the country.
Where do they get these numbers? With gems like this from James Galbraith, son of the amiably paranoiac pop-economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
RECENTLY AS we debated the war now underway in Iraq, seven Nobel laureates joined 150 other US economists (including myself) to call for careful consideration of the costs of war in Iraq. When economists talk about costs, what do we mean? First, we mean budget costs -- for gasoline, equipment, and explosives -- that begin at about $100 billion1. This figure is based on an assumption that the war goes well. It the assumption is wrong, the numbers will go up fast. The history of warfare -- from Europe in 1914 to Vietnam in the 1960s -- is littered with gross underestimates of budget costs.We also mean the material costs, which are sometimes overstated in war -- bombs may fall on empty fields or on rubble and damage can look worse than it is. In Iraq, though, the civilian population is already stressed. Even modest material damage -- to the water, to the electric grids and the health system -- could bring on humanitarian disaster. There are risks of sabotage, not least to the oil fields. And there will be some damage, inevitably, to the archeological heritage of Iraq and especially Baghdad.2
The human costs are beyond accounting. No matter the number of casualities, every dead soldier, on either side, every dead civilian, is a human being who could have lived a productive and perhaps happy life. Every injured person will carry a burden of pain. We need not demean the grief ahead by trying to give it money value.3
The uncertainty costs are more prosaic but just as hard to calculate. How much business investment, how much production, how much trade have we already lost -- not only in the United States but in the world economy -- because of the fear and uncertainty surrounding this war?4 What effect will war have on global economic decision-making, consumer and market confidence, global energy prices? How much more lies ahead?
The reconstruction costs are imponderable. One estimate for the cost of rebuilding Iraq runs to $2 trillion.5 But will the US actually do the job? What if it takes two years and a 100,000 troops? Five years and 200,000 troops? What if the oil fields are shut down in the meantime?
The follow-on costs arise from the military situation we may face after the war ends. Will peace and democracy break out in Iraq? Will the war lead to peace, democracy, and demilitarization across the Middle East, as some believe? Or will there be rebellions, revenge killings, and proxy wars across Iraq, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt? Not to mention in Israel and Palestine.
The diplomatic costs lie in the damage already done, and more may lie ahead -- to relationships with Europe, Russia and other countries. One may count also the cost of disillusion, of much of the world's population, with the American ideal.
The opportunity costs are those that arise every time we make a decision to do one thing rather than another. By choosing to go to war, we are choosing to do less to solve our problems at home. We face a crisis in every state and local budget in this country -- in every school, every welfare program, and every part of public health care. We face a crisis of trust in our corporations, and a crisis of confidence in the profitability of future business investment. American households are facing in slow motion a crisis of household debts. Little will be done about any of this, so long as we are preoccupied with war.
Finally, the apocalyptic costs should be considered. There is the risk, already unfolding, that North Korea will produce atomic bombs. There is also the risk that Iran will buy a few of them or make some of its own. There is the risk that we will shortly face one, two, or perhaps more nuclear powers who regard us -- and not entirely without reason -- as a mortal threat to their existence. There is the risk that we may make a catastrophic mistake in our response.
Once the real costs have been considered, the economic conclusion is not controversial. It is that collective security -- the kind provided by strong alliances, the rule of law, and the United Nations Security Council -- is the only real security. It is certainly the only kind that we, or any other country, can afford. Perhaps war is sometimes necessary. But it is never really cheap enough.
He offers vague possibilities, making no attempt to quantify them, much less calculate their probability, even though the alleged subject of the article is the economic cost of the war.
He conflates all sorts of costs into one big amorphous bundle. He only looks at costs on one side; for example, discussing the cost in lives of the war, without discussing the cost in lives of Saddaam's regime and the sanctions that are the likely alternative to the war. If we kill 300 Iraqi civilians and 300 American troops ousting Saddaam, and Saddaam's secret police are murdering 1,000 people a year, and 5,000 people a year are dying from the humanitarian crisis brought on by sanctions, it is not a net "cost" in human lives.
Likewise, he examines only the negative consequences the current uncertainty might have on the economy, without mentioning that, for example, a successful war might boost the consumer confidence dampened by fears of terrorism, or that lowered security risk in the Middle East might result in both lower oil prices, and higher investment in highly oil-dependent industries.
He offers unsourced references for large numbers -- "One estimate for the cost of rebuilding Iraq runs to $2 trillion" -- in order to give his claims a false patina of precision.
He cites any number of highly speculative, unquantitative "costs" in terms of US prestige and other such intangibles that have nothing to do with economic costs. He posits "opportunity costs" of not doing things that many of us don't want to spend federal money on in the first place. An opportunity cost is a precise economic term: it means the next-best alternative use for your money. You can't claim that our failure to institute national health care is an opportunity cost of the war when such a thing would cost far more than the money being spent on the war, and when it's something that we probably wouldn't be doing anyway.
Finally, he blathers about a possible nuclear holocaust as a result of this invasion, a subject on which he -- and I -- are thoroughly unqualified to comment. I will nonetheless point out that a scenario in which North Korea nukes us or one of their neighbors in order to revenge Saddaam seems slightly less likely than my winning Fear Factor Miss USA. Then he announces that he has proven -- through the miracle of economic science! -- that the only solution we can afford is, surprise, the one dictated by Galbraith's brand of warmed-over 50's liberal internationalism.
Thus, Eric Alterman is enabled to claim that the cost to the US taxpayer will be over $2t, even though most of the larger costs cited by Galbraith aren't going to be borne by Americans either directly or indirectly, but by Iraqi oil.6 That's the oil that will be able to flow freely for the first time in ten years because of this war -- and the revenue from which will flow to the Iraqi people for the first time in a decade.
The war will certainly cost more than the $60b and change that the President is asking for. But it is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.) I don't know how much more, and neither does anyone else, although I'm sure the military has better guesses than I could make. It's important to think about the economic cost of the war -- the pro-war side has mostly dropped the ball on this, and it's an important calculation when we consider whether or not to go. But making up ridiculous numbers in order to support your predisposition isn't helpful -- and when the war doesn't cost us $2t, people are going to remember that the next time you talk about the costs of a program you don't like.
1 Note the number is an inflation of my already inflated number.
2 Note that he does not attempt to quantify any of these costs, nor compare them to the current humanitarian disaster from sanctions.
3 "We need not demean the grief ahead by trying to give it money value" is a funny statement for an economist, since quantifying the value of a human life is routine calculations. It's especially funny in an article titled "What Economic Price This War?".
4 Almost none. Investment is deferred consumption. It can, more or less, be invested in six months just as well: your banker doesn't say, "Well, since you're not investing today, I think I'll just take this hunk of cash out back and burn it." Trade doesn't seem to be suffering. Not all production can be made up, but that amount seems likely to be small.
5 This is a scurvy writing trick: "Someone, somewhere has made a Wild Assed Guess that is Extremely High, but I'm not going to tell you who, because then you'd realize that they're a total idiot and this number is meaningless."
6 Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there's something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.
March 25, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:I'm not blogging directly about the war, because I don't think anyone is interested in my sharing the encyclopedic understanding of tactical military operations I've gained from my extensive collection of W.E.B. Griffin novels. (I don't care what you say -- sometimes you just want to read a story filled with people whose lives contain nothing more complicated than shooting things and fantastic exploits with women of easy virtue).
But please, can everyone stop writing posts/articles on how the last ten minutes activity in the stock market proves their belief that the war is won/doomed? First of all, no one writing any of those "Stocks up on hopes of a quick resolution" headlines took a poll to find out what the millions of investors who set the stock prices by buying and selling individual shares of stock, was thinking. They're just guessing, mostly based on what they think would have caused them to buy and sell if they were people who had money, instead of journalists. Second of all, while the stock market is a useful indicator of the economy, it is not the economy, especially over time periods of several hours. The fact that the stock market dropped three hundred points yesterday does not mean that we are going all going to be out on the street next week, any more than the fact that it's up 100 points today means that we're moving to Easy Street. Third of all, investors overshoot and undershoot, just like you and me, because oops, that's who the investors are. Basing your estimate of where the economy/war is going on the opinions of the folks who brought you Yahoo at $214 a share is mildly lunatic. And fourth of all, stock prices, like other prices, are partly set by good old supply and demand. All the purchases that were delayed in the run up to the war started flooding back into the market when Saddaam didn't gas our soldiers day 1. Excess demand raised prices; some speculators rode the boomlet then sold off. Other things happened in the market. There's obviously some reaction to the war in there, but it's hard to separate how much, and it's not very useful because none of the investors setting the prices have any more idea than the rest of us how this thing will eventually wash out. So please, give the poor Dow a rest.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Advantage: Objectionable Content! Jim picks up something that I think is a blogosphere scoop: Arab news outlets are reporting that Dick Cheney is going to Amman to persuade his daughter not to become a human shield.
This strikes me as unlikely for a number of reasons. At this point, human shields must know that they'll be totally ineffective, without even a way to publicize their presence, plus the only things they'd be shielding are military targets. Still, it's a story that one would think Western outfits would be trying harder to confirm or deny.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Arnold Kling has a post on teacher pay that seems to confirm something I've suspected for quite a while: that a large portion of our educational trouble stems from the fact that you no longer have a large number of competent women who are willing to work for low wages. It's a problem in other fields as well. From my own days as a secretary, I can attest that they mostly fall into three classes: bright young women who are going to do this for a couple of years while they get a degree or gain experience; bright older women who became secretaries back when that was the best job a woman could get; and incompetent, unmotivated, or trapped women who hate their jobs, aren't very good at them, but can't leave -- and can't be replaced with anyone better. As that older generation retires, it's getting more and more impossible to find good administrative staff, the kind that can put the polish on a letter, keep the files ticking and the budget balanced, deftly juggle travel and schedules, keep a thousand pieces of paper moving without dropping one, and do it all with a smile that helps you present a professional face to the world. They're off presenting their own professional face to the world these days, and the secretary is going the way of the dodo. (Not that those of us who used to practice the art will mourn much.)
Kling suggests that the solution is to raise teacher pay, a proposal I heartily endorse, although not under any regime in which they get paid by seniority rather than results. He asks whether that would be the result if we privatized schools, and the answer is that I honestly don't know. The private sector generally pays better than the public sector, but not in the case of the schools; my private school teachers didn't get paid anything you could live on without a trust fund or a spouse to support you. The teachers were trading off pay for the privilege of teaching students whose parents were very active in their education, and who could be disciplined or expelled if they misbehaved. The catholic schools pay their teachers even more poorly. Further violating the rule of the free market, low-paid private school teachers were far more competent and engaged than the highly paid veteran public school teachers in the public grammar school I attended.
It's unlikely that there's any one silver bullet for education. But transforming teacher jobs from moderately paid union sinecures to highly paid professional positions sounds like a good first step.
March 24, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:How real is the hydrogen economy?
Outstanding commentary on hydrogen cells from Lynn Kiesling.
From the desk of Jane Galt:So the airlines are claiming that they need to cut service and lay off employees because of the war in Iraq.
Come again?
War in Iraq means you need to fly smaller planes on the New York to London route? Cut meal service? Get rid of employees? Doesn't sound kosher to me. No doubt there will be a depression of service as Americans decide to stay at home during these uncertain times, but it's hard to imagine it lasting much longer than a couple months. This isn't WWII. You don't lay off 3,500 employees because you're facing a seasonal downtrend; I'm pretty sure their peak season is summer, by which time the worst of the uncertainty and anxiety about Iraq will be resolved.
Besides, what do the airline executives know now that they didn't know two weeks ago? It was pretty clear back then that we were going to war; the only new information is that Al Qaeda probably isn't going to launch a nuclear attack on us in retaliation.
So why are they laying off people, etc.? Because they're hemorrhaging money. Demand for travel is down due to the recession and terrorism worries. The airlines have lost $18 billion since 9/11. They're paying through the nose for the new security measures, their debt to equity ratio is above 30, and they have high fixed costs for mothballed plane leases and lucrative labor contracts they signed when times were flush. They can't get rid of either without bankruptcy. . . unless they can wrap themselves in the flag to get consumers to swallow reduced services, silence union squawking about lost jobs, and hopefully get the government to cough up more cash for the poor, beleaguered airlines.
But don't be too hard on them. This is a frightening time to be an industry executive. Since deregulation, we've seen the gradual democratization of air travel -- most of us wouldn't have been able to zip merrily around the country several times a year before the nineties. That democratization was paid for by the business customers, who pay several times as much for their seats as we do. With profits down and teleconferencing getting ever more sophisticated, those business travelers are staying put or buying restricted tickets like the rest of us bozos. Meanwhile we're staying home to put in that garden we've always wanted. It may well be that airline travel for the masses simply isn't a workable entity without a red-hot economic boom to encourage companies to throw money around like water. And that's bad news for all of us.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A Song for Michael
The Oscars are on my list of "things about which I could give a ****." I did hear the now-famous Michael Moore speech this morning (all 58 seconds), and I started humming an old tune and adding some new words.
With apologies to my favorite songsters, Flanders & Swann.
If you glimpse a large tush
And hear screaming of Bush
Then an animal comes to the fore,
Who is basically pig
But more sweaty and big
You will know you have met with a Moore.
You are glued to the spot;
Will he squash you or not?
No need to have fears about that.
For a friend you beseech,
But for you he does reach,
All he wants is to try out his speech.
But don't be misled;
Soon you'll wish you were dead,
That instead you had married Al Gore,
For Oh, Oh what a Moore he is, what a thundering thumping Moore!
In falsified grunts he will tell you of hunts
Of trickery in celluloid
He will tell you that one can just pick out a gun
In a bank for the race paranoid.
He responds to their terror, that they made an error
By striking our pure Eastern coast,
And suggest that instead target not blue but red
And turn all those rednecks to toast.
Then a joke he will try as you stifle a sigh
And deny that you've heard it before,
Thinking Oh, Oh what a bore he is, what a thundering thumping Moore!
As you laugh at his jokes (Ha ha ha ha ha ha)
'I'm a popular bloke', he will think.
When you're ready to burst,
Then 'Hello there!' he'll cry
To each poor passer-by
The ones that have not seen him first.
For on sight of the beast they will run to the east,
And the north and the west and the south,
And long for the day when his head's on a tray,
With a lemon to stop up his mouth.
They shout as they run;
'He's an excellent son,
An a wonderful fellow, We're sure!'
But Oh, Oh what a Moore he is, what a falsificating,
Pre-var-i-cating
(Grunt grunt grunt grunt)
Grating Moore!
From the desk of Jane Galt:The Corner makes a good argument that the tapes of Saddaam that are being aired were taped before the war, and thus that Saddaam must be in very bad shape.
March 23, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Ominous signs
UPDATE: Well, OK, that was a bit screedy. I should have left it for a morning read. Nonetheless, I will keep it posted so that, as Matt Welch once said to me, I am "reminded me of how I felt at the time."
Here's my beef: Schlesinger complains that the war debate has been left in the hands of "infantile leftists", yet he trots out all the ridiculous arguments employed by those same folks to whom he condescends. He is Michael Moore in a tweed coat with worn elbow patches. So here's a more serious critique. For those of you who prefer untempered late-night ire, skip to the original post.
- Instead of comparing Bush to Hitler, he compares the administration to Imperial Japan. So instead of painting finger mustaches on the president's upper lip he puts him in tails with circular wire-rimmed glasses. As you can see below, I found that offensive.
- He over-demonizes Ashcroft (no favorite of mine either) with the same "infantile" exaggeration that protesters use, claiming massive curtailment of civil liberties and damping of free speech even while disproving the point himself.
- He conveniently avoids addressing the United Nations' ineffectiveness in dealing with Saddam for twelve years, declaring the blind "rush to war" meme of the willingly uninformed.
- He attributes spurious and trivial motives to the administration with his comments on the weather, a poor substitute for oil as the magic word that explains all administration wrong-doing.
- He conveniently overlooks the many polarizing military actions of prior administrations.
- He invokes Cold War-style deterrence, a practice he abhorred while it achieved, in his words, "peaceful victory". Yet he offers this now Shlesinger-credited technique as the solution to a completely different problem, ignoring the facts that neither the Kuwait invasion, nor the 1993 WTC bombing, nor Iraq's WMD development program nor September 11 seem to have been deterred during a decade in which we proved that our conventional forces were as superior as our nuclear weapons. While I don't expect a game-theory essay, I would expect someone who pretends to be this sophisticated to admit that the era of asymmetrical, non-sovereign, unattributed warfare might require a few new techniques. Or he might even suggest what constitutes a credible threat if, as he did, you even opposed action in Afghanistan.
- Finally, he invokes, of all people, John F. Kennedy to admonish against ill-advised idealistic military misadventures. The mind reels.
The last point below, which is really where the post started before the Japan analogy got me all worked up, is simply that both Desert Storm and Afghanistan seemed to go nowhere for quite some time, so I am uncertain how to think aboutt the progress of the campaign so far. I believe there is a vast and unseen military effort banging away at the very foundations of the Baathists, and we have yet to really see it unfold.
So there you are, if you prefer the drier, caffeinated, ante meridian Dreck. On the other hand, if you want to get in the mood of the original post, read this symphony of moral equivalence I cited ("braying ass") below. I have another 14-hour day ahead of me, so don't expect a reaction to any further comments soon.
Oh, and "Uncle" - you haven't really read Jane that much, have you? Perhaps my calling Schlesinger a "twit" hit you like a ....2X4? It's a weblog, friend.
My co-blogger inquires about my health.
I am fine. I've been quite concerned about our progress in Iraq. You see, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has hinted that "our intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties", and a man with his track record has to be taken seriously....as a contra-indicator.
Schlesinger conveniently ignores and reverses several of his own stated principles in this little 'bay of digs' article.
...But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.First, let's congratulate Schlesinger for realizing that we achieved a peaceful victory during the cold war. This is an entirely different telling from Cycles of American History, in which he lambastes Reagan for being an immoral warmonger and soon to be erased from the pages of history. It doesn't sound like a retraction, nor was it intended as such, but I'll take it.
On to his comparison - we have a more formidable military than during the cold war, and it seems not to have deterred some rather damaging action. Schlesinger has a reputation for understanding the nuances of power politics, but it has somehow escaped him that we are facing an entirely different enemy and weapons that might follow a path that erases their origins, rendering the now 'classical' deterrence employed against the Soviet Union unwieldy. That is why we "impose" a war over the minority of congress who voted against it, the minority of U.S. citizens who support it and the three European nations and sundry other non-members of the coalition of 46 countries imposing alongside us. Pardon the imposition, folks!
As for the Pearl Harbor comparison, let me address my remarks directly to the author: Arty you doddering twit! That crap is beneath you and you know it. If not, I hope you join this braying ass in moral equivalence purgatory, condemned to alternate weeks in 1937 Nanjing and a contemporary U.S. P.O.W. camp in Iraq.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner -- a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental maxims of our policy "would insensibly change from liberty to force ... [America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit." Already the collateral damage to our civil liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic who is our attorney general, is considerable -- and more is still to come.
Yeah, Ashcroft's initiatives make putting Japanese-Americans in camps and suspending Habeas Corpus look feeble. Ashcroft must have started detaining incoherent Episcopalians while I wasn't looking. By the way, did any of the other military adventures of the Post-War era make us "dictatress" of the world? Desert Fox? Kosovo? Vietnam? Or is there something about a Republican President that makes Arty start thinking of a dominatrix?
What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been exposed and destroyed under the United Nations' inspection regime.
All four of them! What a relief.
The cause of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather. American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian Gulf's midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army -- and a professional army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.
Just because you say "rush" three times doesn't make it so. Twelve years is a long time, even if Saddam's mortality hasn't come into play (see below). I thought it was all about oil, but now Arty informs us it is all about the weather. Even if the premise of the weather were true, the remark about "losing its edge" is pretty awful. It clearly doesn't change the ultimate outcome, but better weather might still speed the campaign and save a few lives. Is that what Schlesinger calls an "edge"? I'll take it.
There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that is the only war we can win.
Arty misses the days when we went into wars we could lose. It's that Kennedy nostalgia (and "grace" - see below).
We can't win the war against Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can't win a war against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.
Indeed, If we can't find all potential Al Qaeda operatives in twenty different countries, we might actually have to cut off potential sources of arms - rogue states, such as Iraq and, the bigger threat (and known exporter) North Korea. Right, let's attack North Korea! No, wait, let's appease them. OK, no, go back to first paragraph - we deter them like our "peaceful victory in the Cold War". Wait..that's what we're doing now, under Bush, so it can't be right. It will "be a potent incentive to rogue states". We better rush to war. But only a "hard" war - a war we can lose, dammit!
How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate?
It sounded to me like Arty had a searching debate with himself in the last paragraph.
No war has been more extensively previewed than this one.
Previewed, but not debated. It's been in the headlines since we won in Afghanistan. The country's largest newspaper has been on a crusade to oppose it. A "searching" debate is apparently more like when you can't find your eyeglasses or remember what you said two books ago.
Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?
Maybe because a lot of reasonable people believe the President has a point here? Nah...can't be. Only Democrats have a point when they go off on missions against world opinion.
Isn't it amazing that the same guy who thinks lots of Iraq's WMD's were destroyed by inspectors (and I thought inspectors only inspected, silly me) thinks there has been no war debate. I don't know if there's an award for selective perception, but Schlesinger's in the running if there is. He could find someone using the wrong salad fork at a pie-eating contest. Or maybe, as his "rush to war" thesis suggests, he only started noticing our hostility to Iraq a few months ago.
I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional efforts to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text of Byrd's powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement -- a speech ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.
Schlesinger doesn't get around much. Byrd's speech was all over the place. More papers and websites, perhaps, than another Schlesinger would have liked an ex-klansman's arguments to adorn. Well, one man's 'philanthropist' is another man's Richard Mellon Scaife, to coin a phrase. Most of us are still getting over indigestion from Carter's ponderous dud.
According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11.Except that his regime likely performed the identity-laundering for both 911 and 1993 WTC terrorists. And, you know, stuff like that.
Many, perhaps most, Americans believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism. But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.
Easier than what? Enough recruiting to create a 911 is too much for me. A foreign policy based on minute-to-minute Al Qaeda recruitment potential sounds like a "quagmire" to me.
What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair break from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war -- that Hussein might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms -- and their production facilities -- are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on Hussein's part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.
I'm not interested in waiting until Saddam Hussein dies of natural causes to reduce the chance of my children dying unnaturally. I do not consider biological and chemical weapons trivial in his hands. They are perfect weapons for the enemy we face now, and dictatorships like Saddam's are certainly not inherently stable.
The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections to Hussein's human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?
You might also consider that in Cycles, Schlesinger claimed that "moral" military action can be justified based on "human rights, atrocities and genocide." Arguments provided with "ill grace" should be discarded, apparently. What is it with the leftist establishment "intelligentsia" these days? If they lose on logic, substance or consequences, they always go to the "style" gambit as a backup.
Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power?
No, we should leave monsters in power. They are, after all, an endangered species.
"Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.
Everybody take note, Schlesinger has just come around to the morality of consequences. Don't let him deny it.
America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."I guess that must be why we haven't made the slightest threat of attacking Iran or North Korea.
On a more serious note, I fell ill-equipped to analyze the war thus far (The NY Times apparently does, and it is going incredibly well by their own benchmarks). Desert Fox didn't have a very coherent mission, so I wasn't sure how to evaluate it. I remember in both Desert Storm and the War to oust the Taliban that the initial news of the war was disheartening. Both times we were warned "wait 'til the troops come in", and cautioned about the success of the air campaign. Only after the final ground campaign was moving rapidly did we see how well the foundation had been laid for a victory.
While this action unfolds with boots on the ground immediately, I am sure we are missing much of the foundation-building going on right now. It is quite possible that the real action is in special operations, which are working to weaken Baghdad's ability to coordinate resistance and lay traps for our forces when they arrive. So I think the success or setbacks of this campaign will be made obvious at a later point.
From the desk of Jane Galt:I think it's interesting, for all the blather about left-wing Hollywood, to see just how corporate it is. Virginia Postrel makes a good case that the pre-show festivities were cancelled, not because of the solemnity of war, but because the suits didn't want America to hear how stars speaking out against the war. I noticed that they cut in the "time's up" music on Michael Moore way before the deadline, drowning out the end of his speech. And every time one of the more vocally left-wing stars gets up to the podium, it seems to me that the entire audience is waiting with a stone face until they're sure that the speaker isn't saying anything they don't want to get caught on camera applauding. Hollywood, it seems, is pretty much as willing to trim its ideology to public opinion as any other mass-market industry.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Holy Toledo, Batman!
Michael Moore, predictibly, won the Oscar for Bowling for Columbine. Utterly predictibly, he made an Anti-Bush, Anti-War speech.
Highly unpredicibly, the boos were louder than the applause. Michael Moore looked shocked, then horrified, then visibly decided that he wasn't hearing what he was hearing, and plowed through his speech. The majority of the actors, who I think have belatedly caught the tide of consumer sentiment, sat there with the deer-in-the-headlights, frozen smile look of an Episcopalian in a trailer park.
It's clear that Michael Moore, for all his blather, thought that he was taking a most un-courageous stand -- preaching to the choir. What was objectionable was not the sentiment, but the smugness. But the people who boo-ed, given where they live and work. . . that took guts.
I suspect we won't see any more brave anti-war stances tonight now that it's become clear actual courage is involved.
Update Wow, that was fast! Susan Sarandon just made the traditional World War II V-for-Victory sign. See, speaking out can make a difference.
March 22, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Can a businessman make a good president?
Dwight Meredith says that being a good businessman doesn't qualify you to be president, and he doesn't understand why people think it would. And that's true; the skill set isn't all that transferrable. (You don't get to pack the board with people who owe you, and also, there are 545 of them, roughly half of whom will be looking to get you fired at any given time.)
But I'm not sure that any job really prepares you to be president of the US.
We get a lot of our presidents from the governorships. But being a governor means that you know absolutely nothing about foreign policy, because no one really cares what Arkansas's position on dollarization or the ABM treaty is. (Except for Massachussets, which occasionally likes to try to run its own trade policy, but its people are unelectable in the current political environment.)
Being a senator or a congressman is also a popular route, although it hasn't worked for anyone since Nixon. But while a senator is probably well acquainted with the policy issues of the day, he probably also hasn't run anything larger than a committee in his entire life. Most of us would like to believe that we could step in and run IBM if we could just get the board to see it, but as anyone who's managed a significant number of people knows, being an executive is very, very different from being a peer leader, even when you're very powerful. Also, the nature of senatorial politics is such that a successful senator is likely to lack vision, propose only things that can get passed and worry a lot about procedure over substance. They also tend to focus on a couple of things that will get them on camera, rather than developing broad policy agendas. This is what killed Dole, and in the end, I think also McCain -- he only had two issues, and one of them was getting his colleagues in the Senate to sign a campaign finance bill they hadn't read. Also, a senator comes into office owing a great many people a great many favors, which is probably not a good thing.
Being in the army works if your war was popular enough -- but while a general is likely to be good at being commander in chief, and possibly at foreign policy, generals aren't likely to be much good on the domestic front; their entire experience with the social and economic side of things is command and control, which doesn't work as well when you can't have people imprisoned for ignoring you. Also, thank God, we don't have enough large wars to produce many generals with any chance of getting elected.
George H. W. Bush ran the CIA. Probably guys from agencies like this are wizards on whatever their specialty was: foreign policy, energy policy, social services. But being in an agency like that is almost certain to produce tunnel vision after years of fighting for your agency in the back halls of Washington. Also, while managing an agency gives you executive experience, it's not quite the same as running a state or a company; for one thing, you're accountable only under the most severe duress, and for another, you're usually not carrying out your own ideas, but those of Congress or the President.
Businessmen don't know how to do politics, but they are almost certainly more knowlegeable about the economy and business issues than the politicians are, who have gotten all their economic news for the last 30 years filtered through sound bites and lobbyists position papers. They also know how to manage a large organization, if they're successful, which is no small asset in the Oval Office. I don't say that it's particularly likely that they'll succeed, but I don't see that it's foreordained that a businessman in the Oval Office would fail, either. Except, of course, that the ones who are willing to try seem to be somewhat crazy. What that tells us about the politicians who run, I don't care to think about.
March 21, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:It doesn't get any better than this: Business 2.0's annual dumbest moments in business.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Un Message to le President of France
Whatever your opinion of the war, I think we can all agree that this is probably the best existing work in Franglais.
From the desk of Jane Galt:That stings
Forbes is having a contest for best blog about the economy, and we aren't even listed. Boo-hoo. Nonetheless, there are some good choices there, such as the incomparable Lynn Kiesling, the excellent ArgMax, the formidable Arnold Kling, and fellow Chicago GSB-er Zimran Ahmed. So far, "none of the above" is winning, which I choose to interpret, on absolutely no evidence, as a tribute to the missing presence of www.janegalt.net on the list of choices. Anyone who suggests that the missing piece is actually Brad DeLong will be summarily executed.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Requiasit in Pacem
Gulf War II claims its first casualties, though it's unclear whether it was from enemy fire, or simply an accident. Meanwhile, more and more people seem to think that Sadaam was in that bunker, and Iraq may fall almost painlessly, for us and them. I don't want to predict such a thing -- but I can hope, can't I?
From the desk of Jane Galt:One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. . .
Via Joanne Jacobs: Excellent essay on the thin, but vital line between a warrior and a terrorist.
We discussed the fact that it is unlikely that those who have been bewitched by the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden and others like him feel no revulsion at the thought (or in the act) of killing unarmed, helpless civilians. Rather, it is more probable that they are persuaded that any apparent pricks of conscience they may feel are not the screams of their precious humanity hoping to be heard but rather their human weakness battling against their will to perform their sacred duty. They would therefore consider it a triumph of will to carry out the charge to kill without mercy or discrimination.. . .
It is easier to remain a warrior when fighting other warriors. When warriors fight murderers, they may be tempted to become like the evil they hope to destroy. Their only protection is their code of honor. The professional military ethics that restrain warriors -- that keep them from targeting those who cannot fight back, from taking pleasure in killing, from striking harder than is necessary, and that encourage them to offer mercy to their defeated enemies and even to help rebuild their countries and communities -- are also their own protection against becoming what they abhor.
March 19, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Cry havoc. . .
It looks like today is the day. The first shots have been fired, and thankfully, the surrenders have begun, sparing some Iraqis from a senseless death in the name of a dying regime.
Longtime readers know that I support this war. But I'm not glad that it has come to this, and my first and last hope is that it will end quickly, with few deaths on either side.
I think that Edna St. Vincent Millay's Prayer for an Invading Army fits the day perfectly:
O Thou, Thou Prince of Peace, this is a prayer for War!
Yet not a war of man against his fellowman.
Say, rather, Lord, we do beseech
Thy guidance and Thy help:
In exorcising from the mind of Man, where she has made her nest,
a hideous and most fertile beast –
and this to bring about with all dispatch, for look, where
even now she would lie down again to whelp!Lord God of Hosts! Thou Lord of Hosts not only, not alone
of battling armies Lord and King;
but of the child-like heart as well, which longs
to put away – oh, not the childish, but the adult
circuitous and adroit, antique and violent thing
called War;
and sing
the beauties of this late-to-come but oh-so-lovely Spring!
For see
where our young men go forth in mighty numbers, to set free
from torture and from jeopardy
things that are deat to Thee.Keep in Thy loving care, we pray, those of our fighting men
whose happy fortune it may be to come back home again
after the War is over; and all those who must perforce remain,
the mourned, the valiant slain.
This we beseech Thee, Lord. And now, before
we rise from kneeling, one thing more:
Soften our hard and angry hearts; make us ashamed
of doing what we do, beneath Thy very eyes, knowing it does
displease Thee.
Make us more humble, Lord, for we are proud
without sufficient reason; let our necks be bowed
more often to Thy will;
for well we know what deeds find favour in Thy sight; and still
we do not do them.Oh Lord, all through the night, all through the day,
keep watch over our brave and dear, so far away.
Make us more worthy of
their valour; and Thy love.“Let them come home! Oh let the battle, Lord, be brief,
and let our boys come home!”
So cries the heart, sick for relief
from its anxiety, and seeking to forestall
a greater grief.So cries the heart aloud. But the thoughtful mind
has something of its own to say:
“On that day –
when they come home – from very far away –
and further than you think –
(for each of them has stood upon the very brink
or sat and waited in the anteroom
of Death, expecting every moment to be called by name)Now look to this matter well: that they
upon returning shall not find
seated at their own tables, - at the head,
perhaps, of the long festive board prinked out in prodigal array,
the very monster which they sallied forth to conquer and to quell;
and left behind for dead.”Let us forget such words, and all they mean,
as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed,
Intolerance, Bigotry; let us renew
our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be
Himself, and free.Say that the Victory is ours – then say –
and each man search his heart in true humility –
“Lord! Father! Who are we,
that we should wield so great a weapon for the rights
and rehabilitation of Thy creature Man?
Lo, from all corners of the Earth we ask
all great and noble to come forth – converge
upon this errand and this task with generous and gigantic plan:Hold high this Torch, who will.
Lift up this Sword, who can!”
To their boys and ours alike: safe home.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question of the Day
Can someone please tell me why the hell I now have to dial the area code before making a local call in the NYC area?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Memo: The US is not the only country in the world
Longtime readers know that I don't post on foreign policy. But I do want to post about something I've seen over and over and over -- on blogs, in comments, in news columns1. That is the Democrats who say, "Well, of course we should go to war but the only reason that France isn't going with us is that Bush is such a colossal screw up he offended them."
Talk about Ugly Americans! In the world of these folks, the entire rest of the world pretty much exists only in relationship to American actions. The French are foreign children, who will do what we want if we just pet and coax them a little. Likewise, the rest of the world, except for a few naughty rogues -- if teacher is good and kind and y'know, hip, the children will obey and the whole classroom will be like birds in their little nests agreeing. A postmodern classroom, where the teacher is learning as much from her students as the students learn from her.
France is a real, live country, with its very own foriegn policy aims that exist independently of the US. If you'd spent a little more time paying attention to foreign policy, you'd see that over the last five years, the French have been making a concerted effort to consolidate their dominance over the European Union and wield it as a club to counterweight the US. Not because the US is mean. Not because they're in a childish snit over Kyoto -- for one thing, the Europeans had no more intention of signing Kyoto than we did, and for another, what would you think of an American president who dropped out on a NATO ally because of Kyoto? Because France is concerned with increasing France's power in order to advance France's interest, which is what foriegn policy is supposed to do. Casting the entire things in terms of the US actions, as if the rest of the world were just bit characters in the drama of American Empire, is good for Bush-bashing, but bad for rational argument.
Similarly, Sadaam Hussein has held onto his WMD rather than disarming so that he could use them in a conflict he is bound to lose. He's been willing to starve his own people and isolate his nation rather than surrender them; now he's willing to take his nation to war rather than surrender power. These may be logical decisions -- but this is not a debate about the wording of a resolution or a couple of million in foreign aid that we can finesse with a little more wordplay. Arguing that diplomacy would have succeeded where 250,000 troops on the border have failed, as Tom Daschle is doing, is sheer lunacy.
No doubt foreign policy mistakes have been made. But the French were ready to veto from day one; they were also ready to mislead Colin Powell, telling him that they would vote for a resolution authorizing force if Iraq was found to be in material breach. They have delivered ultimatums that forestalled negotiation several times in this process. In short, they have their own foreign policy goals that they are pursuing, and which they would have been pursuing regardless of what we'd done about Kyoto. As Daniel Drezner says, while we could have done things better, the best case scenario isn't that different from the one we have now. And if you'd take off the "Bush is Evil" glasses and look at the other countries as countries, you'd see it.
1Yes, I could post links. But why name names? The bloggers and commenters know who they are -- and I imagine, so do the rest of you.
March 18, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:The dangers of saying sooth
Stuart Buck on the perils of making war predictions:
If there's one thing that I'm sure of, it's that no one who comments on these issues has the faintest clue what will happen.Does that sound too harsh? Perhaps. But consider these questions: Who, in 1929, could have plausibly and justifiably predicted the world-wide conflagration that would ensue shortly thereafter? Who, in 1945, could have predicted that within a comparably short period Germany and Japan would be America's allies? Hardly anyone, and certainly not the people who would have been blogging at the time, had the technology existed. Such broad questions about the state of world affairs are just too complicated, with too many variables, for anyone, no matter how well-informed or brilliant, to know what will happen.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Okay, I don't like Ben and Jerry's. Not because 2% of their profits goes to buy warm sweaters for the Mediterranean Vole, or whatever cause is the flavor of the week; I just don't like their ice cream very much. I'm a Haagen-Dazs girl, and no, I don't care what sort of politics the folks who brought me Dulche de Leche ice cream bars have, and I thank them for not telling me.
Nonethless, when you see something like Star Spangled Ice Cream, featuring flavors like "Nutty Environmentalist" and "I hate the French Vanilla", you have to be tempted to find out if their product is competitive with the other side of the aisle.
From the desk of Jane Galt:And while we're talking about the article I linked below, what's with the people who think that the French boycott is "xenophobic lunacy", but think that Bove guy is cute?
From the desk of Jane Galt:That righteous stand
Can everyone who's concerned about the Dixie Chicks give the cries of corporate censorship a rest, please? The endless fulminating about how those arch-conservative suits in the music business are shutting down anti-war thought? First of all, you can get seriously hurt laughing that hard. And second of all, all the complaining does is make it crystal clear that the suits aren't censoring the Dixie Chicks -- their fans are.
Country music fans are conservative. You do not sell to them by making nasty comments about the president, and if the Dixie Chicks thought otherwise, they need to get in touch with their base. The suits at Columbia don't care what the Dixie Chicks say -- they care about record sales. And when the Dixie Chicks said something that threatened their star value, the suits stepped in -- just as they would have if the Dixie Chicks wanted to make an album full of gregorian chants. In the proud tradition of the first amendment, those executives are about as content-neutral as you can get. If the Dixie Chicks want to make anti-war speeches, all they need to do is grind out some hot-selling depressive folk-rock to sell to the kinds of folks who like a little Bush-bashing with their music.
The people complaining recognize that it's really the fans, but complaining about the record executives makes it seem more unfair, more like the Man stomping on freedom of speech with both jackboots. In screaming that the Dixie Chicks are being censored, they seem to have confused the two meanings of the word "free" as it relates to "free speech". The right guaranteed in the constitution uses free to mean liberty -- the right to say what you want without government interference. Those outraged by the treatment of the Dixie Chicks, and certain other figures on the left, want to use the word in another way: they want speech to be free in the sense that it has no cost. One could argue that the fan response is a tempest in a teapot -- but they're not arguing that. With good reason, because the Dixie Chicks didn't just say they were against the war. They declared in front of a foreign audience that they were ashamed that the President came from the same state they were. It was less a statement of conscience than unseemly pandering for cheap popularity by hurling, at the president of their country, the kind of schoolgirl sarcasm that one is supposed to have left behind by the time one is old enough to play in front of a foreign audience. It's hard to fault their fans if they decline to encourage that sort of performance. So instead they're arguing that it's somehow wrong of you to actually express your dislike of what the Dixie Chicks did by voting with your wallet.
Words have consequences, and I'm afraid I've no sympathy with those who complain about it. When you want to blather away into the ether, collecting the accolades and shunning the negative response, you're not advocating for speech to be free -- you're advocating for talk to be cheap.
March 17, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:I haven't had a cigarette in four years -- not even a "Damn, that interview was stressful" cigarette, or a "I'm celebrating and you can't really have a celebretory drink without a cigarette" smoke, or a "Gee, this is my favorite place/event/time of day for a cigarette" cigarette. People who knew me when I smoked can't believe it; people who've met me since can't believe I ever smoked. Sometimes I miss it, for after all, most of the best things that ever happened to me happened when I had a Camel Light tucked in one hand. But thanks to people like Susanna and Steve, I always remember why I never, ever want to have another. And why I am so very glad that my mother has now been smoke free for three years, after 42 years without a break on the demon weed.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Oh no!
Senator Moynihan is in the hospital after an emergency appendectomy. Moynihan was not only my favorite Democrat, but also my favorite Senator in the 20th century. May his recovery be swift and complete.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Happy St. Patrick's Day
A melancholy Irish poem for your delight:
Into The TwilightOUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.Your mother Eire is aways young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.-- WB Yeats
From the desk of Jane Galt:Torture: Yea or Nay?
Mark Kleiman has emailed asking me what I think about torture, and I suppose I should weigh in, although I doubt my contribution will be very useful.
To some extent, I believe in the hidden law. Which is to say, the choice that some citizens make, under some circumstances, to break the law as it is written. For example, I'm told that most abortions obtained in states where it was illegal pre-Roe were not, despite the Planned Parenthood PR, obtained from back-alley butchers; they were obtained in the clean confines of a hospital or doctor's office, from a friendly doc who was willing to go along with the fiction of the rape or "life of the mother" exceptions. This may have struck a better balance between expressing society's disapproval of abortion, which disapproval I endorse, and not ruining young women's lives with a single misstep. (And my view of abortion now is different from my view of abortion in the fifties and sixties, when for most women to have a baby out of wedlock was to ruin her chances at gainful employment or marriage, and often to get her kicked out of her family as well. The consequences are rather less drastic in 99.9% of today's cases.)
I view torture in somewhat the same way. To see what I mean, I want you to imagine that there's a terrorist group that is threatening, not some faceless person somewhere, but your kid. Your husband or wife. Your beloved brother or sister. Your mother or father. They are planning to kill them. You don't know exactly when, or how, and hence you know that you can't protect them without taking away the liberty that makes their life worth living. Picture the face of that person you love. Picture them dying, horribly, from poison gas. The terrorist group is planning on doing that to them. You know it's going to happen, unless you can somehow prevent it.
Now I want to picture that you have a member of that terrorist group tied up in your livingroom. He probably knows about the plans, and if he doesn't, he certainly knows how to get the people who do know about them. Only despite the best efforts of the Feds, he isn't talking.
Now, are you going to give him back to the Feds to be sent to Gitmo in the hopes that a couple years down the road, he might tell you something -- if they haven't already gassed your child, that is? Or are you going to whip out the toolbox and get to work?
I think it's important to think of this in two ways. First, if you endorse torture, you should be willing to perform it yourself, for you are on the same moral level as the torturer. And second, all the victims of terrorists are someone's beloved sister, mother, son. You should not be more willing to sentence them to death for your high principles than you are your own loved ones. The torture debate is ineffective because it's debated at such delicate remove from our own lives.
So, if it were me, would I just walk away in the knowlege that I was sentencing someone I loved to a horrible death? It's impossible to say for sure, of course. Just as we'd all like to believe that we'd be the Germans hiding Jews in our basement during the Holocaust, despite the evidence that most not-particularly-evil Germans didn't, we'd all like to believe that in such a situation we'd behave with the highest moral character. But I just don't know. How could I value the life or suffering of a terrorist above that of my blameless family? I think in the end that if they were threatening someone I loved, I'd be tempted to stomp them just a little bit. For if you didn't, and they killed your loved one, how could you live knowing that you didn't try the last, terrible measure that might have prevented it? Knowing that the man who might have unlocked the conspiracy is sitting fat, happy, and unscathed in a jail cell while your child's tortured body rests in the grave?
And I think that our operatives are probably so tempted when they face down the evil men who seek out soft civilian targets to sow terror. I cannot entirely fault them for it. I'm not sure they should always be punished. But neither do I want to see the apparatus of the legal system turned to codifying, regulating, and normalizing torture, as Alan Dershowitz has suggested with his terror warrants. If terrorists must be tortured -- and I am unwilling to state that there is no circumstance ever under which I could condone it -- then it should happen in dark rooms, at risk to the lives and careers of the men who carry it out, so that the hidden law will only trump the written law when times are truly desperate enough to call for such desperate measures.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Flying under false colors
Andrew Sullivan links a David Remnick piece on how hard it is to keep your friendships if you're pro-war and living in Manhattan. You have to establish your bona fides by bashing Bush extensively along with your defense of the war. But I've done even worse than that. I've pretended I'm a Democrat, though longtime readers know that I'm not a member of either party.
I've never actually said I was a Democrat, you understand. I've never lied about any of my beliefs. I've just failed to mention that I thought the person I was speaking to was wildly, impossibly, horribly wrong about 90% of their core ideas. And I've talked up points of agreement, giving them the mistaken impression that we were playing on the same political team. I've had long, knowlegeable conversations about Democratic politics that conveyed the misimpression, to the casual observer, that I wanted to see the people under discussion elected. And I have not seized opportunities to correct the fallacious assumption my interlocutors made as to my political affiliation.
I suppose it's a tawdry thing. Although there is a certain awful thrill in being taken for something you are not. But that's not why I do it. The fact is that in New York, if you want to get along with people, it's best to just let them think you're an arch-liberal. Could I disabuse people? Certainly. Am I afraid to? Ashamed of my ideas? Don't be silly. But who wants to spend their evenings getting into political arguments? What a delightful gift to bring your hosts. Such is the hothouse political monoculture of New York that on many issues, saying that you disagree with someone produces shock and horror, and functions as an invitation to spend the rest of your evening being harangued. What am I supposed to say when someone walks up to me and says "Can you believe that moron Bush is getting us into a senseless war?" One can try to be non-commital, but one cannot express disagreement, not even of the mild "I think it's more complicated than that" sort, unless one is prepared to spend the rest of the evening defending the proposition that George W. Bush is not Satan's idiot stepson. And the number of people in New York who believe conversations that begin with "Can you believe that moron Bush is. . .? " are the height of social enjoyment is large enough to ensure that you will meet at least one of them at any gathering you attend.
So I've sailed under false colors many a time, trimming my sails to the prevailing winds. I'm not proud. But as long as the Comintern is policing our cocktail parties, I'm not sure what else I can do.
From the desk of Jane Galt:US Calls off UN Vote
The President will speak to the nation at 8 pm tonight.
Alea iacta est.
March 15, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A Force for Good
Navy Pilot Ken Harbaugh believes the U.S. military is a "Force for Good". (link is audio from Friday's All Things Considered).
On the same show, an interview with Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times on a State Department analysis arguing that the "democratic domino" theory is unlikely to pan out.
Is it just me, or are others unsurprised that a) there might be disagreement within the State Department and b) the argument used to sell the war may not actually be the strongest argument in favor of action?
Miller seems off base with at least one comment, where he quotes the report saying that democracy in the Middle East could mean democracies hostile to the U.S. I'll take that chance, given the tendency of democracies not to attack each other. This sounds like the State Department that prefers stability to..well..anything.
March 14, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Guns, not Clutter
I still have on my Tivo the episode of The West Wing that inspired this post. Since I'm busy posting transcriptions, allow me to lay out the monodialogue from the scene that still leaves me breathless:
Right at the beginning of the show, the President watches in the situation room as his generals receive reports that they have successfully taken the airport in Khundu. It will be recalled that in Khundu, Induye natives are being marched to mass graves and slaughtered, provoking not only intervention from the U.S. but a new doctrine, announced at the inaugural. Bartlett strides back into the oval office where Ambassador Tiki, of Khundu, is waiting for him -
Bartlett (proceeding to his desk): Mr. Ambassador, sorry to keep you waiting, I was just in the White House situation room.Amb. Tiki: The U.S. is trampling on the sovereignty of my country, and on behalf of President Nzili -
Bartlett: I've just taken your airport
(A pause. The ambassador looks as if the President has extracted a large reptile from his posterior and is mounting it for display in the Rose Garden)
Bartlett:...clearing the way for the 101st air assault to take the capital. 7000 troops, 25 battle tanks, 15 Apache attack helicopters and 3 destroyers. Strictly speaking, I've conquered your country without the paperwork.
Ambassador's Aide: Khundu is in the midst of a civil war
Amb. Tiki: (waives off aide)
Bartlett: No it's not, it's in the midst of a one-sided slaughter of an entire people. Both the Secretary General and the Vatican have pleaded with Nzili for a cease fire and both the U.N. and the holy father have struck out, to the peril of 115,000 Induye men, women and, God Knows, children, particularly the boys...
Amb. Tiki: ..who will soon be men and will rise up..
Bartlett:...the heads of Ghana, Nigeria and Zaire have similary been sent packing. The Red Cross has been denied entry on three separate occasions in the last 10 days.
Let's pause there, gentle viewers, and consider who this missionary 'head of Zaire' might be? Last I checked the country fomerly called Zaire (until 1997) was called The Democratic Republic of Congo. The last leader of Zaire, President Mobutu, was not really the peace missionary type - unless there was a lot of personal money in it. Hint: there's a picture of him in the dictionary under "kleptocrat".
And wasn't it presidential? I guess we can talk turkey to these crappy little genocidal countries. Especially the ambassador, who isn't sure where he lives now, or whether he has a job. Or a living family, for that matter.
Finally, I suppose our force is so overwhelmingly superior that there's no downside to giving the enemy's ambassador an accurate inventory of military equipment in use?
Oops. This has been a test of the emergency TV-Fisking system. We return you now to West Wing still in progress. A President is chewing out the hapless ambassador while he skips the "paperwork" of consultation with Congress or allied powers and unilaterally takes over a small African country.
Bartlett (cont.): ..President Nzili has 36 hours to give the command to his troops to hand over their weapons to the 82nd Airborne division of the U.S. Army. In 36 hours and one minute, I will give the order to the 101st Air Assault to take Batanga and run-up our flag.(there is another long pause. This time the Ambassador appears to have had his eyes stuck open with crazy glue. It may have been the intern, he's been known to play pranks.)
Bartlett (like a comedian doing shtick): I skipped breakfast, anyone want coffee..or something?
(Roll credits and cue ponderous theme music)
I knew there was a reason I loved this show. Screw 'em all! Whose got time for diplomacy? Send in the 101st and deliver an ultimatum with a short fuse! "Run up our flag", that'll play well all 'round the world 'cause I'm a gun-totin' Nobel-prize winning economist. How d'ya like them apples, Sir Isaac? Yee-haw!
I'm not saying there is a clear political statement here, or it isn't just entertainment. But you gotta admit it's something to watch in today's context, no? Don't you get the vaguest sense of "it's good intentions that count most"?
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Song for the Anglosphere
The English, the English, the English are best I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.The rottenest bits of these islands of ours
We've left in the hands of three unfriendly powers
Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot
You'll find he's a stinker, as likely as not.The Scotsman is mean, as we're all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn't got bishops to show him the way!The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.The Irishman now our contempt is beneath
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth
He blows up policemen, or so I have heard
And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third!The English are noble, the English are nice,
And worth any other at double the priceThe Welshman's dishonest and cheats when he can
And little and dark, more like monkey than man
He works underground with a lamp in his hat
And he sings far too loud, far too often, and flat!And crossing the Channel, one cannot say much
Of French and the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch
The Germans are German, the Russians are red,
And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed!The English are moral, the English are good
And clever and modest and misunderstood.And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!The English, the English, the English are best
So up with the English and down with the rest.It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad
It's knowing they're foreign that makes them so mad!For the English are all that a nation should be,
And the flower of the English are Donald (Michael)
Donald (Michael) and Me!
(Michael) Flanders & (Donald) Swann
A Song of Patriotic Prejudice, offered in 1960 as a possible English National Anthem.
More F&S lyrics here.
March 13, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why can't I marry my best friend
You know, I support gay marriage, and I know I'm going to get some angry mail, but this is just too funny.
From the desk of Jane Galt:PSA
Incidentally, to anyone who's emailed me, I apologize -- I've been in sunny Florida, and there's quite a backlog. Also, I am the world's worst correspondant, for which I am sure I will spend a large amount of time in whatever the Episcopalians use for purgatory. I will try to answer my mails tonight. Thanks for your patience.
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why doesn't the government do something?
Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I reviewed here.
Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and of a forthcoming book on why some societies do, and some don't, deal effectively with potentially catastrophic environmental problems, gave today's Jacob Marschak Memorial Lecture on the topic of the new book.The structure of the analysis of failure was straightforward: problems aren't anticipated in time, or they aren't perceived after they arise, or no serious attempt is made to deal with them, or they're just too hard. But the wealth of example was fascinating.
Diamond told the story of Easter Island, home to what were the largest palm trees in the world, settled sometime in the Ninth Century, increasingly prosperous until the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, and then abandoned within half a century of its peak as a result of deforestation.
Here's the "money quote," which I'm paraphrasing from memory:
"What was the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree thinking? Was he saying to himself, 'Jobs, not trees'? Or was it 'Down with Big Chieftainship'? Or maybe 'Those deforestation models haven't been validated'?"
RECKLESSNESS
As Diamond phrased the question above, it seemed to be about recklessness. How, in the face of oncoming disaster, could people just keep on doing what was sure to bring the disaster about? This isn't really a puzzle at an individual level, as he pointed out: something (overgrazing or overfishing, to choose two obvious examples) might be good for each individual but bad for the group. The puzzle is how governmental institutions might fail to respond appropriately.
One possible answer was provided by Thomas Schelling in an essay on organizational command and control. Reckless behavior by an organization need not be the product of reckless individuals. It might instead stem from individual cowardice, with each person afraid to be the one to tell his boss the likely result of some organizational policy.
This is, forgive me for saying so, what I think is the heart of the liberal error about government. You see it all the time in advocates of economic regulation. Liberals notice that the market can produce suboptimal, as well as optimal results. Their natural instinct is to make a law about it.
What they seem not to notice is that in a Democracy, the same people making the original error vote.
What were the folks on Easter Island thinking? By the point they noticed that deforestation was coming, they were thinking: "if we cut down fewer trees, some of our people will starve". Environmental degradation only becomes evident at the point when the population has passed the level that can survive with a smaller footprint. Any chieftan who told the people to stop cutting down the palm trees would have found himself ignored or deposed, just as any politician who tells senior citizens that they can't have everything they want, free, gets himself a one way ticket back to Peoria.
In fact, government can often make things worse, by introducing "market failures' peculiar to government, such as rent seeking and deadweight loss, while failing to solve the original problem.
Many, many of the arguments on this site seem to be very well meaning liberals saying fervently "But don't you see there's a problem?" and me saying, equally earnestly, "The fact that there is a problem does not mean that government is able to fix it."
And in fact when we get to the solutions to these types of problems, the ones where the government is supposed to step in and prevent the broad mass of people from doing something very bad for them, what we see is that liberals can recognize that the government is ill-equipped to handle them -- or at least the kind of government of which they are ostensibly in favor, which is to say representative, democratic government. So in the name of democracy, they agitate for agencies with the power to enact fiat rule with limited accountability, such as the EPA. This is profoundly anti-democratic, and can produce the worst of both worlds: a large deadweight loss, with little to show for it.
Take the arsenic standards flap that came up at the beginning of Bush's term. The major environmental issue right now, I think we can all agree, is global warming. Yet the EPA was fussing about standards for naturally occuring arsenic that had been in the local drinking water for as long as there had been towns there, without large crops of people dying off. The cost per life saved ran, if memory served, into the trillions; the new standard was going to save something like two people every fifty years. You could do much better, life wise, funding a service to provide free rides home from rural bars. Why were we wasting time arguing about this? Because the EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency, and it can't go around bothering people at bars; its business is the environment. And talking seriously about global warming meant telling everyone they were going to get a whole lot poorer, which would have brought unwelcome public scrutiny -- angry scrutiny -- to the EPA. So we argued about drinking water standards instead.
The liberal mantra is that the market fails. The free market mantra is that government fails worse. And I think the weight of empirical evidence is on our side.
March 12, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Some days you get to post the good news
They just found Elizabeth Smart -- alive.
March 11, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Linguist Doth Protest Too Much
Geoff Nunberg cited "influential conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds" on Fresh Air tonight. (realaudio link) He did so only to cock a linguist's eyebrow at his usage of "protest" in association with "pro-war". I suppose one's opinion of Nunberg's criticism ("A clueless even-handedness", "a strategic blurring of historical memory" - huh?) rests with whether you think "protest" has become synonymous with "demonstration" in common (insta-)usage.
If you want to go straight to it, start at about 3'30" into the segment.
March 9, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Regimes
(this post has been substantially revised on March 12, 2003)
Reading Jane's recent post on housing valuation, I remembered I meant to put this page* up comparing the real change in value of various assets through three recent periods: 1949-1966, 1967-1981 and 1982 to 1999. These are periods S.E.D. identifies as "regimes" in which radically different expectations obtain for different asset classes.
Real estate just hasn't been anywhere near as frothy as stocks. Household real estate assets have grown about as fast (in real terms) from 1982 to the present as from 1967-1981, The difference in the 1982-1999 regime for stocks and bonds with prior eras is striking.
This doesn't mean real estate isn't in a bubble in certain parts of the country, but I think it suggests it won't re-price, in aggregate, nearly as aggressively as stocks have.
In the same publication, S.E.D. publishes an essay by Lawrence L. Kreicher of Omega Economics. Kreicher concludes that there is no national real estate bubble but there are certain urban areas that are at risk. Particularly interesting is an analysis of the ratio of housing prices to per capita income. He creates an index of this measure and scales it to average 100 over the 1980-2002 period (remember, income is growing). The national index rests at about 100 over the period. San Francisco rests at 140, and New York and Boston at about 120. Kreicher suggests that Robert Shiller, of Irrational Exuberance fame, has come to similar conclusions as well.
Kreicher's data omits the high end of the housing market (he is using conforming mortgage data), so it is fair to allow that extreme valuations may exist not only in geographic pockets but in high-priced real estate as well.
Speaking of "regimes", I have updated the logo to the left in order to gain approval from uberblogger Steven Den Beste.
*The source of the linked page, including the unusual spelling of cumulative, is S.E.D. inc.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Il fait bon dormir
These are the symptoms of sleep deprivation :
If someone is suffering chronic loss of sleep these important functions soon become impaired, overall health is usually affected as is a person’s memory and mood. They become a hazard to themselves and others.
In fact, sleep deprivation is said to mimic Attention Deficit Disorder:
The surprising news is that partial, or low-level, sleep deprivation has a bigger effect on behavior than either the short or long-term complete sleep deprivation experienced by residents (Sleep, May 1996). Until recently, the effects of partial sleep deprivation have been seriously underestimated.We know, based on common sense, that inadequate sleep makes kids more moody, more impulsive, and less able to concentrate. We've known for more than 20 years that sleep deprivation makes it difficult to learn (Journal of Experimental Psychology, Mar 1975).
Recent research has verified that chronic poor sleep results in daytime tiredness, difficulties with focused attention, low threshold to express negative emotion (irritability and easy frustration), and difficulty modulating impulses and emotions (Seminars in Pediatric Neurology, Mar 1996). These are the same symptoms that can earn kids the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, popularly known as ADD).
From today's New York Times Magazine:
France's foreign minister is the Energizer bunny of diplomacy, a hyperactive force who sleeps no more than four and a half hours a night, enjoys waking up aides to discuss matters of state, runs marathons by day and writes poetry by night...While Mr. de Villepin, 49, runs at high speed, it is sometimes difficult to know where he going. Even some of his closest aides call him brilliant or a bit crazy or both, and some diplomats have taken to calling him "Zorro."
Asked in a television interview in January about his perpetual motion, he replied: "It is crucial because the urgency is there. The urgency of great international questions. Terrorism. Proliferation. The rise of fundamentalism. The multiplicity of crises which have an impact on the lives of all of us. Today, you can't put a veil over your face."
If Mr. de Villepin has a vision, it is to revive the greatness of France — a romantic view he articulated in his book, "The Hundred Days," the first published volume of a biography of Napoleon that tells the story of the emperor's return from exile, his triumphant march across France and his final defeat at Waterloo.
Describing Napoleon's philosophy as "Victory or death, but glory whatever happens," Mr. de Villepin added, "There is not a day that goes by without me feeling the imperious need to remember so as not to yield in the face of indifference, laughter or gibes" in order to "advance further in the name of a French ambition."
From the desk of Jane Galt:Housing Valuation
Now this is really interesting: The Economist has an article about a fellow who has tried to derive the intrinsic value of housing. The insight, which seems obvious, is that you shouldn't really be willing to pay more for a house than the present value of the cash flow it would take you to rent the same house. A little less, in fact, because a house carries liquidity risk: if you have to move in a down market, you might have difficulty realizing the intrinsic value of the asset.
What's interesting is that the average price of housing seems to work out to 1.27 times the PV of rental housing, which is fascinating, because by my jackleg calculations, that's very close to what it should be: 1.00 plus the value of the mortgage interest tax deduction, which probably works out in the 25% of value range. So you're overpaying for your house, but not by much.
The other interesting, but unhappy, finding, is that we do indeed seem to be in a housing bubble. There's a spike in the ratio since 1995, which is currently headed towards 1.45. On the other hand, it's not as bad as some people, including me (gulp) have argued, although in local markets, it's probably worse.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question of the Day
I seem to remember, from deep in the recesses of childhood memory, that there were four, ummm, call them incarnations, of the Church: the Church Militant, the Church Penitant, the Church Triumphant. . . and I can't remember the last one. Or perhaps I've gotten them wrong. Can anyone with a better memory than mine fill me in?
Bonus Question: What were the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance? (This one I do know the answer to -- every so often I have to show off my mastery of obscure catechism questions.)
From the desk of Jane Galt:What are those wacky supply siders up to now?
Here's something I've seen over and over: Democrats, and some moderates, denouncing the Bush Administration's belief that if you lower tax rates, you can actually raise tax revenue by stimulating supply-side economic growth. This is a ridiculous belief -- or rather, it is a true belief, but it is not true at the levels and structure of taxation that we have here in the United States -- and it should rightly be denounced. One little problem, however -- I haven't actually found any instances of the Administration making that argument.
I've found examples where they said the important thing was growth, not deficits.
I've found examples where they said that the current deficits weren't all that large, and that the projected deficits are a little hard to plan for given that two years ago we were planning for surpluses at least as large as the projected deficit.
I've found examples where they said that we would lose less in revenue than the Democrats were projecting, because the reduction in taxes would lead to some new economic activity. I've even found some rather aggressive estimates on how little we would lose.
But nowhere have I found the Republicans saying "Don't worry about those tax cuts -- we'll raise more revenue than we lost through new economic activity." In fact, I haven't heard anyone argue that outside of a few wingnut wonks since the Reagan administration.
Since the people writing the articles and blog posts don't offer any examples of Administration people saying this, I presume they couldn't find any either.
It kind of kills any incentive I have to listen to anything else they have to say. Especially since not a single one of them shows any interest in speaking about the wacky Democratic "temporary tax cut" stimulus proposal, or the deficit-exploding Medicare proposals on the table. Leading me to believe that they don't really care about the deficit. It's just a useful club. What they really care about is that the Federal government is reducing what they consider to be its rightful take.
Update: Brad DeLong offers examples in the comments.
March 7, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Can COLI?
So it turns out that Amitai Etzioni has a new, and excellent blog. In one post, he links a piece critical of the practice of buying COLI insurance, sometimes known by it's more pungent name: Dead Peasants Insurance.
Well, since my favorite pastime is defending the apparently indefensible, and since a lot of people get all huffy and regulatory when they discover the existance of these policies, I think I'll take a stab at saying that while the practice may be bad PR, it isn't really immoral.
The basic idea of COLI is that a company buys life insurance policies, payable to the firm, to ensure against the economic loss occasioned to the firm when an employee dies. The employee dies; the company gets the benefits; the family gets nothing. This strikes many people as awful.
But wait -- why should the family get anything? They weren't paying the premiums. If the policy had been made out to the family, the company would not have bought it, or would have made the family pay the premiums either directly, or through lowering the salary on offer. We're complaining because the family is not getting a benefit from a policy that never would have been purchased if the family had been the beneficiary. In other words, the family isn't losing anything. If you take out an insurance policy on my life because of the irreparable loss you expect to suffer if and when I am no longer around to provide the finest economics and bullmastiff web commentary, and pay premiums on it, it may be ghoulish, but it's neither illegal nor immoral. Nor should my family expect to be given the proceeds of a policy they didn't pay for.
One often hears arguments against these policies on the grounds that the companies aren't really suffering any economic loss -- hence the "Dead Peasant" moniker. But this is beside the point, because the point of this sort of policy is not to provide insurance; it is to collect a tax benefit.
Let's start with the proposition that over the long run, companies on average are not going to make money on these policies. If they were making an economic profit -- that is, more than they were paying out in premiums, adjusted for the time value of the money -- the insurance companies would be losing money, and then they would go out of business and we wouldn't need to argue about COLI policies any more. Thus, this is not a gruesome plot to make on last dollar off the backs of the employees, even though it sounds like it in most newspaper treatments. Over the long run, the cost of the premiums and the capital required to pay for them will be at least equal to the payout. Over the short run, specific companies may make out like bandits, but then there will be other companies that pay out a lot of dough and all their employees live to be ninety. It evens out on a societal basis, which is how one has to look at things like regulating insurance policies.
If they're not making any money, though, why do they do it? Well, for one thing, it does cost the company something when an employee dies, even a lowly one. Whether or not that's equal to the value of the policy is a matter for argument, but frankly, if there's anything more tedious than an argument about actuarial valuation techniques, I haven't come across it in my thirty years. At any rate, that's not the major reason that a lot of these policies are written. The major reason is that it's tax advantaged. When a company pays insurance premiums, that's a tax-deductible expense. When it collects insurance premiums, on the other hand, it is assumed to be making whole an economic loss, and the benefits are thus untaxed. COLI's are essentially serving as a sort of corporate Roth IRA.
Is there anything wrong with that? Well, for those who believe that there is some sort of magic "fair share" number of corporate taxes that can be known with certitude, and that they are thus qualified to judge when the corporations have departed from the platonic ideal, I'm sure this policy strikes them as horrible. Longtime readers know that I think that for all the time and energy companies waste trying to minimize their tax bill, and that we waste trying to stop 'em, it would be a lot better for all of us to eliminate the corporate income tax and just tax any income they distribute when it hits employees or shareholders. In this case, I don't see how you could "close the loophole" without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. GE is certainly going to suffer a net economic loss if any of their executives or even middle managers drop dead -- are you going to keep them from insuring the risk? Or open up a huge can of worms by trying to tax insurance proceeds? Think carefully before you answer, because that exemption is why you don't have to pay taxes on the money Geico paid you when your sister wrecked your car. You might find it a little hard to replace the car after Uncle Sam has taken 30% out for taxes.
Now, the policies might be dreadful PR, and thus a bad idea. But I don't see how they're particularly immoral, and I certainly don't think that, as many argue, there ought to be a law.
UpdateMark Kleiman says that the reason it's bad is that it gives companies an interest in their employees death. But actually, I don't think it does in any meaningful sense.
When I take out a life insurance policy on you, I now have an interest in your death -- and indeed, that interest can be so strong that insurance companies have developed very strict investigatory divisions intended to prevent those who decide to take aggressive action to realize that interest. But it doesn't work that way for a company.
Remember, the company is insuring a pool -- unless they have an actuarially significant number of employees to insure, the risk is too great that they'll be on the wrong side of the bell curve, none of their employees will die, and they'll have spent a lot of money for nothing.
When you're insuring a pool, you can't gain economic benefit from raising the number of deaths in the population. Why? Because if an abnormal number of people die, the insurance company will notice. If you seem to be causing the deaths, either by running an unsafe workplace or hiring from an especially risky pool (rock climbing sky divers with brain tumors wanted to run the copy machines at Acme Widgets!), the insurance company will either stop writing the policy, or they will require you to take action. And they'll also raise your rates because you're a high risk client. Those rates will be at least the economic cost of covering your new, riskier insurance pool. In other words, any money you make from encouraging your employees to die will be paid to the insurance company as premiums to cover their higher risk of dying.
That doesn't even take into account the liability and health insurance costs you would incur if you started trying to kill your employees.
So, no, I don't think it gives a company an interest in their employees' deaths. In fact, a company that's looking out for its economic interests will want their employees deaths to vary right within the normal actuarial range. Which, if they're large enough to be using this sort of scheme, is probably just what they'll do.
UPDATE: (Mindles speaking) I wrote about this in May of 2002.
March 5, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Do college athletes get something more valuable than a salary?
A fairish number of people have written or commented on this post to the effect that it's not true that the NCAA is making money unfairly off the backs of young athletes; they get a very valuable education out of the thing. It's a fair argument, but I think it's wrong. While an education is very expensive, it's non-transferrable, and I think it's clear that a lot of the athletes can't use the value themselves.
The colleges make an enormous amount of money out of these guys. In exchange, they give them something they can't use. It's as if someone gave you a non-transferrable yak instead of your salary. The yak may be very valuable, but unless you've got a rice paddy to work, it's more of a liability than an asset. In the case of college football players, they have to waste time going to classes they don't get, in exchange for a degree that will not, in itself, do them any good (it may do them good to have been, say, a Texas Longhorns halfback, but it's hard to see how this would do them any more good than having played on the local farm team for a salary).
Now, of course, I've argued elsewhere that in most cases, an education is not really intrinsically valuable; it's more of a signalling mechansim than a useful tool. However, there are limits to what a signalling mechanism can do. For one thing, you can usually spot a football player. And for another, if the candidate didn't understand anything in their classes (which is not, according to the people I know who attended institutions with major sports teams, unusual), it's probably going to show up in the interview.
So while the university may be giving away something valuable, I'd argue that the athlete who is totally unqualified to attend the institution isn't getting much of value. And given how much the universities make on these guys, it's hard to credit them with any generosity.
On the other hand, what do I know about college athletes? I was at Penn when our football team snapped Columbia's 20 year losing streak.
From the desk of Jane Galt:The Economists
There's something just deeply, deeply wrong with making economists dance around like a not-very-attractive ballet corps, following the gyration of the charts, and yet. . . I just spent fifteen minutes doing so.
(Via the incomparable ArgMax)
From the desk of Jane Galt:Phillipe De Croy suggests a compromise on the Estrada nomination: give up Estrada in exchange for agreement to hold a vote on all the other nominees, including Owen and Pickering. It's not a bad idea, but I don't think it will happen, because the Republicans don't need to compromise. The reason the filibuster is still going on is that most of the country doesn't know it's happening. If war comes, either the Democrats will give up their filibuster to allow vital business to proceed, or they won't. And if the Democrats are holding up vital Senate business in order to keep Estrada's nomination from coming to a vote, they will suffer mightily at the polls -- especially since a nice majority of this year's presidential crop comes out of Congress. All the Republicans have to do is wait -- and meanwhile, no extra money gets spent. It's win/win.
March 4, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Shocking Soldier
Fresh Air today is well worth a listen. First up is Iraq veteran Anthony Swofford, author of the new book Jarhead. You'll find his answers particularly interesting when Barbara Belgave asks him if he killed anyone (7:10). Swofford mentions an incident with a group of Iraqi soldiers at Al-Jawar airfield that were "easy targets". In fact, they end up wandering around trying to surrender, and Swofford describes how frustrating he found the lack of opposition and how he put each soldier's head in his scope's sites, "popping around from head to head", shooting them in the mind's eye.
Belgave is clearly horrified - to the point of being speechless, but Swofford has a seriously detached tone. It gives the impression of a Marine I've always had - brutal but disciplined.
The last interview is Gidon Kremer, one of my favorite violinists. He has the juiciest tone in the business. Kremer speaks frankly about the involvement of the Soviet state in his artistic and personal life prior to 1988. Ugh. How soon we forget.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A Hot Tip for Winter Runners
It must be sweeps weak here on A.I. Having covered other parts of the anatomy in recent posts, we move on to the John Thomas, to Bob & The Twins, etc.
Eugene Volokh has discovered a story about a fellow who..er...boiled his frank & beans with a laptop. "Ouch", he observes, appropriately.
Those who have met me may have a hard time believing this, but I'm a runner. When you run in the winter, you have to take certain precautions on cold windy days to prevent the opposite phenomenon of the one mentioned above. I recall a letter in Runner's World about a fellow who came home from a run only to discover that he had partially frozen the extremities. The appropriate remedy for any frostbite is specific immersion in room temperature water to bring about a gradual increase to body temperature. So this fellow poured himself a glass of warm water and straddled it. Now I actually haven't tried to lower the wee danglies into a cup, but I can easily imagine it requires an awkward positioning of the limbs and a hand to hold the cup in place. Naturally, stripping from the waist down would be a necessary precondition to successful defrosting posture. So the overall effect is fairly close to standing, naked below the midriff, knees akimbo, and jamming a cup of hot water into your crotch with a crooked arm.
At any rate, after our chillie willie had rushed into the kitchen, assumed the position and begun to benefit from the laws of thermodynamics, his wife, a non-runner, walked into the kitchen accompanied by a female friend.
Once the circumstances had been explained the friend excused herself and there was, he tells us, a happy ending to the day's exercise.
May I offer my sincere apologies for the pun.
From the desk of Jane Galt:All Kevin, All The Time
Today's quote from Kevin Drum comes from an excellent post about collegiate athletics:
Why should good athletes be denied the opportunity to develop their skills simply because they're not very good at math/English/history/etc.?
Of course, the reality is that this doesn't happen. I doubt there are any good athletes who don't end up in a university program one way or another, it's just that most of them don't graduate. So we pretend they're student-athletes, when in fact they are just revenue generators for the university.
Eugene's proposed solution is to let academically unqualified athletes play for one university (say, UCLA) while attending classes somewhere else (perhaps a trade school). As Eugene suggests (go read the whole post for details), this is a win-win-win — but unfortunately it exposes the fundamental dishonesty that bubbles just barely below the surface of collegiate athletics today: if college athletes take classes somewhere else, it becomes too hard to ignore the reality that their only purpose is to generate money for the university. And if that's the case, then why aren't they paid for it?
As things stand, major collegiate sports are simply free farm teams for the pros. Universities like it because it generates revenues and keeps the alumni happy, and professional sports teams like it because it saves them the trouble of running minor league teams. The only ones who get screwed are the athletes themselves, most of whom never become pros, never get a diploma, and never get a dollar out of the whole thing.
The more you think about how these kids are treated, the harder it is not to feel faintly disgusted. It's about time we put a stop to it.
In other Kevin news, he pans a sneering review of Left Behind that clearly thinks there's something risible about Americans believing in the Bible. I don't get the whole Left Behind thing -- I bought one at an airport, and it wasn't very well written -- not terrible, but in the paper-thin-characters-bolting-from-point-to-point style that doesn't do anything from me. But I don't get excercised about the fact that people read it, any more than I worry who's consuming the dreadful bodice rippers, awful gay and lesbian sermons-with-a-cast, or tedious war blow-by-blows clogging the shelves of my local bookstore. Personally, unless they're reading Mein Kampf, I try not to worry about what other people are carrying on the bus with them. Mostly I think displaying contempt for what other people choose to while away the errant hours says more about you than the readers in question.
And Kevin -- if you look out your window at three AM and see a really tall chick just sitting in her car, don't call the cops, okay?
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Economist Mouse Control
This is funny. Will I be accused of making disparaging remarks about economists? More importantly, do they have Ph.D.'s?
March 3, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:CAFE Standards
Kevin Drum asks a good question:
WHY ARE SUVs SO EXPENSIVE?....So I watched 60 Minutes tonight, and in the segment on SUVs I heard once again about how the profit margin on these vehicles is anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 or more. This compares with ordinary cars, which we are lead to believe are practically sold at a loss.
I've heard this so many times that it must be true, but what's the explanation for this? The same companies compete in both the car and the SUV market, so shouldn't competitive pressures force the profit margins to similar points? Isn't that how this whole free market thing is supposed to work?
Can anybody out there who works for a car company explain this?
I believe I can, in two words: CAFE standards.
CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency. And what that means is that rather than setting a baseline below which no car can fall, the regulators examine the average efficiency of the entire fleet in order to see whether they're making their target.
There are several current ways to make cars more fuel efficient:
1) You can make the engine smaller. This makes the car hard to get up hills, reduces its carrying capacity, and decreases its safety, since averting accidents sometimes requires the ability to accelerate quickly.
2) You can make the car lighter without reducing its size. This is very hard and very expensive to do, and it makes the car much less safe, because less metal around you to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact means that that energy gets absorbed by you. Advocates like to argue that this is only because other people are driving heavy, inefficient SUVs, but this is a canard: lightening the car makes it less safe even in an accident with a car of similar weight. The problem is the velocity, not the weight of the other car.
3) You can make the car smaller. Americans don't like small cars, and they're also less safe. Compact and sub-compact cars are, as SUV-critic Gregg Easterbrook points out, death traps. However, they have the advantage of being cheaper to make than light big cars.
4) You can get creative with the design. The Honda Insight combines all teh abovementioned: it's smaller (two seater with no luggage space!), lighter, underpowered. It also has an innovative engine design. However, I've heard estimates that Honda's losing 20K on every model it sells (no one seems to know the true figure, as Honda and Toyota are very tight with their figures on their hybrids).
Basically, what it boils down to is that in order to get cars to consume less fuel, you have to sacrifice features that Americans like, like size, power, and safety. You can't just decree that everyone only make tiny underpowered cars, because that would not only focus the ire of the people on Washington instead of automakers; it would create problems for people who genuinely need the features you're eliminating, because for example they live on a ranch in Wyoming. So the regulators set an average (and also, I believe, a low floor), and told the automakers to figure it out.
Well, they've got the same problem that Washington does -- no one wants to buy a death trap with no luggage space. So they make small cars and sell them to people who wouldn't be able to afford a more powerful one. Flexible people who don't mind cramming eleven people in a Geo from New York to Maine. People without a lot of stuff to put in the trunk. People who don't care about safety because they think they're immortal. Your kids, in other words. The only problem with kids is that they can't afford cars. So the automakers lower the price to the point where a kid with a modest after-school job can make the payments.
Now we begin to see the perverse logic of fiat solutions. Have we lowered the total output of carbon emissions here? No, we've raised them, because in order to placate the customers who don't want less power & room, the automakers have increased the number of cars they sell. Now kids who would otherwise be riding the schoolbus are zooming around until all hours, merrily spewing carbon dioxide as they go. The fact that they consume less gas than a family sedan doesn't really matter, because in a lot of cases they're consuming gas that wouldn't have been consumed at all, as those of us who made it through high school without cars can attest that we were not given unlimited access to the family minivan to gallivant around the highways with.
(Actually, my family had a brown 1976 Chrysler Cordoba, and I was probably the only child in America who was offered the opportunity to borrow the car and refused it. It was not only radically uncool; parking it was like trying to parallel park the Love Boat.)
Anyway, in order to make up the money they're losing on the compact and sub-compact market, the automakers jack up the rates on the rest of us. Especially in the most price-insensitive part of the market: the SUV owners, who have proven that they're sufficiently oblivious to cost that they're willing to buy a car that costs $50 to fill the tank.
Note that if we raised fuel efficiency standards on SUV's, the price of compact cars would have to rise, because a chunk of the subsidy would disappear. I think that's fine, myself, but of course I live in Manhattan. The folks in the suburbs might feel a little differently. Depending, of course, on whether or not they have kids.
From the desk of Jane Galt:A Day to Remember
I have some natural sympathy for PETA. Not because I'm a vegetarian, incidentally. I'm a vegetarian because it's healthier, and I feel better on the diet, but I have no illusions about what it means to be on the top of the food chain. Nor am I under the impression that if we didn't raise them for food, the cows and chickens would be able to run free in the wild. The native habitat of a domestic animal is a barnyard, and the cows wouldn't make it five feet without someone to milk them and leave hay out in the winter. I'm even less enthralled by the vegans who've told me that death was better than "slavery" for farm animals -- anthropomorphizing is a form of speciesism, you know. This argument is revealing only in that it makes it crystal clear that these animal rights people have never spent time with a cow. They eat, they chew their cud, they excrete. They do not strike out into the wilderness to build representative democracies securing the blessings of liberty to themselves and their descendants. And if they did, those blessings would be -- eating, chewing their cud, excreting. And in many cases, dying younger than they do now of predators and disease.
Nonetheless, I'm somewhat sympathetic to their crusade against horrible animal living conditions. The fact that we eat meat doesn't mean we have to make their short lives miserable, and the fact is that industrial farming practices often mean that the animals spend their entire lives in horrifying conditions. One of the most repulsive cases I did in business school involved the poultry industry, where the extreme crowding induces the birds to fight each other. The solution? Why, cut off their beaks and talons, of course. This makes them vulnerable to disease, impedes their eating, and is extremely painful for the birds. This is a dumb creature, incapable of understanding, that you the consumer are torturing to save a buck a dozen on eggs. That's why I buy nest eggs instead of the cheaper ones, and free-range birds when I ate meat. If I were genuinely poor, of course, I'd probably make a different choice. But I'm not, and I can afford an extra dollar for eggs or three for chicken breasts, and I think that knowing what I do, it would be shameful not to spend the money.
So I really do sympathize. But then they have to undertake dumb campaigns like throwing blood on people or their latest work of genius: comparing the slaughter of animals for food to the Holocaust. It's stupid on two levels: one, for expecting people to equate the suffering of people and animals, as if abuses committed during the inevitable process of killing to eat were the same thing as the senseless slaughter of 11 million people; and two, for trying to appropriate someone else's tragedy to dress up the seriousness of your own cause. I've always found the competitive ethnic grief exhibited during some forms of argument -- slavery-was-awful-but-the-Holocaust-was-worse-yea-well-what-about-the-Famine? -- to be both counterproductive and faintly repulsive. Trying to apply it to the process of making food is risible.
So Meryl Yourish is proposing, in response, International Eat an Animal for PETA Day. Now, you'd think it would be hard for a vegetarian to participate. But not that hard, as the official position of PETA is vegan, and I'm lacto-ova. So I'm going to participate in my own fellow-traveler event: International Eat a Strata for PETA day:
Mushroom-Cheese Strata
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
1-1/2 pounds fresh mushrooms, sliced
8 cups (packed) 1-inch pieces white bread (about 12 slices)
2 1/4 cups whole milk
1 1/2 cups half and half
5 large eggs
3/4 cup chopped fresh chives or scallions
2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme or 1 tbl dried
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
9 ounces soft fresh goat cheese (such as Montrachet), crumbled (about 2 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 cups (packed) grated Parmesan cheese (about 4 ounces)
1 cup (packed) grated Fontina cheese (about 4 ounces)
Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter 13x9x2-inch glass baking dish. Melt butter in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add mushrooms and sauté until tender, about 8 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cool.
Combine bread and milk in large bowl. Let stand until milk is absorbed, about 15 minutes.
Whisk half and half and next 6 ingredients in medium bowl to blend. Stir in goat cheese.
Place half of bread mixture in single layer in prepared glass baking dish (bread will not cover bottom of baking dish). Top with half each of mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, Fontina cheese, and half and half mixture. Repeat layering with remaining bread, mushrooms, Parmesan and Fontina cheeses, and half and half mixture.
You can make it up to a day ahead; if you want to, this is the point to put it in the fridge. It's actually almost better when you let it sit for a while.
Bake strata uncovered until firm in center, puffed and golden, about 1 hour.
Guaranteed to make any PETA representative who sees the recipe faint.
March 2, 2003
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Shroud Waving?
So D-Squared Digest has finally succeeded in getting a rise out of Steven Den Beste.
I walked under the Trade center plaza about 45 minutes before the first plane hit on September 11. I was only a few blocks away for most of the day. A colleague of mine is only alive because he decided to attend an early meeting before going to a conference at Windows on the World. That meeting was with me. One of my employees was nearly clobbered by a falling body as she emerged from the PATH train. Another was pushed through a store window by the crowd escaping the cloud from the first collapse. I watched as several of my colleagues panicked or burst into tears. I lost one golfing buddy and dozens of acquaintances and business contacts that day. I went to two funerals, some of my friends went to eight.
I was also there in 1993. S11 has certainly blocked it out, but it seemed pretty horrible at the time. Now I don't go a single day without wondering, at least for a few seconds, if my number will be up next time.
These people were targets - and I am a target- not just because we perform our jobs as bankers, kitchen workers, secretaries, traders and mailroom attendants in a district of great economic and symbolic importance, but simply because we are Americans. I don't see why it should be difficult to be "emotionally involved" - from any distance - in the spectacularly perverted slaughter of one's innocent countrymen. More to the point, we were all attacked.
Anybody who resents the deliberate targeting of civilians by religious thugocrats is welcome to share in any outrage the authorities may graciously allow me. Where do I apply for my rations?
___________
I can't seem to find the "nuking Berkeley" joke that condemns Den Beste to warmonger purgatory. The Clueless search engine won't bring it up. I'm going to need this if I am to apply for the job of umpire. Yeah, and my Rector is applying to be the D.J. at Scores. (warning, the Scores link is both adult and spawns endless pop-ups if you haven't equipped yourself to subdue them. Scores is the remaining strip club in Manhattan).
UPDATE: Here's the Berkeley comment, emailed to me by Calpundit, who was apparently virtually present at the creation:
Update: Calpundit asks whether I think it's important that a unilateral attitude will make others in the world hate our guts. What I think is that they already do hate our guts, and that at this point acting unilaterally won't increase that to any significant degree. We don't have the choice of being liked in the short term; we can only be feared or held in contempt.By the way, have I mentioned lately that I don't give a flying fuck "why they hate us"? Having a lot of people in the world hate us is a bad thing, but there are other things facing us which are worse. I'd rather be hated than to have one of our cities nuked (unless, of course, it's Berkeley).
SECOND UPDATE: Checking in tonight I see dsquared hung in for 80 comments or so. I'm impressed (work or sleep must have been sacrificed). I've said it before, but it's worth saying again: I think it would be a shame if colourful language and the occasional over-the-top analogy or gallows humour were to be stamped out by the relentlessly dull march of political correctness. While dsquared and I were born to disagree, you have to like the title of his web page, and he doesn't hold back. That's O.K. by me.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Media Bias Committee's Initial Findings
Terry Gross interviewed Eric Alterman and Bernard Goldberg on Fresh Air Thursday night.
Readers of ancient Dreck will know I read Bias a long time ago and was not particularly impressed. I haven't cracked Alterman's book. I just finished The Tipping Point and have begun Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, so Alterman will have to wait.
I had the following impressions:
Common Ground:
These two agree on more than you would think. For instance, Alterman concedes that most news journalists are liberals and, like Goldberg, draws a bright line between opinion media and news. Both agree conservatives have opinion media 'locked up' (see "the need to entertain" below) , but they lump the 'punditocracy' into the news media or not, depending on its convenience to their argument.
Nicer in voice:
Both of them came across a lot more congenial than they do in their written work. Reading Alterman's blog, I've often thought I'd pass if given a chance to meet him. Speaking to Terry Gross, he sounded like very friendly and interesting company. Similarly, Goldberg's book leaves you with the overwhelming impression of a bloke driven by resentment of Dan Rather. In fact, he seems to see a giant media conspiracy infested with Dan Rathers, portentiously promoting their next evil-thugocrat interview. Again, not the sort of thing that makes one seek Goldberg's company in order to lift a glass of the best. In the interview he comes across as much more mild-mannered.
Not liberal enough for thee:
Alterman states there are no liberal TV pundits, clearly subscribing to the idea that none of these people are true scotsman. Alterman tends to get into the degrees of conservatism, 'Pat Buchanan is so far right he requires a Marxist counterweight' argument. Buchanan's a nutjob. Another nutjob might provide contrast, but not necessarily balance. And who will reach practical agreement on the degree of left/rightness of a pundit? (however, I have a nomination for the unit of measurement - an 'Ideom').
Bureaucratically defensive behavior vs. bias
Goldberg uses his stock examples about AIDS coverage glossing over the lack of heterosexual non-drug user contagion and conspicuous omission of legal handguns from news stories about criminals being stopped by citizens. Alterman complains of the press' lack of vigor in investigating corporations and general pro-corporate anti-labor views.
If we stipulate the accuracy of both writers' evidence, we can still find them consistent. All of the above are examples of defensive, risk-averse bureaucratic behavior.* Those of us who lean right observe the press treating the true-but-politically incorrect like someone else's radioactive underwear and infer a "liberal" bias. Liberals observe the press describing a clear example of a corporation putting its shareholders before its employees with the circumspection of Jeeves describing Bertie Wooster's faults. To them, this betrays a conservative skew. It is accurate to say that a corporate news organization will tailor its behavior to make life easier and shelter themselves from criticism. Both of these behaviors follow that pattern. If there is one bad thing about "big" media, it is that the bigger it gets, the more bureaucratic it may become.
I don't see a specifically "antilabor" bias in news media, as Alterman suggests. There also seems to be no shortage of news outlets willing to make companies out to be the evil exploiters of labor and customers - after all, it sells newspapers. Nonetheless, I absolutely believe that when potential corporate malfeasance is not the primary subject of a story, corporate-employed journalists will shy away from the inference. Whether that's good practice or defensive behavior has to be left up to context, I suppose.
UPDATE: Pejamn Pundit has a different and lively take.
The need to entertain
Both point out that some of the behavior they decry in media is the result of a need to entertain. I couldn't help but think that they both seemed to agree that conservative punditry is more entertaining, although neither of them actually said it out loud (hey - is that bias or fear-inspired lack of bias?).
Adjusting the political compass
Alterman also says that news outlets bend over backwards to tell the conservative side of a story, partly because of the entrenched architecture in place to howl and object when they don't. I think he's basically correct. Journalists are always careful to provide the window dressing of neutrality by quoting sources on both sides of an idea. That isn't Goldberg's complaint, however. Goldberg suggests that it is the journalists' own neutral voice that is out of whack, not the count of pundits invited to the party. Goldberg feels the 'cocooning' of liberal journalists has placed their definition of "center" well left of the country's. Hence the irreducible kafuffle about use of political labels such as "Conservative" (with or without the scare-prefix "ultra-").
I sort of recognize Goldberg's anger. It is the rising frustration of talking to someone and realizing that you are the only non-PC Liberal they know (or think they know). I have that problem with my family. We rarely talk politics, but when we do it is clear that I am the only person exposing them to a seriously differing point of view. It's very frustrating to have to explain everything from first principles and clear out the hitherto unquestioned mythology (it's all about oil; Bush came up with the term "regime change", etc.) and get to the elusive meat of the disagreement.
The New York Times Editorial pages often give me this feeling of a leftward-drifting center.** Prior to September 11, the times editorialists kept describing the Bush agenda as "Radical Right" and "Radical Conservative" (no links - pre-blogging days). Can you doubt that their idea of a "moderate" Republican is one who agrees with the Times' own essentially party-line Democrat outlook? Seriously now.
Tempest in a teapot
For myself, I am increasingly less concerned about media bias in this country. I have an enormous diversity of media to choose from on-line, including established publications from all over the world and, of course, weblogs, which make up for their obvious bias with lively non-bureaucratic personality and occasional first-person reporting.
Furthermore, just as smokers actually tend to overestimate the dangers of smoking, yet continue the habit, the citizenry will continue to have similar belief patterns regardless of the barking dogs of bias.
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*DIGRESSION WARNING. Some of you have suggested that I am anti-government or at least libertarian. Like Steven Den Beste, I'm suspicious of "isms", but one of the things that unites my beliefs is a strong antipathy to bureaucracy. When even well-meaning people get together in hierarchical, committee-rich structures, they do beastly things and call it progress. Unfortunately, it appears to be human nature. I am extremely suspicious of many forms of government because they amount to great unaccountable committees with enormous amounts of power. I'm a fan of a free private sector because it tends to destroy corporations that become bureaucracy-bound rapidly.
I work at a small private company. I have also observed during my career that private companies often make substantially higher returns on equity than large public ones (they also tend to pay earnings out, not retain them).
Some might argue that given my antipathy to bureaucracy, I should be more anti-corporate and less anti-government. Not really, government has much greater power and is therefore infinitely more dangerous, and there are precious few market mechanisms to destroy government when its behavior becomes bureaucratically entrenched. When individual companies have the power of government I shall be rabidly opposed to those corporations.
**since it is anecdotal and comes from the editorial pages, I have no interest in entering this data in a bias-inspired label count.
March 1, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:So the left half of the blogosphere is up in arms about the recent move by the feds to redirect the URL's of websites retailing drug paraphenelia to the DEA's website. Talkleft says it's as if they'd decided to grab ACLU.ORG, which is ridiculous; retailing drug paraphenelia is illegal, which, last time I looked, advocating for civil liberties wasn't. A large part of the rest of the left blogs seem to think this is some evil innovation on the part of Ashcroft in his unceasing quest to strip us of our civil liberties and put us in camps. The tone is one of shocked surprise to find that these assets are being seized even though the people involved haven't been convicted yet. They seem to have a curious amnesia about the Clinton administration's aggressive use of these laws to punish all sorts of people.
I think civil asset forfeiture, under which the propertyitself is deemed to be guilty of facilitating a crime, is horrible law. The problem is, it's hard to get a constituency to repeal it. The left thought civil asset forfeiture was just fine when the Clinton administration was going after people it didn't care for, like right wing nuts living in the woods and religious wackos. Now it's shocked -- shocked! -- to find that these laws can be used against people it likes, while the right seems to have lost all interest in the matter.