Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Credit Where It’s Due

1 Comment

One of the few things that I liked about the Clinton administration was its support for free trade. So it’s nice to see the Obama administration get this right as well, despite a lot of idiotic protectionist rhetoric during the campaign:

The media made much of Obama’s polite gestures to dictators, but he gave them nothing resembling what he gave to Uribe. Name one dictator Obama sat with for lunch. Which troublemaker got a White House invitation? Which tinhorn got a promise to visit?

And has anyone heard of Obama giving his autograph — “with admiration!” — to another president? It was as if Obama himself unclenched his own fist to reach out to the Colombian hand.

Obama may have had political reasons to seek out Colombia — the Chavez-Obama pictures didn’t do him any good domestically, and Drudge Report ran pictures of them all weekend, infuriating White House officials.

But the outlook for free trade has been improving for several weeks, too. On a visit to Medellin last month, Uribe gave us a veiled signal of positive moves on trade under the surface, and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has since made encouraging statements.

Two congressional delegations of pro-trade Democrats turned up in Colombia this month, back-slapping with the Colombians. But nothing approaches the good news seen now.

One of the causes of the Great Depression was protectionism and the imposition of tariffs. I hope that we’ll at least avoid that policy insanity.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary

Making Ayn Rand Look Good

3 Comments

Tyler Cowen has a brutal review of what looks to be an idiotic ant-capitalist documentary:

A few months ago I went back and tried to read some Ayn Rand. As Adam Wolfson has suggested recently in these pages, it wasn’t easy.1 I was put off by her lack of intellectual generosity. I read her claim that “collectivist savages” are too “concrete-bound” to realize that wealth must be produced. I read her polemic against the fools who focus on redistributing wealth rather than creating it. I read the claim that Western intellectuals are betraying the very heritage of their tradition because they refuse to think and to use their minds. I read that the very foundations of civilization are under threat. That’s pretty bracing stuff.

I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not (if the stalking presence of Naomi Klein has not already done so). If you are looking to benchmark this judgment, consider this: I would not say anything similar even about the movies of Michael Moore.

In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.

“Narrated by Martin Sheen” would be the first clue.

Political Commentary, Space

Mike’s Whining

15 Comments

Dr. Griffin made a speech at the Goddard Memorial dinner last week when he received the Goddard Trophy. Jeff Foust has a report of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view). There’s a lot of good discussion in comments (in which Mark Whittington makes a fool of himself by ignorantly slandering people like Steve Isakowitz), including the recent release of the Aerospace report that indicates what anyone with half a lick of sense already knew — that it would be much faster and cheaper to modify EELVs for human exploration than to develop a whole new launch system. I think that this report will hammer the final nail in the coffin of the Ares 1, particularly since it was produced at NASA request. And, like someone in comments at Space Politics, I find Mike’s statements flabbergasting:

Your viewgraphs will always be better than my hardware. A fictional space program will always be faster, better, and cheaper than a real space program.

So let’s get this straight. Ares 1, which won’t be operational for several years in the most optimistic scenario, is “hardware,” but Atlas V and Delta IV, which have flown multiple times, are “view graphs”? Jon Goff is amazed and appalled as well.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

A Modest Proposal

25 Comments

Terry Savage has some suggestions for improvements to the Constitution, should there be a convention. I agree with some, disagree with others (mostly around the edges — for example, I see nothing about serving as a US Senator that would qualify one to be president, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates), but they are all thought provoking and debate provoking.

Of course, my fear is that there were to be a convention, the result would be a document much more dedicated to “positive rights,” and an expansion of the franchise to non-citizens, and possibly the world…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Coming Fourth American Republic

6 Comments

Here’s a long, but interesting essay on American history, and what perhaps lies ahead.

His formulation of multiple republics since 1787 makes a lot of sense to me, particularly since, though we haven’t written a new constitution, we have amended and misinterpreted it far beyond anything that the Founders envisioned for the nation. It’s pretty clear that both the War Between the States and the New Deal were major demarcation points from one governmental era to the next (Wilson was the first fascist American president, but even his era, even with the introduction of the federal income tax, didn’t end the post-war limits on government). And sadly, Reagan only temporarily slowed down the growth of the state, but didn’t end the era of what Delong calls the “Special Interest State.” Obama and the current Democrats may finally do so, however, in their overreaching. I certainly hope so.

Delong is optimistic that we may return to a true republic again in the next phase. I hope he’s right. But even if so, I fear a very ugly transition.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Winning Hearts And Minds

22 Comments

A Democrat official in New Hampshire says that the Tea Partiers are out of their minds. Well, the feeling is mutual, I’m sure. I don’t have an idea why this guy, and Pelosi, and the other Democrats trying to denigrate these people think that this is going to tamp down the anger at them. And according to Rasmussen, if they’re crazy, there are an awful lot of crazy folks out there, including a lot of Democrats. And note the huge opinion gap between political elites and the rest of us. All this is going to do is get people to sharpen up their pitchforks even more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Michael Barone says that the public isn’t as stupid as the political elites would like to believe:

Many of the sneering comments about the participants in last week’s hundreds of tea parties across the nation were premised on the idea that these people didn’t know much about public policy. The hostile CNN reporter (Rush Limbaugh might call her an infobabe) who told tea party attendants that they were going to get tax rebates was an example of that. It was also an example of the condescension of so many in the media: ordinary people should be satisfied with getting a few extra bucks now and shouldn’t worry about the long-term effects of huge increases in government spending and government debt. As I wrote last, the idolators who attended Obama events last year seemed entranced by the candidate’s persona, while the tea party participants seemed preoccupied with serious issues of long-term public policy. Which side was more intellectually serious?

We’ll see how long he can continue to skate on charisma alone. Because that’s about all he has.

[Update late morning]

More Tea Party thoughts:

What we found most striking about the tea party we attended, and those that we observed taking place elsewhere, is how it departed from the normal partisan atmosphere one comes to expect at political rallies. Those in attendance were for the most part not political activists, and most did not come to support one party or oppose another, though certainly there was an emphasis on limited government that once was, and must become again, the rallying cry of the Republican Party.

We say once because during the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans in Washington abandoned their economic principles. Spending rose and the earmark culture flourished. As has often been said, Republicans went to Washington to drain the swamp, but instead joined the alligators.

Thus, the furious reaction by many on the left to the tea parties. They hoped, they believed that fiscal conservatism was a spent force, that conservatives had lost the credibility and even the will to be fiscally responsible. After bringing America dramatically closer to the European economic model of state control in three short months, with only fawning approval from the mainstream media, suddenly from out of nowhere came demonstrations of mass opposition to the Obama program. Left wing activists, flush with triumph, could only ask with great annoyance: How could the “failed” policies of the past eight years suddenly have such popular support?

They fail to recognize that the tea parties are not Republican forums for Bush nostalgia. They are expressions of frustration with the government’s failure to live within its means, as the rest of us must. Hundreds of billions of dollars in Bush administration debt are being chased by trillions of dollars of Obama administration debt. The pundits care only about political scorekeeping, so they simply are not equipped to understand the honest-to-goodness, enough-is-enough exasperation of the tea parties.

The fact that the tea parties represent a grassroots movement only perplexes the cynics further, because Obama’s election to the presidency has been marketed as the apotheosis of grassroots populism. It is as if the true believers of ever-expanding government have actually convinced themselves that only hedge fund managers on Wall Street could possibly oppose the government takeover of the private sector. Of course, they’ve also convinced themselves that a federal government unable to balance its budget — or even to finish its budget on time — year after year is somehow going to introduce sound accounting to the private sector.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society

An Upcoming Regulatory Disaster

41 Comments

This is insane. Here’s why:

Since EPA plans to find endangerment on both health and welfare grounds, the Agency could be compelled to establish “primary” (health-based) NAAQS for GHGs. Logically, the standard would be set below current atmospheric levels. Even very stringent emission limitations applied worldwide over a century would likely be insufficient to lower GHG concentrations. Yet the CAA requires EPA to ensure attainment of primary NAAQS within five or at most 10 years—and it forbids EPA to take costs into account. Regulate CO2 under the NAAQS program and there is, in principle, no economic hardship that could not be imposed on the American people.

It’s the new hair shirt in the new environmental religion. And all from unelected bureaucrats.

[Tuesday morning update]

Here’s a place to go to express your concerns.

[Bumped]