Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Government Fat Cats

An interview with Iain Murray (my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) on his new book.

[Update a few minutes later]

An excerpt:

LOPEZ: What do you have against the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Do you like lead in toys?

MURRAY: No, I don’t like lead in toys, but I don’t like people who make toys that have never been anywhere near lead being forced to pay $30,000 to prove that to the CPSC, which gets to almost double its budget to administer these ludicrous requirements. I don’t like the fact that libraries have had to sequester children’s books that were printed before 1985 and may have to burn them. Above all, I don’t like the fact that the people who did put lead in our children’s toys were able to lobby for and win an exemption to the testing requirements. Again, this is an issue where people who like wooden toys — often, in my experience, on the liberal end of the political spectrum — can come together with conservatives to oppose this insanity.

LOPEZ: Is anybody doing this reform right?

MURRAY: People such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio have twigged that current conditions are unsustainable and have shown political courage in standing up to the government-sector special interests. It’s been a long fight so far and they may yet lose, but they’re showing the way. At the local level, there are municipalities that have done it right, essentially doing away with their government sector entirely. Sandy Springs in Georgia springs to mind. Some places, such as the Southside Fire Department, also in Georgia, have even worked out how to protect public safety without the bureaucracy.

LOPEZ: Does the Tea Party know this?

MURRAY: The Tea Party understands this can’t go on, but isn’t great when it comes to promoting workable solutions. I’m completely with the Tea Party in terms of motivation, so that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, to give them some suggestions for workable solutions that can get us from here (Greece) to there (a functioning liberal democracy).

LOPEZ: How much of this is about the New Deal and the Great Society?

MURRAY: The New Deal showed the way, but much of this is more recent. In 1990, we spent $2 trillion in today’s dollars. By 2000 we’d only added $300 billion to that, but in the past decade that’s gone up by a further $1.4 trillion. Moreover, even at the height of the New Deal, FDR recognized that allowing government workers to unionize was asking for trouble.

Read the whole thing.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

On Being A Non-Leftist SF Writer

25 Comments

An interview with Sarah Hoyt:

…like all the arts, writing is a liberal’s game. Science fiction, too, I think encourages extreme ideologies, which almost inevitably default left. It’s part of creating a world. You start thinking you could create “logical” rules for “this” world. (I tell you, if Lenin had written SF instead, we’d all be happier.) The climate in the field can best be judged by the fact that I could stand up tomorrow in the middle of a conference room full of my peers and announce I was a communist and they’d all applaud. However, if I announced I’m anti-communist, they would laugh. Some of them might laugh nervously and sympathetically but they would laugh.

Anyone clinging to Marxist theory is immediately believed to be very smart, and someone who goes against it is considered a lightweight.

Do they intentionally discriminate against Libertarians and conservatives? I don’t think so. Not the vast majority of them. The vast majority of my colleagues are decent people. They are also, like the vast majority of the human race, conformists. Most of them attended good schools and grew up in upper middle class neighborhoods (at least most of them who came into the field in the last fifteen years. Yes, there are reasons for that, which I’ll mention rapidly later, if I have time.) Their parents were taught in college about class struggle and that money was evil. They got it at home. They got it from schools. They got it from magazine articles and newspapers. The books they read growing up were infused with unconscious Marxism. OF COURSE they assume anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid or evil. And would you give a leg up to the career of someone who is evil? Would you help them?

The funny thing that always startles me a little is hearing myself addressed as a “conservative.” I’m full of wild-eyed radical ideas not proposed out loud since Thomas Jefferson talked in his sleep, and I’m a “conservative” because I am, ultimately, anti-communist. This is a through-the-looking-glass world, since the establishment is as close to soft — (and sometimes hard) — communism as someone can go without sewing hammers and sickles into all their undies.

And that’s part of the problem there too — I don’t think any of them means to discriminate against me. Some of them even like me, in a slightly bewildered way, but they don’t know what to do with me. I was born in a Latin country, I am female, and yet I don’t consider myself a victim and you truly don’t want to get me going on a-historical theories of great mother goddesses. They don’t know what to make of me, or what to do with me. I make them uncomfortable, and it’s easier to ignore me or not to have me around too much.

It’s always been a little weird, being into both folk music and science fiction, because the prevailing political attitude in both has been leftist, at least for most of my life. One does have to be a little careful of what one says in such groups. And of course, it’s always amusing to see the confoundment on some peoples’ faces in the space activist community, who read my blog and fantasize that I’m a conservative or Republican (or worse, like RAH, a “fascist”), and see me defend Barack Obama’s space policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

For those who haven’t read Darkship Thieves, for which she just won the Prometheus Award, please give me a cut if you decide to buy it (it doesn’t seem to be available in hardcover any more).

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President’s Bluff

51 Comments

James Taranto has some thoughts on the fading/faded powers of Barack Obama:

A lot of people have been making fun of the president for supposedly saying, “Don’t call my bluff,” as if he’s admitting he’s bluffing. That seems to us a bit pedantic. Surely what he meant was something like “Don’t think you can call my bluff.”

What got our attention about this exchange as reported by Cantor is the president’s threat to take his case “to the American people.” Would those be the same American people who aren’t paying attention and don’t understand all this complicated stuff?

This seems to us an empty threat not least because since his election, Obama has a poor track record when it comes to taking his case to the American people–who still overwhelmingly oppose ObamaCare, give him poor marks on the economy, and think the debt limit shouldn’t be raised even though it pretty much has to be. He always ends up wishing he’d done a better job “explaining” his position, which at least sounds more humble than saying the American people don’t get it.

Of course, even if that’s what he meant, he’s still implying (in fact clearly stating) that it’s a bluff. And he’s right.

[Update a few minutes later]

Charles K. — “Call Obama’s bluff.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Eric Cantor — “This is not a game.”

[Update a while later]

“Sounds like Obama won’t even call his own bluff.”

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Doubling Down On The Bluff

2 Comments

Apparently the DSCC is as clueless about the concept of bluffing as the president is. Hilarious:

Don’t call my bluff.

These were the strong words President Obama had for Eric Cantor, leader of the Congressional “Hell No” Caucus. These Republicans are so bent on destroying the president, they’re willing to create an economic meltdown to try to tie it on the Democrats.

The president and Democrats are holding strong against this obstinacy, but in no time, the GOP will go on the attack. If a debt ceiling deal is not reached, they will spend millions blaming Democrats. And we will need to fight back against every single lie.

And note the usual leftist projection about the “lies.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Debt crisis today, or debt crisis tomorrow? Why just raising the debt ceiling doesn’t solve the problem.

Business, Education, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

On The Chopping Block

14 Comments

(My CEI colleague) Iain Murray says that part of a budget deal should be to eliminate the Department of Commerce.

It’s not actually the first one I’d go after (I’d get rid of e.g., Education, Labor and Energy first), but I understand the potential appeal. But it does serve many necessary functions that would have to be redistributed elsewhere. For instance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wouldn’t find a comfortable home in the State Department, nor would NOAA or the weather service. Granted, the latter is kind of a mess right now, in terms of not getting needed new satellites up (particularly now that we’re headed into the heart of hurricane season), though it’s not clear whether that’s NOAA’s fault, or NASA’s, which actually manages the development of the satellites. Also, giving over the commercial export list to the State Department could make ITAR even more of a disaster than it already is. It would also raise the issue of finding a new home for the Coast Guard (and the Space Guard, if we ever get one).

There is a reason that Commerce has been around a lot longer than the three agencies I mention above as better targets — if it didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent it in some form. And unlike education, energy, or labor, we actually do have a Commerce Clause in the Constitution (flawed and overstretched though its interpretation has become).

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

High-Speed Rail

…is dead:

Advocates have excoriated opponents to high speed rail, but have shown themselves largely utterly unserious about the enterprise as they have put no focus on overcoming major institutional barriers such as the steam road era thinking of the Federal Railroad Administration which is stuck in the 90s – the 1890s – or the mismanagement at Amtrak. Getting to an HSR system that works is going to involve major reform (or replacement) of those agencies since all proven, international HSR systems are illegal in the US under current rules. Witness here also the histrionics about a Republican proposal to privatize the Northeast Corridor rail operations rather than engage with it as a starting point. Even in Europe and Japan, many HSR operations are private, so there’s no reason they can’t be in the US too.

To be clear, though I myself have been ambivalent about the high speed rail enterprise, I do not consider myself anti-rail in the slightest. I agree that HSR could bring potentially significant benefits, particularly in the Northeast, although it’s a somewhat more speculative enterprise in most parts of the country. This is one on which reasonable people can disagree. But however one feels, getting to the benefits will require a properly designed and operated true high speed system, something few of the current proposals would provide.

It’s time to take a major gut check on high speed rail in America and rethink the direction. Clearly, with the budgetary and political situation, significant future HSR investments are unlikely. Even if some billions materialize, the experience of the stimulus suggests that they will be frittered away as salami slices sent hither and fro.

A better approach might be to take some time to think more clearly about what we want high speed rail to look like in America. It starts with learning from best – and worst – practices abroad, while noting the important differences versus the US. We need to put a proper regulatory regime in place and reform the FRA; to set up a framework for a successful privatization of any system, probably with operations contracted to an international operator with high speed experience; and to jettison any thought of Amtrak as the ultimate HSR system operator.

But all of that would defeat the true purpose of the system. And unfortunately, many of these programs will zombie on, especially in those states that can least afford them (like California) until the real economic tsunami hits. But I think I can already start to see the waters starting to recede…