Fidel says that all that stuff that Raoul said to Obama about freedom in Cuba was just crazy talk. Or rather, a “misinterpretation” of what he said.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Just A Coinkydink, I’m Sure
The states with the highest unemployment rates just happen to also have high marginal tax rates, high unionization, or both.
Credit Where It’s Due
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.
Making Ayn Rand Look Good
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.
Mike’s Whining
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.
Flow Charting The Left
Somehow, this post reminds me of the old Far Side Sydney Harris cartoon. And read Pat Santy’s post on why the left makes common cause with extreme Islam.
A Modest Proposal
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…
The Coming Fourth American Republic
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.
Stopped Clock
The Ninth Circuit actually gets an opinion right. Maybe they’re just trying to get their average of being upheld by the SCOTUS out of the gutter.
Yes, there is an individual right to bear arms, California.
Free Speech At The Annenberg School
Not so much, at least if you’re a conservative journalist.