Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Man Who Talked Back

Jimmy Pethokoukis:

In 1937, there was a radio debate between Wendell Willkie— later to become the 1940 Republican presidential nominee—and Franklin Roosevelt administration official Robert Jackson—later a Supreme Court justice—about the proper economic role of government. (The event and its fallout are wonderfully described in the outstanding book “The Forgotten Man” by Amity Shlaes.)

By all accounts, Willkie won easily by arguing that FDR’s efforts at nationalizing the utilities industry, his dramatic tax increases, and his administration’s push for prosecutions of businessmen had frozen the private sector with fear and prevented the country from returning to prosperity. The Saturday Evening Post would later dub Willkie “The Man Who Talked Back” against the New Deal and Big Government. I would love to see a debate between Santelli and Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs.

Yeah, I’d pay to see that, but they’d have to institute a mercy rule, I think, after the first ten minutes.

I hope that Santelli is ready for his upcoming IRS audit.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Space Billiards

5 Comments

There is an excellent and comprehensive discussion of the recent satellite collision over at The Space Review today. There is plenty of blame to go around, from perverse incentives in the military, to government policies that are long on rhetoric and short on funding and priority, and corporate risk taking:

It also appears that either Iridium or the JSpOC terminated the collision screening for the Iridium constellation at some point between July 2007 and the collision in February 2009, as Iridium has made repeated public statements that they did not receive any warning. Likewise, the US military has stated that they did not have any warning. The following additional comment by Campbell at the same event may shed some light as why this happened:

That said, this isn’t aviation; the Big Sky theory works [emphasis added]. We figure that the risk of a collision on any individual conjunction is about one in 50 million. However if we have 400 a week for ten years, you can do the math; clearly that risk is something bigger than zero. As I said, our coordination with JSpOC is great.

Basing the protection of the largest low Earth orbit constellation of satellites on such a theory, even when there is a significant amount of data showing that it could be false, leads one to question the decision-making process involved. Perhaps Iridium decided that they could not afford the resources to deal with the decision-making and maneuver planning to properly operate their satellites in a safe manner. If that is indeed true—and there is no known hard evidence either way—then they placed the short-term financial well being of one company over the long-term welfare of all.

Clearly, the entire international system in place for dealing with this kind of problem (to the degree that it exists at all) needs to be overhauled.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Remembering Our First President

9 Comments

I’m on record as being opposed to “President’s Day,” which seems to be simply another excuse for a federal holiday, and it mushes all the presidents together as though they’re all equally worthy of honoring, when clearly some are better than others, even if we disagree on which are which. Back in the olden days, we used to celebrate both Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th, and Washington’s birthday on the 22nd (today). Scott Johnson has some thoughts on the birthday anniversary of the American Cincinnatus, a man who could have been king, but instead created the republican template for all presidents to follow, broken only by FDR, who ran for third and fourth terms.

Political Commentary

The American Tea Party

57 Comments

…has a Facebook page.

You know, maybe the American Tea Party is a third party that could actually get enough adherents to work…

[Update a few minutes later]

Of course, that was just an off-the-cuff comment, and it deserves a lot more thought. “Clarendon” has provided some:

I’m not objecting to the protests. Far from it in fact. I’ll be at the protest in Washington, D.C. But I am not expecting anything other than street theater, or the political equivalent of clearing our throat rather than the yelling our politicians deserve to hear. I won’t compare it to the Boston Tea Party, because there is no comparison. To claim otherwise is to both cheapen the actual protest by 200 Bostonians and their thousands of supporters, and to inflate the magnitude of our current actions.

I wonder, what are we expecting to achieve from these protests? Are we content to merely register our disapproval, or are we seeking to change what Congress and our president have done? If it is the former, I’m sure the politicians will note our objection, and wait for us to quiet down. If it is the latter, I fear our current protests are too scatter-shot to do any real good.

What is the target of our protest? Are we protesting the President and Congress for an act already passed, or are we petitioning our state and local governments to refuse to accept the stimulus money?

What do we do if these protests do not result in the change in policies we are asking for? What happens next?

Make no mistake, once a movement like this has begun, it will, sooner or later, have to answer these difficult questions or risk failure. Now is the seed-time of liberty, and the steps we take and the words we use will either be recalled triumphantly by our grandchildren, or seen as a sad charade conducted by children who could not muster the strength and conviction of their ancestors.

It’s a good question. But a strongly related one (though not one that the original tea partiers had thought through themselves) is “what does this movement stand for? What are its principles?”

It’s very easy to say that we’re opposed to the bailout(s), just as “we’re opposed to tyranny and taxation without representation, and a tax imposed on our favorite hot beverage with no recourse.” But to what else are we opposed? What are we for? Those are the issues on which third parties have foundered over the decades, even ignoring the institutional difficulties of starting one. It’s very easy to unite against something, because the enemy of my enemy is always my friend, but the devil lies in the details of determining what one stands for.

I’d like to think that this is a small-government movement, but I fear that people who are opposed to the bailout(s) aren’t really opposed to big government — they just don’t like what the big government has been doing lately.

[Late Pacific update]

Here’s more from PJ Media.

[Sunday morning update]

Has the revolt of the Kulaks begun?

[Another update later morning]

OK, I didn’t watch Schoolhouse Rock, but I think I get it anyway.

[Early afternoon update]

Per one of the commenters, yes, the Perot mania is exactly what I was thinking when I expressed the concerns above. That was a Seinfeld campaign — a campaign about nothing.

Political Commentary, Space

More Lane Thoughts

2 Comments

I put up a post the other day in which I described how unimpressed I was with Neal Lane’s comments on space policy. It turns out that Paul Spudis didn’t think much of them, either. He’s actually harder on him than I was:

(Neal Lane) has made some public statements that are so egregiously ignorant that I cannot remain silent.

Tell us how you really feel, Paul.

[Update a few minutes later]

Paul writes:

Aside from the idea of continuing to fly the Space Shuttle (not a very good idea for many reasons), none of this is particularly new but rather a re-statement of the Apollo-era meme that, “If we can go to the Moon, we can solve the (fill-in-the-blank) crisis.” Since energy and climate change are the current crises du jour, some seek to capitalize on the public’s fondness for the NASA of old (“The Right Stuff”) with the frantic cry that it should be redirected to make these “fixes.”

I deconstructed this kind of thinking last summer, for the Apollo landing anniversary:

Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done. At its height, the Apollo program consumed four percent of the federal budget (NASA is currently much less than one percent, and has been for many years). Considering how much larger the federal budget is today, with the addition and growth of many federal programs over the past forty years makes the amount of money spent on the endeavor even more remarkable.

But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.

It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones.

As I note at the end of the piece, if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we get people to stop making inappropriate analogies with landing a man on the moon?

[Saturday morning update]

Over at Space Politics, commenter “Red” has some useful thoughts:

Continue reading More Lane Thoughts →

Political Commentary, Space

A Space Council?

5 Comments

Jeff Foust has some interesting testimony from the president’s science adviser:

We have been looking at what the best way to resurrect the National Space Council in the White House would be. I think that’s going to happen. There’s no question that the gap in our capacity to put people in space is a matter of great concern with the shuttle program coming to an end and its successor program not yet ready.

That seems like good news. I wonder who will head it. Let’s hope that Joe Biden’s involvement is minimal.

He also lays out rationale for space:

Space is crucial to our national defense; it’s crucial to civil as well as military communications and geopositioning; it’s crucial to weather forecasting and storm monitoring; crucial to observation and scientific study of the condition of our home planet’s land, vegetation, oceans, and atmosphere; and it’s crucial to scientific study and exploration looking outward.

That’s all right, as far as it goes, but no mention of planetary defense or off-planet economic development or resources. There is nothing in there that would support an effort to open up space for the masses, or imply more support for private efforts. Too bad that there was no follow-up questioning in that regard.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Ended The Depression

5 Comments

Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).

One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”

[Update a while later]

OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.

What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]

[Late morning update]

Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.

And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.