April 29th, 2007
Steve Chapman points out the supremely counterproductive policies behind foreign aid:
Affluent nations often make it impossible for Third World exporters to participate in the world economy. Third World producers trying to export to rich countries face tariffs averaging nearly 13 percent, nearly four times higher than the duties encountered by producers from rich countries.
Poor countries that might sell agricultural commodities in the West also face another hurdle—government subsidies to farmers in rich countries, which amount to $1 billion a day and serve to discourage imports. Textiles and apparel, where poor countries often excel, are still tightly restricted in the United States and other advanced economies. We want developing nations to compete in the world economy—but without inconveniencing our own producers, thank you. All these barriers cost poor countries about $100 billion a year, which is twice as much as they get in assistance.
“The biggest request we are making of Western countries is to open their markets,” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said recently. “Debt relief has saved us some money, but the real money will come from trade. Give us the opportunities, and we will compete.”
Of course, Africans aren’t exactly helping themselves either. As Nick Kristof points out, the staggering amount and complexity of red tape only perpetuates economic stagnation and dependence on handouts:
[O]f the 20 countries in the world where it is most difficult to do business, 17 are African, according to the [World Bank] study, “Doing Business in 2006.” Niger ranks 150th, followed by Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso and—the very worst place to try to do business—Congo.
Take a simple construction project—building a warehouse for books. In Niger, obtaining the necessary licenses would involve 27 procedures over half a year. And in either Nigeria or Zimbabwe, the licenses would take nearly a year and a half to obtain. . . .
The minimum wage is set at $35 a month in Niger, higher than the local market level. Employees are allowed to work no more than nine hours a day, weekend work is basically prohibited, and women are not allowed to work evenings at all. Layoffs are usually not allowed.
How does any of this relate to the war on terror? Tom Friedman connects the dots:
Wouldn’t it have been wise for the U.S. to take the initiative at Cancún, and offer to reduce our farm subsidies and textile tariffs, so some of the poorest countries, like Pakistan and Egypt, could raise their standards of living and sense of dignity, and also become better customers for U.S. goods? Yes, but that would be bad politics. It would mean asking U.S. farmers to sacrifice the ridiculous subsidies they get from our federal government ($3 billion a year for 25,000 cotton farmers) that make it impossible for foreign farmers to sell here. . . .
The Pakistani farmer we’ve put out of business with our farm subsidies then sends his sons to the Wahhabi school because it is tuition-free and offers a hot lunch. His sons grow up getting only a Koranic education, so they are totally unprepared for modernity, but they are taught one thing: that America is the source of all their troubles. One of the farmer’s sons joins al Qaeda and is killed in Afghanistan by U.S. Special Forces.
April 25th, 2007
Since I missed his talk last night, “Defending the Constitution, Restoring the Republic” (at the District Chop House, courtesy of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute), I was pleasantly surprised that Ron Paul showed up this morning at Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting.
Unfortunately, the congressman’s remarks were no better than his recent, lousy appearances on TV (twice now on Lou Dobbs, most recently two nights ago; once on Fox’s Red Eye; on MSNBC; and once on Bill Maher.)
He faces two big problems, neither of which impinges upon his platform per se but upon the way he communicates it.
1. His policies are so radical that they require heaps of explanation, to say nothing of patience for persuasion. Paul is all-too happy to oblige, but he needs to discipline himself to speak in sound bites, not like a professor. He doesn’t need to sandpaper his ideas or poll-test his words, but he needs to compress them into simple syllogisms.
Grover, for instance, has done this well: “The government’s power to control one’s life derives from its power to tax. We believe that power should be minimized.” TV Watch is even succincter: “Parents, not government.”
2. Because his radicalism encompasses every aspect of politics, i.e., he has so much to say, he rambles. The solution: a stump speech, something to keep him on message, so he can constantly hammer home the idea (with which many Americans already agree) that Big Government does more harm than good.
Nobody cares, as Paul is sometimes baited to argue, that the U.S. could have ended slavery without a civil war. That’s ancient history and an academic debate, and any time he discusses it, he rightly loses his audience (their attention and interest) and he rightly looks like a kook.
The good news is that Paul is a good fund-raiser and has a strong online presence. His hard line on immigration also helps him with the Republican base.
Moreover, as a libertarian, Paul offers something for all audiences. Are you an environmentalist? He wants to stop subsidizing Big Oil. Disturbed by the war on terror and its accompanying civil liberties clampdown? Paul opposed the Iraq war before it began and is the only presidential candidate to sign the American Freedom Agenda.
If you’re a gun nut, Paul has never voted for a federal restriction on the Second Amendment. Plus, he’s from Texas. For the abortion crowd, while he is personally pro-life, he is politically pro-choice, even as he votes against taxpayer-funded abortions and would nominate judges who would repeal Roe v. Wade.
To be sure, Ron Paul isn’t even a serious contender for the vice presidency, let alone the presidency. But his greatest hope is considerable: the chance to influence the national debate. To do that, he must communicate better.
On a related note, among the myriad fliers at this morning’s meeting was a scorecard from Americans for Tax Reform on all the presidential candidates. Since Paul has never voted for a tax increase or for an unbalanced budget, I’m curious why his lifetime rating from the antitax group is a middling 71.9?
April 25th, 2007
If I were a columnist today, I’d write a column apiece about the presidential candidates. I’d follow them on the campaign trail to gain both a sense of who they are and specifics about their platforms.
George Will, a columnist par excellence, seems to be doing something similar. Here’s his take on Duncan Hunter (from February), on Giuliani, Romney and McCain (March), on Fred Thompson (April), and, now, on the other Thompson—you know, the one who rides a Harley and served four terms as Wisconsin’s governor and four years as secretary of health and human services, where he presided over a $580 billion budget, which is larger than the combined budgets of the eight largest states.
Will makes three main points. Looking backward, Thompson achieved extraordinary success on welfare reform and school choice. Going forward, Thompson wants the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should remain there. In the present, Thompson says he can win the crucial 27 electoral votes in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota combined.
If I were a journalist today, I’d spend more time covering people like this than scrutinizing the death out of the front-runners’ every yawn and wristwatch-check.
Addendum (4/27/2007): A freelancer for the New Republic calls to our attention something George Will neglected: “As governor, Thompson racked up a reckless spending record and left residents with a $3.5 billion deficit.”
April 13th, 2007
A mass e-mail I just received from Mike DuHaime, the campaign manager of Rudy for President, contained the following sentence: “This recent news story highlights some of the many cases Rudy prosecuted as U.S. Attorney[,] including those against the mob, corruption and tax evasion.”
I was initially tempted to think that since the article comes from the AP and not the campaign, I shouldn’t assume that Rudy is proud of all the cases the article highlights. But DuHaime specifically mentions “tax evasion,” by which he means a 1998 indictment Rudy brought against Leona Helmsley.
The husband of real-estate and hotel mogul Harry Helmsley, Leona was found guilty of deceiving the accounting firm that prepared both her corporate and personal tax returns. In short, she submitted false invoices that claimed as business expenses $4 million in renovations to her Connecticut mansion.
But even leaving aside the numerous red flags in the case, it’s unclear to me why an economic conservative, running in large measure on an anti-tax platform, would trumpet this indictment as if he had gone after Tony Soprano.
If you break the law, you should be prosecuted. But prosecutors wield enormous discretion as to which cases they prosecute, and it’s unfortunate that Rudy made his bones on Leona Helmsley’s back.
Given that taxes are far too high and the tax code is far too complicated, I don’t begrudge someone who tries to loophole herself more of her own money. Call her greedy, but it’s my kind of greed.
April 11th, 2007
Pit easily exploitable emotions against deep philosophical convictions, and you get a glimpse of the debate over stem-cell research.
“Consequently,” write Robert George and Thomas Berg, “we propose six facts on which people on either side of the . . . debate should be able to agree”:
1. There is no “ban” on human embryonic stem cell research in the United States.
2. We are a long way away from therapies derived from embryonic stem cells.
3. The human embryo has at least some degree of special moral status.
4. There are non-controversial alternatives worth exploring.
5. Concerns about embryo destruction are not only religious.
6. [Omitted because it's nonsense.]
One of the best strategies for reasoned discourse—where the goal is enlightenment, not victory—is to begin with common ground. The above essay is a good example, since by trimming the trees, if you will, it shifts the discussion to the forest, like where life begins and what research taxpayer dollars should fund.
My proposal for the next such primer concerns another subject fueled more by ignorance and arrogance than by facts: global warming. Here’s a start:
1. The earth is warming.
2. Human activity is partly responsible for the warming.
3. Environmentalists have a track record of alarmism.
From here, we can delve into the essential issue: will the warming be disastrous?
April 11th, 2007
Yesterday I blogged Monday’s sunshiny debate on global warming between Newt Gingrich and John Kerry. Today, Dana Milbank rains on my parade with a quote from the former speaker:
“I am not automatically saying that coercion and bureaucracy is not an answer,” he granted.
Newt has never been a limited-government conservative. In 1995, he told Time, “I’m for limited government, but a very strong limited government.” (Translation, courtesy of Democratic Congressman Barney Frank: “He’s not for smaller government. He’s for different government.”)
Indeed, in a word, Newt is a technocrat, who wants the government to wield science and technology in the service of empowering the citizenry.
Addendum: Bradford Plumer, the liberal New Republic researcher-reporter on the GOP environmental beat, raps Newt for being too much of a limited-government guy. In Newt’s alleged world, Plumer writes,
If it involves more regulation, it can’t possibly be good. “We’re talking about a massive increase in government power,” he warns.
Plumer ends his article with another typically Newtonian quote,
perhaps the most elegant explanation of why global warming is a difficult problem for conservatives—even for someone who, like himself, professes to care deeply about the environment. “For most of the last 30 years, the environment has been a powerful emotional tool for bigger government and higher taxes,” he says. “Even if it’s the right thing to do, you end up fighting it because it’s bigger government and higher taxes.”
This is an intriguing but ultimately specious theory, because it assumes that people cannot be allowed to do the “right thing,” but must have the government do it for—i.e., force it on—us.
If Newt were a conservative before he were a technocrat, he would instead trust the wisdom of crowds and the forces of supply and demand, i.e., the market. But because he’s a technocrat before he’s a conservative, he’s not opposed to “coercion and bureaucracy.”
Addendum (4/14/2007): I should have noted that Newt isn’t the only conservative to have gone green. Mark Sanford, the former congressman and current South Carolina governor, recently penned an op-ed in the Post, in which he proclaimed, “I am a conservative conservationist who worries that sea levels and government intervention may end up rising together.”
April 10th, 2007
How familiar should our elected officials be with their constituents? Undoubtedly, they should know how hard it is to live on the minimum wage—and how hard it is on small businesses to have that floor raised involuntarily. It might also behoove them to be aware of the price of gas and of a gallon of milk.
Unfortunately, when asked today about these staples, Rudy Giuliani put forth considerably low estimates. While seemingly trivial, I think such knowledge is important because politicians should know what life is like for those whose interests they’re supposed to represent.
To be sure, it’s unimportant for the president to have details like this at his fingertips, since he’s so far removed from you and I that he probably doesn’t even carry a wallet and certainly never pumps his own gas.
But candidates for the presidency, like members of Congress, are not constantly surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. They’re supposed to live among us, so that when Bill O’Reilly goes on his next tirade about the conspiracy of Big Oil to ratchet up prices, they can judge for themselves en route to their daughter’s weekend-afternoon soccer game.
This is what the founders envisioned when they created Congress: citizen legislators who drop by Washington as a necessary evil, not career politicians who use the capitol as an ivory tower.
April 8th, 2007
In the past several years, as the GOP has labored under the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan has become our collective lodestar—all things to all conservatives.
Libertarians claim him as one of their own, owing to his rhetoric about government as the problem, not the solution. Christians view his conversion to the pro-life agenda as his strongest legacy. Neocons uphold his ending of the Cold War.
The biggest hurdle facing the current crop of our presidential candidates is the inability of each to unify these three wings of the party.
All three support the president on Iraq, especially, and crucially, the surge. But despite McCain’s voting record, the religious right doesn’t trust him. Nor do they embrace the pro-choice, pro-civil union New Yorker, Rudy Giuliani. On paper, Mitt Romney is the Christian candidate, except that he’s only recently become so, and he’s Mormon.
Rudy is the libertarian candidate, save for his elevation of security over liberty. Romney’s language about deficits and vetoes is attractive, if you minimize health care. Ditto for McCain’s bona fides on pork and waste, if you overlook McCain-Feingold and tax cuts.
So who will be Reagan’s heir? At this point, no one. Still, it behooves us to remember, as George Will has written, “that insisting on perfection in a candidate interferes with selecting a satisfactory one.” Or, to use another cliche, politics is the art of compromise.
April 7th, 2007
Newt Gingrich takes to the op-ed page of the LA Times today to clarify his YouTubed remark equating Spanish with “the language of living in a ghetto.” His premise is as follows:
Mastering the language of a country opens doors of opportunity. . . . In the United States, English is by no means our only language, but it is the language of economic success and upward mobility.
This is so self-evident, I’m constantly dumbfounded when I run into someone (say, a server in the capitol building cafeteria, as I did yesterday) who shrugs and says, “No hablo Inglés.”
Of course, the ignorance of such people is their loss, not mine, and ignorance does not threaten me. What does threaten me, for instance, are multilingual ballots.
Why should ballots be unilingual? Because what makes America unique is our ability to assimilate immigrants. A common tongue gives us unity and thus strength. As Charles Krauthammer has argued,
The key to assimilation . . . is language. The real threat to the United States is not immigration per se but bilingualism and, ultimately, biculturalism. Having grown up in Canada, where a language divide is a recurring source of friction and fracture, I can only wonder at those who want to duplicate that plague in the United States. . . .
The way to prevent European-like immigration catastrophes is to turn every immigrant—and most surely his children—into an [English-speaking] American.
Indeed, this is why bilingual education—that is, being taught (usually in Spanish) while being gradually taught English—is misguided. As Krauthammer notes, “It delays assimilation by perhaps a full generation.”
To be sure, had I learned espanol while learning English (instead of blowing off classes in the former in high school), I bet I’d be fluent today. Research shows that learning a language is easiest when you’re young and the mind is sponge-like. Moreover, in part because of our geographic insulation, Americans are less worldly than our European counterparts, among whom bilingualism is the rule rather the exception. In the age of interconnectedness, speaking only one tongue—even if it’s the global one—surely puts us at a competitive disadvantage.
These objections are valid, but can both be addressed via immersion classes, instead of bilingual education. The difference—between English-first and English-second—is crucial, and, in fact, once one learns English, one should move on to Spanish.
April 4th, 2007
Published on Reagan Republicans.
The cover of the current issue of Reason (not yet online) contains the subtitle, “The totalitarian implications of public health.” By contrast, the subtitle of last month’s cover story used the word “authoritarian,” as in “The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick.”
I don’t think it’s purely semantic to argue that “totalitarian,” as used today, is facile and hyperbolic, and, as such, diminishes real totalitarianism—of the Stalin, Hitler, Mao variety.
Say what you will about socialized medicine—or even conscription or the terrorist surveillance program—but do you really think they amount to the idea that you “should be totally subject to an absolute state authority“?
Let’s be clear: nothing in America today compares to the systematic murder and enslavement of tens of millions of people, engineered by tyrants unconstrained by checks or balances and utterly dismissive of democracy.
Accordingly, let’s reserve “totalitarian”—like references to the Holocaust, Nazis and tsunamis—for the real thing, and instead partake of the richness of the English language with words like “dictatorial,” “authoritarian,” “tyrannical,” “despotic” and “autocratic.”
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