The White Peril 白禍

Busy and not where it's easy to post. But I didn't want to let the D-Day anniversary go by without acknowledging it. Q and O, Rondi, and Eric, among many others, I'm sure, have posts up. We all owe an enormous debt to those who fought.

Eric links to a piece by Thomas Frank at the WSJ, in which he accuses conservatives of being too suspicious of Washington bureaucrats. Frank writes:

Mr. Issa's suspicions may be grotesque but they are also typical of the conservative movement. The government and its bureaucrats are, to the right, ever a malign force — jealous, power-hungry and greedy. But it's hard to blame someone for failing after you've worked so hard to make them fail.

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But back in 2008, he insisted that "the problem starts and ends with the federal government." Among other things, he charged, its regulators "weren't just asleep at the switch but in many ways . . . gave the green light for these practices," meaning the trading of mortgage-backed securities.

On this point, at least, Mr. Issa got it right. The regulators did fail us. They were too cozy with industry and too blinkered by the free-market faith to see the reality unfolding under their noses.

I'm not a particular fan of Issa's, but I'm getting really sick of hearing about how economic policy governed by unbridled "free-market faith" is the cause of our current problems. What meaningful deregulation of anything has there been in the last decade--especially related to the housing market, where one of the big problems was insulation from feedback? And I don't know that the problem with regulators is that they were too "cozy with industry"; rather, to hear the language they used and use, they seemed to think that pushing through their decision-distorting policies justified bringing in the private sector as "partners" when it was useful to do so.

At least, my sense of mischief compels me to point out, Thomas Frank is an apt person to be counseling against being too suspicious. Those of us who subscribed to Harper's a decade ago remember his piece on the soon-defunct band Yum-yum, in which...well, I'll let the Reason piece that ran at the time tell it, since it's online:

In February, a new buzz about Yum-Yum started on e-mail listservs and phone lines among people who both knew the band and read Harper's Magazine. The March issue of Harper's contained a 10-page feature story about Yum-Yum, written by Chris Holmes's childhood pal and former roommate Thomas Frank. Frank is a rising leftist intellectual star who edits The Baffler, a magazine of cultural criticism, and writes critiques of advertising and big business.

What made this obscure failed rock band of interest to Harper's? Frank had a theory about the band, one with which almost everyone who had independent knowledge about Yum-Yum disagreed. The Yum-Yum record, Frank postulated, was not intended as a sincere work of popular music. It was instead an ironic gesture, an attempt to "fake fake itself" (his italics). Pop music was the "fake" being "faked." The album was, Frank asserted, a "critique" of "the pop-music industry" even as it was a product of it. Thus, the story fit well with the main mission of Harper's: helping middle- to highbrow intellectuals confirm their inchoate contempt for the modern market order.

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By the time I got my copy of the March Harper's, I had already heard, via e-mail lists or phone calls, complaints about the story's dubious premise from about a dozen Yum-Yum-conscious Harper's readers. The executive editor of Spin magazine, Craig Marks, was peeved enough to write in The Village Voice that he found Frank's account "bafflingly misguided." Marks suggested the real story was probably that "Holmes, too embarrassed to admit to his hard-ass buddy that...he actually liked girly-pop...fed Frank a steaming plate of cred-saving b******t. And Frank bought it....Now that's ironic."

If memory serves, the Harper's article was even more obnoxiously smug than Brian Doherty's excerpts would lead you to believe; nevertheless, Frank's impulses are very easy to empathize with. (If you'd backed yourself into profiling your friend in a national magazine, wouldn't you be looking for some way...any way...not to admit, in your head and on paper, that you'd discovered in the course of doing your research that he was failing in his ambitions?) But that didn't make his view of things accurate then, and in a strikingly similar way, it doesn't now.

Frank tries to personalize the animus against Washington: "The government and its bureaucrats are, to the right, ever a malign force--jealous, power-hungry and greedy." Okay, sure, there are some small-government types who seem to be fueled by resentment or uncharitableness; but I think it's fair to say that most of us just think that expecting big government to work well (the way most of us mean when we say "work well") goes against what we know about human nature. Which is to say, when you get a bunch of people--anyone--together where they're mostly removed from scrutiny, then encourage them to think it's their job to queen it over a population of 300 million, it's not all that surprising that they start to think largesse is theirs to give and take at their own discretion.

Or as Eric says:

But if I may say a few words in defense of conservatives here, it would be that the government was never actually being run by conservatives, but by untouchable, unaccountable, and above all unelected bureaucrats. It matters very little who is supposedly in charge of them, as they can't be fired and they often have more power than their purported superiors who have to run for office, and who dare not offend the movers and shakers in the bureaucracy.

Even if through some bizarre miracle there were a libertarian majority in Congress, I doubt they'd be able to do much. Government would still fail to fix problems, and problems that government tries to solve invariably demand more government to fix. It's part of the design.

Added on 22 May: Thanks to Eric for the link back. In case I haven't already linked to Classical Values enough this week, Eric put up a related post about whether it's possible to define the "Republican base" usefully. I sincerely think it's worth a read.

Reason.tv has a hilarious conversation posted between Katherine Mangu-Ward and Greg Gutfeld, who hosts Red Eye on Fox News and apparently used to be editor of Men's Health magazine. (I grew up a stone's throw from Rodale Press HQ.) The Hit & Run link makes it sound as if the clip were full of raunch, but I don't think Gutfeld says anything you couldn't get away with on network TV after 10 p.m. or so. (You may still think that's vulgar, but it doesn't seem like a degree of naughtiness worth playing up.) Anyway, he has a lot to say about health-related nanny-state-ism, tiresome moralizing, and keeping your toaster away from meth addicts. A good listen.

John at 21st-Century Schizoid Man has been writing a lot about the way we're getting rubber-hosed by the current administration's forays into business and trade engineering.

The second point is how markets were distorted by government regulation in such a way that market-clearing economic activity led to the results that the critics are now calling market failures: the markets didn't fail. They just punished those who followed government-mandated development that no market could sustain.

This is the great tragedy of the recent crisis: that government, which got us into the situation, is actively making things worse. The markets obey the Gods of the Copybook Headings, the unavoidable effects of cause and effect, the inexorable meeting of demand and supply in clearing the market of available goods, what we economists call equilibrium. Politicians sincerely believe that they can manipulate markets to give them the politically desired effects: that works only for a relatively short period of time, as markets will ruthlessly punish those who mess with them. The invisible hand of Adam Smith doesn't care about political goals and will destroy, in the long run, anyone trying to game the markets for political effects.

The Japanese have spent the last two decades finding that out, too.

If you're not depressed enough, Eric links to a piece by Jim Geraghty that argues, fascinatingly if not surprisingly, that Washington is now following the Alinsky model of governance. (Yes, Saul Alinsky, of course.) Eric adds:

Bear in mind that from the voters' standpoint, both sides always say they care more about principle than power, and they always say that the other side has no principles. I think voters tend to be more cynical than is customarily believed, and certainly they're smart enough to realize that to most politicians, "principles" are all about talk. Something the chattering classes and political junkies might debate, but nothing for which any rational politician would risk losing his seat. Besides, how are ordinary people supposed to evaluate the legitimacy of rival politicians' claims to having "principles"? I think it's more likely that in the end, voters will do what the politicians do, and conclude that it's all about power.

There's certainly plenty of evidence to back that up.

I always find it funny when my more liberal friends get all enthusiastic about government as this wonderful vehicle for us as The People to pool our power and realize our Visions. That sounds nice, but in practice it runs smack up against the fact that Americans disagree in good faith over a lot of policy principles, and not everyone can win. Most government officials have narrow experience and expertise just like the rest of us, and asking them to butt in on all kinds of issues they can't possibly have the knowledge to adjudicate is just asking for trouble. It forces voters to monitor what their congresspersons and senators think about anything and everything. It gives Washington officials a broad range of influence to peddle. (Or, if you prefer to believe venality originates with the private sector, it gives lobbyists of every stripe a reason to come calling.) And it gets those officials addicted to the (heady, one can only imagine) feeling that they have not only the authority but also the know-how to drive the economy and engineer society. And this is what we get.

Added after a few more sips of coffee: I pushed "Submit" before remembering to add this back in: I realize it's not just liberals who openly romanticize government who vote for meddlesome nanny-state policies and distortionary entitlements. There are as many on the right as on the left who could stand to bear in mind the old libertarian saw that it's dangerous to increase the powers of the state under the assumption that your friends are always going to be those enforcing them.

Redundancy of the week goes to Camille Paglia's Salon.com editor, who summarizes her column thus: "The assassination jokes and 'liberal' conspiracy theories on talk radio could be an ominous sign of things to come."

Paglia herself says that her worries stem from listening to talk radio:

With the national Republican party in disarray, an argument is solidifying among grass-roots conservatives: Liberals, who are now in power in Washington, hate America and want to dismantle its foundational institutions and liberties, including capitalism and private property. Liberals are rootless internationalists who cravenly appease those who want to kill us. The primary principle of conservatives, on the other hand, is love of country, for which they are willing to sacrifice and die. America's identity was forged by Christian faith and our Founding Fathers, to whose prudent and unerring 18th-century worldview we must return.

In a harried, fragmented, media-addled time, there is an invigorating simplicity to this political fundamentalism. It is comforting to hold fast to hallowed values, to defend tradition against the slackness of relativism and hedonism. But when the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation, there is reason for alarm.

I've never been a talk radio listener, so I can't really determine whether Paglia is accurately perceiving what she hears there. But the read I've gotten--from the Tea Party demonstrations, from my working-class relatives, from news sources, from blogs--is less aimed specifically at "liberals," who have always been in the cross-hairs of much of the American public, than at insider politicians and their hangers-on, who any sensible person knows are on both sides of the aisle. Of course liberals and Democrats are taking most of the heat right now; they are, in fact, in power. They control the presidency and both houses of congress, and they got there by campaigning on pharisaical displays of outrage at conservative and Republican nastiness and making promises that they would change the way things are done. Now that they're in power, of course, it's still politics as usual, only more so: favoritism (whether bestowed on an individual tax evader who happens to be in line for a cabinet post or on a labor union), fantastical levels of spending, and a war policy that has changed very little (despite all the rhetorical arabesques). Paglia baffles me by continuing to insist "what a fresh new breeze Obama represents in Washington." We all saw her susceptibility to charisma in the Clinton era, but at least then she had a rueful sense of self-awareness about it.

Speaking of people who get Camille exercised, Julie Burchill is interviewed in the Guardian--hilarious and well worth reading as always:

Bindel: You describe yourself as a "militant feminist". What does that mean to you?

Burchill: "A girl who likes to have fun" ... and a lot of other stuff obviously. Someone who realises that women's human rights are more important than cultural "sensitivity". Like it's sensitive to cut someone's clitoris off! Someone who doesn't give a toss about the approval of others - men and women.

A woman that cheeks and insults men, righteously and politically, but also for kicks and fun. I like men and get on much better with them one to one than I do women, who can be a bit emotional. But part of what makes a man a man is that he never takes offence! When you see sad-sacks like, what was his name, Neil something [Lyndon, author of No More Sex War: the Failures of Feminism]. "Men's Lib" - that's the opposite of a man, to me. Just shut up and take your lumps. And then we can all have a laugh.

Obviously, having had the father I had I have very high expectations of men. On the whole, in the west, where feminism has made its mark, I think they've done great. It's so lovely that even in prison, men who aren't touchy-feely have to be stopped from beating up rapists - not just child molesters, but rapists of grown women. It's a shame that educated middle-class leftwing men can't take feminism on board so effectively.

Bindel: I much prefer women to men. A lot of them are emotional cripples. Have you not found that? Are we such different feminists do you think?

Burchill: I don't want to hear about every last thing someone is feeling. I think most men have it about right. All men should be like my dad!

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Bindel: Is your Christian faith still important?

Burchill: I would rather be a Jew. I find it hard to think of myself as an Anglican while the head of the church is a cowardly suck-up like Rowan Williams. I'm hoping that Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, will get the gig next. He's my absolute hero.

Bindel: Why would you want to be a Jew?

Burchill: I love everything about the Jews. But I probably won't become one, as I like the view from the outside. I will probably just remain a Christian Zionist; it's a long and honourable tradition.

Via Alice.

Bruce Bawer writes that he's received a number of responses to his most recent City Journal piece, which says in part:

More and more Western Europeans, recognizing the threat to their safety and way of life, have turned their backs on the establishment, which has done little or nothing to address these problems, and begun voting for parties—some relatively new, and all considered right-wing—that have dared to speak up about them. One measure of the dimensions of this shift: Owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who 10 years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

The other major reason for the turn against the left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. These taxes have slowed economic growth. Timbro's Johnny Munkhammar noted in 2005 that Sweden, for instance, which in the first half of the 20th century had the world's second-highest growth rate, had since fallen to No. 14, owing to enormous tax hikes.

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The past few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad. Add to all this the growing power of an unelected European Union bureaucracy that has encouraged Muslim immigration and taken steps to punish criticism of it—criminalizing "incitement of racism, xenophobia or hatred against a racial, ethnic or religious group" in 2007, for example—and you can start to understand why Western Europeans who prize their freedoms are resisting the so-called leadership of their see-no-evil elites.

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If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria's recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11% of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust "a detail in the history of World War II" and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5% of the vote in London's last mayoral election. Then there's Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won 5 out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.

He's posted an update on his blog--there are no links to individual posts but this is the one timestamped "Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 9:28 P.M. CET":

The other day, in the wake of my City Journal piece "Heirs to Fortuyn?", a couple of anti-jihad writers who had not yet rebuked me for my stance on Vlaams Belang finally got around to doing so. Not only did they send me e-mails taking me to task for criticizing VB in that article; one of them also took it upon himself to chew me out for, in his view, admiring Pim Fortuyn too much and Geert Wilders too little. (Never mind that I've defended Wilders frequently and that Wilders has blurbed my new book, Surrender.) Wilders, this individual felt compelled to lecture me, is a far greater figure than Fortuyn ever was. Why? Because, he explained, Wilders stands for "Western values," while Fortuyn stood only for – get ready for this – "Dutch libertinism."

Yes, "Dutch libertinism." The words took my breath away. During the last few days (while, as it happened, I was visiting Amsterdam) I haven't been able to get them out of my mind. For a self-styled anti-jihadist – who, by the way, I first met three years ago at the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in The Hague – to refer in this way to a man who sacrificed his life for human liberty is, in my view, not only incomprehensible but profoundly despicable. This is, after all, precisely the sort of language that Dutch Muslim leaders hurled at Fortuyn during his lifetime. And in the present case the words were plainly aimed not only at Fortuyn but at me – a writer who, like Fortuyn, that great martyr for freedom, is gay.

Some of these people probably had contempt for Fortuyn all along but were willing not to repudiate him as long as he was one of the few high-profile advocates of classical liberalism. It doesn't take a major leap to see their becoming fans of the Vlaams Belang (which from everything I've ever heard is seriously wacko), either.

What's more worrisome is the number of sensible, rank-and-file Western European citizens who may be figuring that the emerging alternatives to the left establishment are the only useful corrective and pushback available at this point, and that the unpalatable fascist undercurrents can be dealt with later. It seems a dangerous game to play in light of history.

Added at 20:44: Oh, and speaking of people with Norway connections who don't swim with the social-democratic current around them, Rondi Adamson was profiled last week on Normblog, and it's an interesting read.

Added on 12 May: Thanks to Eric for the link.

Come to think of it, he's got Norwegian blood, too.

It should be obvious by this point that I just kind of stop posting for weeks now and then, but I'm still grateful to those who've dropped a line to ask what's up. Nothing in particular--except, perhaps, that my currently working as a translator considerably lowers the motivation to use free time to search out interesting Japanese news and translate it. And now that cherry blossom season is over there's kind of a dead space for seasonal poetry.

There's never a dead space for political idiocy, however, and Sweden resident Michael Moynihan pounces on some from a recent episode of The Daily Show:

Not a particularly funny bit, considering the available material, but a few points about the total awesomeness of Swedish social democracy and the show's but-we're-only-joking case for the Swedish model. (They are, after all, making a serious political point in an unserious way.) Cenac's interview with ex-Abba frontman Björn Ulvaeus, during which he attempts to get him to admit that the song "Money, Money, Money" is a paean to American capitalism, leaves one with the impression that the millionaire songwriter is rather pleased with his country's glorious socialist history. Well, no.

In 2007, the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) reported that governent "authorities claim[ed] Ulvaeus, using the services of a tax haven company, concealed millions in music production income to avoid paying taxes." DN points out that "Since 1990 Ulvaeus royalties have been collected in a Dutch company, now known as Fintage. The company made a deal with the tax haven company Stanove, on the Dutch Antilles, to transfer 95% of [Abba's] royalties there." And avoid giving it to a mother desperately in need of a second year of maternity leave.

Nor is this a new issue for Ulvaeus. In 1982, before the Social Democratic Party returned to power on promises of soaking the rich, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Abba's manager Stig Anderson was "deeply concerned by the threat of a Socialist takeover of his [business] empire. 'If we had had these funds today, we would have been forced this year to part with about $US2.16 million...Why should I continue to work 14-15 hours a day to give money away like this?...We don't want to leave Sweden. Our roots are here. We have our friends here. I intend to stay here and fight these funds even if the Social Democrats are elected. But if it becomes impossible, of course it would be very easy for us to move out.'"

All of this is, of course, just an excuse to indulge my recent ABBA jag. Here the four are performing the song from which I've snagged the title for this post:



Some child-of-the-'70s observations: Agnetha looks like a Cheryl Ladd who might actually pull a gun and waste you if need be. And Benny has exactly the same mannerisms at the piano as Christine McVie--from the little smile to the way the hair moves. And look at how tiny those microphones are! They were cutting edge, they were. And tell me you've every seen anyone look as fierce in a quilted jacket as Frida.

Bjorn doesn't seem to be doing much; he just kind of reminds me of Dana Carvey.

Lest you think I've forgotten about Japan, here's another performance for Japanese TV from the same period:



Can you imagine any production getting away with such a static set and nonexistent choreography today--especially when there's not even any pretense that the band is performing live? Nowadays, poor Agnetha and Frida would have been rehearsed to within an inch of their lives, and there'd have to be something projected on the wall behind that arc-balloon thing.

Added later: Oops--I think Moynihan has permanent residency in Sweden but now lives in DC. At least, he does if his bio at Reason.com is updated.

If the predictable awfulness of the stimulus bill is so predictably awful that you're so incapable of getting worked up over it and kind of fear you're dead inside, Reason.com asked a group of libertarian-leaning economists to descant on the many specific ways it promises to suck. Even Deirdre McCloskey, who's usually good for at least one wicked laugh, doesn't find much funny. She does note one of the ways we got here and will probably get here again:

At less than full employment the Keynesian stuff works. So the minority of the quickie expenditures will "put people back to work"--until we return to almost-full employment, which will happen pretty quickly in the recovery. At that point the stimulus will merely crowd out private investment. In the short run people might get more cheerful, too, always a good thing. But in two years the recession will be over. And the myth will grow up--rather similar to the ones about FDR and war expenditure--that Obama did it. Essentially, Obama will get credit for the self-adjusting character of the economy. I reckon we should start preparing that other face of Mount Rushmore.

The lead editorial in the Nikkei today opposes protectionism, both in general and in specific (that is, U.S. and Japan) cases:

If a certain country sets policies that benefit only its domestic enterprises, there is the possibility that its trading partners will incline toward similar protectionist measures as a countermove. If this vicious cycle is left uncontrolled, it is possible that the WTO's non-discrimination principle, which places importance on equal competition between domestic and foreign entities, will exist in name only.

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The United States is not the only country suffering. Global demand has contracted, and both developed and developing countries both are contending with the same sorts of under-performing organizations and manufacturers domestically. It will be no strange thing if other countries are hesitating over criticizing America because they think tomorrow it could be their hide.

Latent in all this is the danger that protectionist barriers will go up. If we shut our eyes tight against one another's actions, cases that are essentially outside the applicability of the WTO conventions will keep piling up as faits accomplis. Even [staying carefully] outside the line demarcating governmental provisions that could conflict with the WTO conventions, there's plenty of room to exercise grey-area judgments related to subsidies, technology barriers, quarantining, and import procedures.

Japan, of course, has its own not-so-nice history with protectionism, so the Nikkei could have warned more against economic drag rather than just focusing on retaliatory measures by trading partners.

Are we still on this topic (via Instapundit)? Of course, we are. It comes up every contentious election. Don Surber's reaction to the latest BBC poll is this:

What? The sky did not open? The light did not come down? Celestial choirs did not sing? The world is not now perfect?

Reality is hitting liberals.

Envy, honey, envy.

We're the bestest nation and they are soooooooooo jealous of us.

Well, yes, it often really is envy, especially on the part of Europeans whose grandparents needed rescuing during the war.

Never underestimate the power of good, old-fashioned ignorance, though. A lot of supposedly educated people abroad seriously think they can learn all they need to about the United States by watching CSI: Miami and listening to, well, the BBC/CNN International version of world news. I can't count the number of discussions I had about the Iraq invasion, during my twelve years in Asia, in which my interlocutor clearly just was not processing the idea that finding weapons of mass destruction had not been the only (or even the primary) rationale offered by the Bush administration. My point is not that foreigners couldn't build a case that America is prosecuting the WOT in a way that does harm, if they really believe so, based on an accurate understanding of how things work. My point is that they don't. I think most news-junkie Americans would be pretty shocked at how few alternatives to pacifist social-democratic happy talk there are in many other places.

At Hit and Run, Matt Welch is on fire. First on the anti-bourgeois crack high of a salary cap on upper management at banks:

I'll stack up my class resentment against anyone's, particularly when it comes to billionaire hosebags scarfing at the public trough. However, the only "outrageous" thing going on here is that the government forced itself upon a comparatively successful private company, bitched about the host's ingratitude, and is now doing what the federal government does best: Setting compensation rates at commercial banks. What's that you say? Bank stocks tumbling on "nationalization" fears? Why I never!

To sum up: In a fit of righteous anti-greed, people who make several hundred thousand dollars a year as federal employees (then millions more out of office doing whatever it is Tom Daschle was doing) are consciously driving the best talent out of endangered firms that are sitting on scores of billions of taxpayer dollars that they were made to accept by force. Shoot, what could go wrong with that?

...

It will likely never be that time [when President Obama deems it acceptable for banks to make profits and pay out bonuses], as long as the government is in the business of running private commerce. Banks will be forced to write 4 percent mortgages. Automakers will be forced to build magical green cars that spew out 3 million jobs from their exhaust pipes. Airlines will be forced to Buy American, governors will be forced to spend their budget-filling bounty on unionized teachers, and newspapers will be forced to run Rahm Emanuel columns. Local commercial decisions will be made in Washington, based on politics, instead of by business-owners, based on consumers.

And, again, no one who supports this kind of interventionist malarkey is in any moral or ethical position to be working up to high dudgeon about the omnipresence of lobbyists in D.C.

Welch is even better on Obama's column in the WaPo today. The president's introduction reads in part:

What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives — action that's swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.

Well, then, Americans are screwed. Federal officials may have the best of intentions, but many of them have clearly never run so much as a lemonade stand successfully, and there is much on-the-ground information about actually operating a business in a way that's good for shareholders, employees, and customers that they just have no way of knowing.

So the wisdom part's kind of suspect. Welch has issues with the boldness part, too, especially when it's characterized as a departure from all those free-market, capitalist policies that have been blighting our lives lately.

There is one charge here that I for one am happy to embrace: We can indeed "ignore...energy independence"...because there's no such as thing as energy independence. Really. It's b******t.

Why do people oppose the stimulus? Here are a few actual reasons: There is no strong evidence that stimuli work, and plenty of evidence that they don't (a relevant consideration, no?). Like the deeply flawed PATRIOT Act, the deeply flawed Iraq War resolution, and the deeply flawed bank bailout, it is being rushed through the legislature in an atmosphere of pants-wetting crisis and presidential warnings of impending doom. It is filled with special interest giveaways, big-government featherbedding, and "Buy American" considerations that have about as much to do with stimulating an economy as playing violin has with putting out fires. By taking from fiscally responsible states (like South Carolina) and giving to fiscally irresponsible states (like California), it violates basic notions of fairness and creates still more moral hazard in an already hazardtastic universe.

And remember–aside from misportraying his opponents' concerns, Obama is also blaming their "theories" for the whole crisis in the first place. Neat! But who had the theory that the federal government should be the elephant in the room of the mortgage business, pressure commercial banks to write mortgages for risky borrowers, even while applying less oversight to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than on actors in private sector? It certainly wasn't the free marketeers. Who thought credit default swaps and mortgage-backed securities should be left to expand like crazy without providing for a clearinghouse to at least measure their number and worth? It wasn't the house libertarian on the SEC. Who thought elevating Alan Greenspan to deity status while he maestroed the long era of loose credit was the capital thing to do? I know this will come as a surprise for those who think an Ayn Rand habit gets people a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card on Planet Libertarian, but Greenspan's bubble-blowing policies were plenty controversial in these quarters before the dukey hit the fan.

Who knew Barney Frank was a libertarian?

It's a few days old, but Cato's David Boaz posted at Real Clear Politics with clarity and point about the latest attempt by special-interest politicians to interfere with honest profit-seeking:

Every company and industry wanted to be sure that it would be eligible for some of the money, and members of Congress worked to slip their constituents and campaign donors into the bill's 451 pages. By the time it passed, it included special provisions for Puerto Rican rum producers, auto race tracks, and corporations operating in American Samoa (such as Starkist, which is headquartered in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's district). It required that insurance companies pay for mental health benefits and granted tax benefits for victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and makers of children's wooden arrows.

Once the bill passed, the lobbying frenzy only accelerated. Banks and other companies focused their attention on the Treasury Department regulators. A Treasury spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that political influence played no role in the department's decisions: "The decisions are made by a committee of officials at Treasury based on recommendations and data provided by the regulators through the application process."

That's always the official answer. Put the government in charge of handing out money, and the decisions will be made by highly trained, public-spirited economists or lawyers, irrespective of political considerations.

...

Even if regulators are as smart as Leonardo da Vinci and as incorruptible as Mother Teresa, they can never have as much knowledge as the decentralized, competitive market process, so planned economies and planned industries fall further and further behind free-market systems. But in reality, even if they're smart, they're not incorruptible. Political influence always comes into play. What we're seeing with the bailout funds will also happen with the stimulus money.

I get why people don't like lobbyists, but it's not hard to understand why they exist. When Congress wields power over Americans on all sorts of little local issues, it's irrational for affected individuals and organizations not to try to leverage it in their favor. And then there's the problem that no congresscritter can be an expert on everything from sheep farming to municipal opera outreach programs to traffic engineering, so decisions are inevitably made on the fly based on what sounds good (yet another opening for clever lobbyists). And we citizens who have better things to do must waste all sorts of time keeping an eye on Washington in order to stay even marginally informed about the shenanigans going on there.

Virginia posts about the stimulus package:

Now if you're going to lavish tax money on infrastructure projects, I'll concede it makes good sense to use trained construction workers, not random day laborers. But politically it's still a union payoff. And there's no public-spirited reason to overpay for materials (or, for that matter, for labor).

But the cost to taxpayers isn't the biggest problem with the bill's protectionism. A trade war threatens to exacerbate the single largest danger in the worldwide downturn: that a serious contraction in China will lead to domestic unrest and that that the Chinese government will engage in military aggression to focus frustration outward.

China's precarious balance of prosperity and unrest is a relatively new problem, so I think most people can be forgiven for not realizing it needs to be factored in.

The reality that favoring American steelworkers means screwing over equally American factory workers further down the supply chain is, however, not new. Virginia cites this WaPo article:

There are early signs that nations are putting up trade barriers to protect domestic companies as the global downturn worsens. Despite promises offered during a major economic summit in November to refrain from taking such measures, countries from France to Indonesia have done so.

That, some argue, may be reason enough for the United States to follow suit. But in recent decades, the United States has stood out as the global champion of free trade; some analysts fear a move by Congress to restrict foreign companies from stimulus spending would mark an important shift away from that philosophy.

Supporters say expanded Buy American provisions could help ensure that the treasure trove of government contracts for new highways, schools, bridges and energy grids creates jobs at home instead of abroad. They note that much of the tax rebate checks that went out last year to stimulate the economy went to Chinese-made televisions and Korean-made refrigerators.

Well, yes, but the entire retail price didn't go directly to the PRC and ROK. It also paid for the salespeople working the floor, the truckers who got the goods from port to warehouse, and the operations people who took care of the planning, ordering, and logistics here in the States. And forcing manufacturers to use more expensive materials means they pass the increases along to customers--a.k.a. the American consumers we're supposed to be helping here.

"What we're already seeing is that demand is going down, but imports of Chinese finished steel is going up because they are subsidizing it," said Thomas Gibson, president of the industry-funded American Iron and Steel Institute. "What we're saying is that this is a stimulus package to promote American jobs. We ought to maximize every dollar in that bill toward that end. If you were building a bridge in West Virginia, you wouldn't bring in German workers to do it. Materials should be no different."

That final comparison reveals itself as inane the moment you try to generalize away from West Virginia and German laborers (mmmmm...German laborers). Imported labor is used all the time, around the world, when local labor is too scarce or costly. The first part has a certain emotional resonance, but the tit-for-tat policies Gibson is using it to push for don't seem to me to make much sense. The best hope that China will be convinced to loosen controls and distortionist government meddling is the increased flow of ideas and people, as well as goods, that comes with increasing trade.

Thanks to all our veterans today. It would be lovely if prosperity and peaceful business within a free society translated into prosperity and peaceful business all around. Unfortunately, it doesn't. There will always be threats that need to be dealt with decisively; our gratitude to those who make it their business to handle doing so.

The Nikkei gives the Aso administration's reaction to the election results:

On 5 November, Prime Minister Taro Aso, having received word that Democratic candidate Obama had won the U.S. presidential election, stated, "The most important thing is to maintain, in cooperation with the new president, the relationship that Japan and the United States have both cultivated through more than fifty years."

Regarding discussions with Mr. Obama, he stated, "It's not as if there were any need to meet with him immediately. It's President Bush until 20 January of next year. I think this is a topic for after the president officially changes." He was responding to the press corps at the prime minister's residence.

The same day, the prime minister released a statement: "I send my heartfelt congratulations. In cooperation with the next president, I want to strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance even further, and exert all possible efforts toward solving issues that affect the whole of the global community, such as the global economy, terrorism, and the environment.

Japan is officially in favor of peace and diplomacy and the Kyoto Protocols, and there's been a lot of controversy over our military presence. I'm still not sure Tokyo is going to be all that happy if Obama's preference for soothing diplomacy and cutting "wasteful" spending on defense involves going soft on China. Or Russia or North Korea.

I'm a libertarian; I'm used to being unsatisfied with election results, even when the candidates I voted for win.

I did not vote for Obama. I don't agree with his policies, and I don't sympathize with his view of the world. But most politicians, no matter what you think of them while they're campaigning, have a way of turning into windsocks once elected. Time will tell what he does with the office. In a few months, he'll be our president, and I wish him the best.

Added on 5 November: I'm glad to see Connie and Dean posting them, but do people really need to be told these things? Reading the comments here, I guess so.

A related point: I'm disturbed at the complaints that seem to imply that Obama was elected because of the media or his cult-creating mind rays. Yes, the media were shilling for him shamelessly. Yes, a lot of his most fervent admirers seemed to be working themselves into the sort of ecstasies that have no business surfacing anywhere outside church or a performance at the opera.

But it's our job as citizens to seek out information. Ours. Those who wanted to read his memoirs critically were able to do so. Those who wanted to find information about Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were able to do so. Those who wanted to know what the historical record says about social-democratic policy were able to do so. I'm not absolving CNN of its transgressions, only saying that it demeans our fellow citizens to imply that they needed to be spoonfed the truth. Some people are fully aware that Obama's longer on charisma than on policy, and they hope that's enough because they recognize that a lot of the most pressing issues of the day are going to have to go through congress anyway. Others decided that he would be the less deleterious choice in the long run despite disliking quite a bit of what he stands for. And finally, some people persist in believing that the Third Way will somehow work if we get it right this (twelve millionth) try.

I don't agree, but that doesn't mean that large segments of the electorate were brainwashed by Wolf Blitzer and Andrea Mitchell. If we're going to argue that people should be expected to earn their own way in society, surely we can expect them to use Google, on a terminal at the public library if necessary.

Having now criticized my own side a bit, let me get back to the more fun project of criticizing the opposition. I agree that the election of a black president is a moving, historic moment. It was one thing to know that it was theoretically possible, because we all said that we were worried about policy and character and not skin tone. It's another thing entirely to see America actually show that someone's non-whiteness would not prevent his being voted in. It's the difference between the hopeful belief that you're good enough for your beloved and actually having your marriage proposal accepted. I get it. In and of itself, that's a good thing. And this is an American election. so of course it's American racial history that we're using as context to judge it.

At the same time, could we just every once in a while show some knowledge of the wider world here? Racism and ethnocentrism are the norm in human history, not some rebarbative Yankee aberration. The United States did not invent ethnic tensions, and it was not even the last country to outlaw slavery. To outsiders from nations that have traditionally been more ethnically homogeneous, our noisy, front-and-center conversation on race looks like unrest and a chronic inability to get along, but that's exactly backwards. In America, arguing is what we do. Our periods of glazed-over gentility such as the 1950s tend to arise from external circumstances and be short-lived. American mouthiness and rough-and-tumble debate cause more immediate bruising, but they've helped us to advance organically through our racial and ethnic problems much better than the Europeans, Asians, and Africans that so many left-of-center people think we should be genuflecting to.

Just voted for the first time in twelve years that I didn't use an absentee ballot--very exciting. I was in line by 6:05 and out of the booth by 6:30, but there were already signs that the monitors and police were surprised by the crowds. (Things were a bit confusing, but I don't really blame them. The space is tight, and it was probably hard to work out exactly what traffic flows would be until they started.) This is probably familiar to anyone who hasn't lived abroad for a while, but I found it oddly touching to be standing in line to vote in a school corridor, harangued from all sides by posters about punctuality and attendance and ordering class rings.

Like a lot of people, my first experience of democracy was our mock vote in first grade for governor of Pennsylvania, complete with cigar box and squares of lined paper. (Dick Thornburgh was running against some guy named...Flaherty? Flannery?) I hope Miss Cramer's happy that the lesson stuck. The church I was brought up in--if I haven't mentioned this--frowned on voting in national elections. God has plans for the United States and the world, see, and you could be voting against Him.

Just imagine trying to explain your way out of that one on Judgment Day.

Polls are often wrong, but if they're right, I won't be happy with the results today. That's the way these things go. Both viable presidential tickets well and truly bit this year, but fortunately, Washington is not largely controlled by the president alone, and the states are not largely controlled by Washington alone. Whoever wins is unlikely to wreck the republic. It just remains to see who it is.

I'm late on this, having spent the last day or so with the stomach flu, trying to edge ginger ale and saltines down my throat unnoticed.

Anyway, Reason has a round-up of thoughts by libertarian thinkers on the Obama candidacy. (I'm sure a parallel post about McCain is coming today.) While I have to say that Deirdre McCloskey gets off the best line...

Since I live in Chicago, and anyway am a rational economist, I'm going to vote Libertarian, as usual. After all, why throw away my vote?

...it will doubtless shock you to hear that I most like Virginia Postrel's take. How felicitous for her that the Obama campaign came along not long after she'd turned her culture-critic's eye to the workings of glamour!

If elected, [Obama] will have not a policy mandate but an emotional one: to make Americans feel proud of their country, optimistic about the future, and warmly included, regardless of background, in the American story.

A President Obama could deliver just the opposite. He might stumble badly abroad, projecting weakness that invites aggression (think Jimmy Carter) or involving America in a humanitarian-driven war at least as long and bloody as Iraq (think Sudan). As for inclusiveness, you can get it two ways: by respecting individual differences—-however eccentric, offensive, or hard to control—-or by jamming everyone into a conformist collective. Obama's New Frontier-style rhetoric has a decidedly collectivist cast. NASA is great, prizes for private space flight are stupid, and what can we make you do for your country? A guy who thinks like that will not worry about what his health care plan might do to pharmaceutical research or physicians' incentives.

Obama's campaign draws enormous power from his rhetoric of optimism-"hope," "change," and "Yes, we can." But the candidate's memoir betrays a tragic vision. In Dreams from My Father, almost everyone winds up disappointed: Obama's father, his stepfather, his grandparents, the people he meets in Chicago. Only his naive and distant mother keeps on pursuing happiness. Then she dies of cancer. ... Hope is audacious because, at least in this world, it's futile and absurd. Faceless "power" is always waiting to crush your dreams.

Before anyone starts screeching that McCain also has Daddy issues and that he's also obsessed with strong-arming people into "national service" and that Obama has too proposed specific policies--yes, I know. So does Virginia, whose piece about McCain is likely, if anything, to be even more cutting when it appears.

The things she's talking about still matter. Obama talks a lot about hope, but his view of America is actually pretty dour: we need to be shaken from our complacency (by him and his fellow travelers) and change our ways--not because we're a society made up of human beings that doesn't always get it right, but because we've got loads of fundamental sins to atone for. As Melanie Phillips wrote last week:

[T]he only way to assess their position is to look at each man in the round, at what his general attitude is towards war and self-defence, aggression and appeasement, the values of the west and those of its enemies and – perhaps most crucially of all – the nature of the advisers and associates to whom he is listening. As I have said before, I do not trust McCain; I think his judgment is erratic and impetuous, and sometimes wrong. But on the big picture, he gets it. He will defend America and the free world whereas Obama will undermine them and aid their enemies.

Here's why. McCain believes in protecting and defending America as it is. Obama tells the world he is ashamed of America and wants to change it into something else. McCain stands for American exceptionalism, the belief that American values are superior to tyrannies. Obama stands for the expiation of America's original sin in oppressing black people, the third world and the poor.

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west's fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That's why he believes in 'soft power' — diplomacy, aid, rectifying 'grievances' (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America's defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will 'cut investments in unproven missile defense systems'; he will 'not weaponize space'; he will 'slow our development of future combat systems'; and he will also 'not develop nuclear weapons,' pledging to seek 'deep cuts' in America's arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups.

My biggest problem with Obama is his instincts. I don't think that he hates classical liberals (via Eric), any more than I think Sarah Palin hates those of us who live in blue cities.

What I do think is that he believes, like a lot of liberals who approach things from an academic background, that human relations can be fixed in some ultimate way. We talk until we find common ground, we all make some compromises, and then we all go home partially happy and make the best of it. That means that those of us who believe that ideological conflict is inevitable, that in some conflicts there will inevitably be distinct winners and losers, and that competition among ideas is not only inevitable but frequently salutary, are spoiling the party. As Virginia implies, it's hard to champion both conflict-avoidance and "diversity."

Eric and M. Simon link to this masterwork of scintillating ninnyism by, not to put too fine a point on it, the sort of person I vowed I would never, ever become when I left the Lehigh Valley. I will leave aside the ha-ha-but-I-really-kind-of-mean-it argument that white people should be banned from voting. Whatever thesis it was in service of, Jonathan Valania's conclusion would be an insult to everyone referred to:

By this point, you either think I am joking or are calling me an elitist. I assure you I am neither. OK, maybe a little of both. But it wasn't always like this. I come from the Coal Belt, from that Alabamian hinterland between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as per James Carville's famous formulation.

I am, in fact, just two generations out of the coal mines that blackened the lungs of my grandfather, leaving him disabled, despondent and, finally, dead at the ripe old age of 54.

So, understand that I am saying all this for the good of the country and, in fact, for the good of those hard-working white people that Hillary used to pander to.

I know those people, I come from them. They are not some shameful abstract demographic to be brushed under the rug of euphemism by Wolf Blitzer and his ilk.

I have broken kielbasa with those people. I went to school with their children. I have gone to Sunday Mass with a deer-hunter hangover with those people. They are bitter with good reason, and they are armed because they are scared. They mean well, but they are easily spooked.

I fear for what is to become of them after the campaigns leave town for the last time, and Scranton and Allentown and Carlisle go back to being the long dark chicken dance of the national soul they were before the media showed up.

I am, in fact, just one generation away from the steel mills of Bethlehem that sent my father to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns one day when I was a child, have chronically aggravated his psoriasis, and have dinged him up with joint problems.

But you know something? Much as I adore my parents and many of my elder relatives, I have no idea what it's like to be a plant worker. Therefore, when the discussion turns to their lives, I generally trust them to know themselves at least as well as I do.

That's not to say that I don't disagree with them on policy frequently...though my disagreement, I imagine, runs in the opposite direction from Valania's. To my mind, people who claim not to need the government to take care of them are far too ready to embrace further distortions of economic decision-making through changes to the tax code, protectionism, and support for national health care--as long as they're pitched as "relief for Pennsylvania families." I think they're wrong to support such policies, and I wish they didn't. But no one is required to adhere to my wishes when prioritizing which political values they're going to use their vote to optimize. If a free society is to work, we have to be ready to accept other people's choices even if we think they're bad.

I'm not trying to dodge the simple fact that people often make judgments based on prejudice; my point is just that you can't tell from someone's ballot how he or she decided whom to vote for. We're a gigantic country in a gigantic global economy, and all of us deal with daily torrents of signals. Not even trained social scientists concur on policy, for heaven's sake, and they're the ones who spend their working lives poring over the data. How difficult should it be to accept that ordinary citizens, trying to make the most sense of the fragmentary information they have, don't all agree with you or your candidate? (It might also be pointed out that Allentown is in the 15th Congressional District, which went for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Yes, it's a notorious swing district, and the margins were narrow; and as a registered Republican, I'm not pointing these things out as some kind of point of pride. I just think that someone who's going to bitch about white people's voting the wrong person into office in one paragraph and then cite Allentown in another should have a surer hand with the numbers.)

Middle PA has its fair share of born hotheads and sourpusses, but so do Tokyo and New York. What does that prove? I have relatives who hunt. They like hunting, and they like guns. They go to church regularly and like the people in their congregations. Most of them take pride in their jobs, even if everyone has plenty of stories about being screwed by bureaucratic bossiness or the idiot colleague everyone else has to carry. The economic dislocations of the last few decades have been painful, and people can certainly get riled up over what they see as betrayal by the government. But bitter in the all-around sense? I just don't see it. And if you want to see easily spooked, just try announcing in a group of gay guys here in New York that you're voting for McCain.

BOO!

I know that this is not a new point, but the best way to approach people with opposing beliefs is to argue with them. Maybe you have something to teach them, or maybe they know as much as you do but have drawn different conclusions. Vigorous disagreement is built into the American experiment, but it can't work if we're all busy accusing each other of voting based on our hang-ups.

...

Oh, and I'm not even going to go after that "broken kielbasa" nonsense. Well, except to say that, as an incoherent metaphor and in combination with the reference to the chicken dance, it put me in mind of "The Chicken Song," which, while no more logical than Valania's piece, at least is as funny as it intends to be.



Added on 29 October: Happy Diwali (that's the greeting?) to our Indian friends. And thanks to Eric for the link and the kind words as always.

Added on 30 October: Thanks to Eric for pointing out that Valania's confirmation bias and lefty-from-central-casting cultural and economic illiteracy go back at least a half-decade. Check out this piece that, among other things, contrasts two Philadelphia-based businesses that are owned by former partners. The founder of Urban Outfitters is now, at least to a degree, a conservative. His retail chain is described like this:

The interior of the flagship store at 17th and Walnut streets is stylized to evoke what can only be described as janitorial chic: exposed brick, scraped plaster walls and low-hanging ventilation ducts. Everything is illuminated by the soft glow of warehouse loft light fixtures. All the merchandise is displayed against pegboard backdrops faintly reminiscent of ye olde family rec room or dad's workshop. And piped in over the sound system is the jarring electro clatter of Peanut Butter Wolf's oh-so-appropriately titled album Badmeaningood.

His former paramour is still gratifyingly liberal, so her enterprises are characterized thus:

"Hi, this is Judy in the woods," says the voice on the answering machine at the Poconos summer home of Judy Wicks, owner and operator of the White Dog Cafe, a homey restaurant/bar in University City, and of the adjoining artsy gift shop called the Black Cat. Wicks is a prominent local businesswoman and a diehard liberal activist.

...

Judy went on to open the highly successful White Dog Cafe, where she would host and coordinate countless social and community activist campaigns, while Dick went on to build the Urban Outfitters empire out of the humble beginnings of Free People.

If you don't know Philadelphia, you may not know how laugh-aloud hilarious it is to see the White Dog depicted as "homey." I don't think that there's anything inherently wrong with its carefully cultivated shabby-genteel atmosphere, but it's a joke to try to argue that the place is any less pretentious than, like, Le Bec Fin. (That goes double for the bibelots at the Black Cat.) Here's an item from the White Dog's current dinner menu:

Pulled Duck Confit on Chickpea Panella
coco agro-dolce and an arugula, radish, and zucchini flower salad

Just like Mom used to make, huh?

As I say, I think it's great that Wicks found a marketable business model that helps fund causes she supports. There's nothing immoral about combining peasant-y ingredients in a fashion formulated to appeal to the Mother Jones set, but I don't see how it's any more inherently forthright an enterprise than Urban Outfitters. And Valania never seems to get around to noting that Richard Hayne's company, having grown so large, has helped create wealth and employment across the globe. (He's busy decrying "sweatshops" while giving short shrift to potential arguments about what their employees' lives would be like if factory work weren't an alternative.)

Heather MacDonald has a characteristically smart piece in City Journal about Sarah Palin (via Amy Alkon).

I know, it's elitist to expect a candidate for president or vice president to speak like an adult. Sure, there are parents out there battling the "like" epidemic who might not appreciate having someone in the White House validating their 15-year-olds' speech habits. But, hey: "Total role reversal here." (Palin, of course, can sound adolescent even when she uses the right verbs, as when she disingenuously denied her snarky put-down of Joe Biden's age while lauding herself as "you know, . . . the new energy, the new face, the new ideas.") It's even more elitist to expect a vice president to put together sentences that cohere into a minimally logical progression of thought. There was a time, however, when conservatives upheld adult standards—such as clarity of speech and thought—without apology, even in the face of the relentless downward pull of adolescent culture. But now, when a vice-presidential candidate talks like a teenager, mugs like an American Idol contestant, and traffics in syntactical dead-ends and non sequiturs, we are supposed to find her charming and authentic.

...

Nevertheless, Palin's verbal hodgepodge may say nothing about her qualifications for the vice presidency. Judgment and political acumen could well rest on different mental capacities than the ability to order thoughts into smooth sentences. But the inability to answer a straightforward question about economic policy without becoming tangled in words suggests either ignorance about the subject matter or a difficulty connecting between ideas. Neither explanation is reassuring.

The Palin nomination has unleashed among Republican pundits and voters a great roar of pent-up rage against liberal elites, much of it warranted. But the conservative embrace of Palin comes at considerable cost to conservative principles. The populist identity politics that Republicans are now playing with such gusto may come back to haunt them in the future.

...

Liberal hypocrisy on Palin's family dilemmas has matched the conservative turnaround with perfect symmetry, of course. And perhaps both sides will blithely and unapologetically switch places yet again as soon as circumstances allow. Still, the conservative position on the family happens to be the right one. So, too, was the erstwhile conservative defense of articulateness, knowledge, and uncommon achievement. It's a shame to have sacrificed these ideas, even temporarily, in the quest for political advantage.

I, too, wonder how the backing and filling is going to play out when Republicans start making rigorous classical standards of education one of their favorite topics again. I'm a bookish man who gravitates toward bookish people and lives in a bookish city, but I recognize that Palin has good instincts and has held her own in terms of hands-on achievement in office.

What worries me is that she doesn't give any indication of having been exposed to Matthew Arnold's "the best that has been thought and written," which you can do at the University of Idaho as surely as you can at Amherst if you're of a mind to. I spent the first half of the '90s as a comparative literature major at Penn, so believe me, I am well aware of the limits of cutesy verbal game-playing. That she's not more honey-tongued in the lawyerly sense we've gotten used to since the Clintons is not something I hold against her.

But that doesn't change the fact that much of the history of mankind is stored in language, and Palin doesn't seem to think or talk like someone who's been absorbing the lessons of the past from the Founding Fathers or Orwell or even Margaret Thatcher. Palin's "you know" and "like" don't bother me as much as the fact that her phrasing makes ideas squishy and the connections between them unclear. Isn't the point of exalting folksiness usually to prize blunt, fearless truth-telling?

Yes, because I also know which pronouns are singular and plural.

And they complain about Sarah Palin's intelligence.

Added at 21:26: "Are each of you willing to...?"

Added at 23:00: May I just say...I will never agree with Hillary Clinton on policy, but she's come a long way in terms of her public persona. Good on her.

Eric links to this post by Bill Whittle about Barack Obama's assertion that citizens have a right to health care in the debate the other night. Eric says,

[H]ealth care is not a right. Certainly not a right in the way our country has always defined rights, for if there is an obligation for other people to pay for it, it becomes not a right but a duty, to the government, by other people — duties to the government being the antithesis of rights.

Having lived in Japan for twelve years and had several friends who (unlike me) work in health care, I had a lot of lively discussions about the relative merits of socialized medicine. What always drove me crazy was when people talked as if the money for health care weren't going to have to come from somewhere. There's plenty of great health care available in Japan, but stories have surfaced recently about patients' being turned away or dumped by hospitals, and about desperate Japanese who travel to China for organ transplants. One doesn't want to be like the NYT Style Section and inflate every clutch of three colorful anecdotes into a Major Trend, but the aging society does mean that there will be fewer workers supporting more geriatric patients in short order. Everyone is worried.

Of course, that's a practical, not philosophical, problem. Whittle writes,

Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

But these new so-called "rights" are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin.

And, of course, when the government is in charge of giving out goodies, it gets to set priorities and trade-offs for individuals. Is your need for a procedure "urgent"? What's an acceptable minimum for "quality of life"? Would you prefer to buy less health coverage and more of something else you value more highly? What happens when functionaries start telling fat people they don't deserve bypass surgery because they've spent their lives tunneling through five Entenmann's cakes a week?

Not, I hasten to add, that the current American system is anywhere near perfect...but then, neither is it a free-market system. Former AIG executive (!) Jon Basil Utley wrote the following in Reason a few months ago:

So why isn't all this being debated in the presidential campaign? For one, some of the richest and most powerful lobbies in Washington are run by the medical and pharmaceutical establishments. They don't want a competitive system. Democrats do propose forcing everyone to "buy" high-cost insurance, while continuing with the current system, and then have taxpayers subsidize premiums for the poor. But they also oppose tort reform which would hurt their trial lawyer political allies. Many Republican congressmen, meanwhile, also benefit from the lobbies and don't want to rock the boat. After eight years in power, they don't want to take criticism for having made little reform.

Medical cost reform is just one of many areas where Washington is corrupt and paralyzed, in particular because of the gerrymandered power structure, whereby sitting congressmen are almost invulnerable to defeat. They then legally collect millions in "campaign contributions" from the lobbies. Reform will only come about if Americans become better informed, yet most of the media is ignorant about health costs. Reform depends also upon major corporations attacking the current system, such as Wal-Mart has started to do with its in-store clinics. But most companies are silent and afraid to tackle the medical power structure. The Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Businesses seem reluctant to challenge both the monopolies and the current system. Lessons from the experiences of other nations are certainly available, but most Americans are ignorant of them and still believe claims that "our system is the best." It may be "best" for Medicare, some Medicaid recipients, congressmen, state and federal government employees, and the military, but then they already have "socialized" medicine; they just don't pay most of the costs.

I'm not sure exactly what can be done about the current mess. Public policy that enshrines health care as a right does not seem like a great plan, though. It would further separate the health-care payments citizens make from the goods and services meted out, muffling useful price signals. And it would further insulate government officials controlling the goodies from competition, feedback, and new ideas. That always works out well, huh?

I watched the debate with my buddy, a few friends of his, and some friends of theirs. I was pretty much the only right-of-center person in the room, but I feel safe in saying that we all had more pointed, concrete things to say about The Issues than either man in the hot seat tonight. (And Tom Brokaw seriously needs a different surgeon.) I'm still voting McCain--at this point, nothing would make me trust Obama with the presidency--but between the jabbering about ending dependency on foreign oil and the nattering about using federal power to play Mr. Fix-it with the economy, I was (even more) glad (than usual) for the nectar of the grape. Ugh.

Added later: Will Wilkinson:

Holy god there is nothing more important than not trading with foreigners for energy. Double the Peace Corps, so we can renew America, because there is no non-state way to do that.

Ann Althouse takes issue with Andrew Sullivan's sardonic comments about Sarah Palin's winking during the debate. Althouse specifically tackles this Rich Lowry post, in which he admits to finding Sarah Palin sexy. Althouse makes a good point, but she doesn't seem to remember this post by Sullivan himself a few years ago. About a VP candidate. In a debate.

Well, I could easily be wrong, but I have a feeling Cheney will crush Edwards tonight. The format is God's gift to Daddy. They'll both be seated at a table, immediately allowing Cheney to do his assured, paternal, man-of-the-world schtick that makes me roll on my back and ask to have my tummy scratched. (Yes, I do think that Cheney is way sexier than Edwards. Not that you asked or anything.)

Your day's complete now, right?

Personally, I don't see why we shouldn't take note of a politician who's unusually hot; it's not as if Washington were so chock-a-block with irresistible sexpots that we'd run the risk of being distracted indefinitely from economic, geopolitical, and energy policy. Corn subsidies are at least as sexy as the average member of congress.

Eric, BTW, notes that Palin's winking is not exactly precedent-setting.

I didn't go into the debate thinking Sarah Palin was either (1) the august Saint Jane of Sixpack, whose Middle-American horse sense is worth ten times its weight in Yale degrees and who has the stuff to remake Washington completely while one hand dandles a baby and the other cleans a rifle or (2) the dumbest religious-rightest bitch ever nominated for anything ever who can't even make sentences and OMG have you seen those glasses and what does she think this is a Pantene commercial and that Valley-Girl-from-the-North-Country accent gives me hives and AAARRRGGGGGGHHHH?!

I like Palin. I think