Thank you TSA and Aeroflot

My wife left for Russia today, taking the kids with her. They'll return in late July.

I just wanted to say that I found TSA at Dulles Airport to be very helpful and considerate, both when I contacted them by email some months ago, and when we dealt with them in person today. A thank you to a bunch of civil servants whose job is definitely not easy.

Thank you also to the Aeroflot personnel who were helpful and even personable (!). We appreciate it.

Now, don't go and make my wife's life miserable on the flight, because I will update this!

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Is this what a "healthy Conservative party" looks like?

The healthy, modernized Conservative party of Britian… still can't muster enough votes to govern.

Over the last few months, I've read a lot of commentary about how a healthy, modernized conservative movement in the United States would look and sound like Cameron's Conservatives in the UK. I really, really hope that this election result puts an end to all that. The United States cannot now, and never could be, modeled after Great Britain. (I seem to recall a bit of a disagreement over that a couple of centuries ago.)

Contrast this to Berlusconi's party put up solid wins in Italy's recent regional elections, despite a poor economy, scandal, and all the rest.Should Republicans look to Italy's, uhm, "healthy" conservative party for inspiration on how to win elections? If so, God help us all.

Update: Some commentators now argue that the result in the UK validates their arguments, since the percentage of Conservative voters increased over the 2005 election, from 9 million to 11 million. Given the supposedly atrocious state of things in Britain (which many of them trumpeted, at least) I find the argument unconvincing.

I prefer a different comparison: that from 1974 to 1979. A healthy Conservative Party would be a Conservative Party that could grow from 10 million to 14 million voters.

Some have argued that there simply aren't that many voters who might vote Conservative. There's a point to this: just add up the number of Labour and Liberal Democrat votes. Fair enough, but I don't see how this helps the larger argument: if the Conservative "brand" is such that there's no way to win 14 million votes in Britain, then it isn't a healthy party. Period, full stop.

Neverthemore, the United States and the United Kingdom are two different entities. Should American conservatism modernize? Absolutely. But there are different ways to modernize it, and those who advocate Cameron-style Conservatism strike me as profoundly unconvincing.

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What do Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts have in common?

Easy: they were three of the largest of the original 13 states. Smaller states like Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Hampshire so feared the power of a Congress that was purely representational that the writers of the Constitution created the Senate precisely so that smaller states could obstruct the ambitions of larger ones.

All three, moreover, have contributed important statemen and presidents to our nation. Between them, Virginia and Massachusetts have contributed almost a third of the men who have served in the land's highest office. New Jersey has sent only one man to the White House, Grover Cleveland. Unless you count Woodrow Wilson, who was no one to sneeze at, and in any case was born in Virginia.

These days, the three states aren't especially large. They have roughly the same number of Representatives in the House: 10 for MA, 11 for VA, and 13 for NJ. As such, statewide elections in these three states rarely attract national interest. Everyone knows that New York and California are where all the important stuff happens. After all, they have large populations and many more representatives, and the news media is concentrated in those two states, so it's not as if these three middling states should be of national interest, right?

…uhm, right?

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If you're going to do something, do it well

A conversation between my wife and me.

Are you ashamed sometimes of America when you are abroad?

I'm not, but some Americans are ashamed when they go abroad.

Why?

Well, they still believe the old Soviet propaganda.

Какой propaganda?

That we're the single greatest cause of evil in the world.

Это не propaganda. You should be proud of yourselves at being the best at something.

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Results of World Cup 2010: you read it here first

FIFA drew the groups for the World Cup 2010 tournament today by lots. Over the last few years I have developed a highly sophisticated formula^* that predicts quite accurately^** the final results. I don't have time^*** to consider all the teams, but here are the ones I care about most:

1. Four years ago I stunned a fan by referring to Team USA as "a bunch of pathetic, overrated losers". The characterization was well deserved: they scored all of two goals in that year's World Cup, and one of those was an own goal by the other team, which emphasizes just how pathetic the offense was; and American fans who study the sport and ought, therefore, to have known better, overrated the team and bandied about seriously the notion that Team USA would win the thing. So, yes, in case you're wondering: I'm poking both the team and its fans.
   
   After today's draw, the same completely unreasonable speculation started. YOU READ IT HERE FIRST: Team USA will not make it out of the group rounds. After a dispiriting spanking by England in the opening game (this ain't 1950, folks) we will be shocked by Slovenia, who recently shocked Russia (no one to sneer at). At that point we'll struggle even to tie Algeria and save face. In other words, expect a repeat of the 2006 Cup.
   
   Doubt me? Here are some scores from the past few months:
   1. lost to Denmark 1-3;
   2. lost to Slovakia 0-1 (Slovakia, Slovenia, hmmm…);
   3. tied Costa Rica after falling behind 0-2;
   4. lost to Mexico in a World Cup Qualifier match 0-5.
   You read that right: 0-5, a baseball score. In a game that counted. Now Mexico isn't someone to sneer at, but they ain't exactly Cup favorites, either. No, I'm afraid we're a long ways from a win yet.
2. Speaking of England, it's England FTW. If not, they should be banned from the sport for ever. Come on, boys, even France has a title now. Win this won for God, Queen, and Country. Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the pitch! Britons never will be… uhm… kitsch?
3. Italy, whom I must root for lest my blood relatives disown me, will underperform. They won the 2006 World Cup, and there's some law of fate that Italy can't appear in consecutive cups (only Mussolini found a way to make that happen, much as only Mussolini found a way to make the Italian trains run on time, or so they say). So it's out of the question. Besides, the team hain't been the same since i notti magiche di Totò Schillaci, or (for that matter) the incomparable Gaetano Scirea.
4. Brazil fans without any connection to Brazil: that's not sporting. Fate will punish you with a performance that will teach you to pick an underdog for once and learn what real fandom is. Honestly, you're no better than fans of the Yankees, Cowboys, and the Northern Italian Triumvirate of Serie A.
5. Speaking of underdogs who will surprise and delight: my usual favorites are out (Romania, Poland, Russia) so I'll pick
   1. Slovenia (see above)
   2. South Africa (since at least 2002 the refs have made a habit of cheating for the home team; so France, you've just been warned)
   3. Nigeria (Diego "Hand of God" Maradona is coaching Argentina, so I'm praying for this one);
   4. Mexico (Team USA fans, your consolation is that Mexico will shine, shine, shine—if not, France may yet win).

You may be wondering whether I'm making all this up. Read the footnotes below.

Two more notes:

1. FIFA has once again designed a new ball that, they say, will increase goal scoring. Considering how well that worked last time around (the 2006 Cup featured fewer goals than the previous Cup—147 v. 161—which featured fewer than the 1998 Cup), don't expect a lot of excitement.
2. I forgot the second. Must not have been important.

---

^*This formula is designed with meticulous precision. Its primary criterion is to annoy as many soccer fans as possible. What? at least I'm honest.

^**The metric of accuracy here is my imagination.

^***(or interest)

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Nationalism

I would like very much to emphasize one of the tags below: this is a

Largely uninformed rant.

With that out of the way, I want to think aloud about this post by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy.

After reading Somin's post, I have to say that I agree with all of it except two things.

(1) The assertion,

[N]ationalism is second only to communism as the greatest evil of modern politics.

In my opinion, tribalism is the greatest evil of modern politics, greater even than nationalism. I think it explains a lot of the problems we have: hyperpartisanship (if that's a word), interest groups that hate each other so much that they work even against their own interests, so as to destroy the other, etc. Of course, that's only an opinion.

(2) The definition of nationalism,

loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.

This requires a much longer explanation.

I have never thought much about what nationalism is, except that in general I have thought that nationalist movements in lands where nations did not have states of their own were generally Good Things (Poland, East Timor, Greece, Armenia, etc.) even if tainted with bad aspects (are there any human phenomena untainted by bad aspects?), whereas nationalist movements in nation-states tend to be bad things. So I'll think aloud about it for a moment, and invite people to tell me what a moron I'm being. Or, if you prefer, what an insightful genius I'm being. But that never happens. :-)

Contrast Somin's definition of nationalism with the definition of patriotism,

loyalty to one’s government and/or its ideals regardless of ethnic or racial identity.

This is helpful because my definition of nationalism would remove one word from the one given:

loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.

That is to say, one can be nationalist without being very loyal at all to one's nation-state. Indeed, I think Somin's distinction in the definitions is a distinction without a difference; for me any nation-state is more or less identifiable with the government. This may be wrong, but it explains why, to me, one can be quite disloyal to the nation-state precisely because one is loyal to one's nation. Nationalism can favor the nation-state, for example, when none exists; on the other hand it can oppose the nation-state, for example, when it feels that the "state" part of the nation has turned against the nation or been co-opted by another nation. I have in mind things like Operation Valkyrie in Germany. As one leader of the latter put it,

It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?

To me, this is a far closer expression of nationalism than those who worked to maintain Hitler in the name of the nation-state, or to subjugate other nations in service of one's own.

Somin was replying to a weblog entry of Jonah Goldberg at National Review's Corner. To be honest, I didn't entirely understande Goldberg's argument that Thanksgiving is a nationalist holiday as opposed to a patriotic holiday—I kind of get it, but I kind of don't—but it does look to me as if Goldberg is working from the definition I give here of nationalism, rather than Somin's. He writes,

The Fourth of July, President’s Day, and even Veterans’ and Memorial Day are celebrations of the nation-state created by the American founding. In short, our other holidays are about patriotism, not nationalism. …[O]ne reason for [this country's] greatness, too often forgotten, is that it is ours. [emphasis added]

Goldberg explicitly identifies patriotism with the nation-state, and implies that nationalism refers to the people and culture who make up that nation-state, regardless of whether they actually had a state.

To follow through, I don't think a nation can be healthy without a healthy nationalism, as opposed to the unhealthy nationalisms described by Somin. By contrast, there is a very unhealthy anti-nationalism that poisons a nation's institutions, so that its history, culture, and genuine achievements of a nation are forgotten, ignored, or discounted so much that the institutions inculcate disdain of the nation and its traditions rather than love for it. And I think both of these can, and probably must, exist at the same time, but that healthy nationalism must be nurtured in order to stave off unhealthy nationalism.

This though comes from my observations and interactions of the inhabitants of several nations: Italy, Russia, and the United States:

1. Fascism so poisoned the Italian notion of nationalism that (in my experience) Italians usually display flags only when the national soccer team wins a game. In Italy, the flag is a national symbol more than a patriotic symbol: the combination of green-white-red has existed in some form as an Italian flag since the Risorgimento, and the tricolor was the de facto symbol of the Italian nation since shortly after Napoleon. Admittedly, Italians never had a very strong sense of an Italian nation, with reason (Cavour's famous remark comes to mind), but I think this would only strengthen my argument.
   
   Italians do value many aspects of their culture (religion, cuisine, fashion), so by my reckoning Italians maintain a half-hearted nationalism. But even "Italian" cuisine varies greatly by region, and my experience with Italians is that they value their nation too lightly, especially when thinking of how they can solve their problems. Italians tend to have a can't-do attitude, that their problems will always plague them and their nation will not be great.
2. Russians, on the other hand, take the assertions of anti-Russian bigots far too seriously, even while rejecting them far too thoroughly. Serious achievements in the sciences and the exploration of space are so thoroughly forgotten that Russian films portray older Russians asking younger ones, Do you know the name Gagarin? Of course not, why would you? That is a serious lack of nationalism that leads to the unhealthy militarism and bigotry that people wrongly confuse with nationalism.
   
   Thus Russia allows me to try and distinguish what Somin has, I think, confused: nationalism and militarism are not the same thing. Nationalism in general relates to a nation, which can be independent of a state. The Polish nation, for example, existed even when the Polish state had been dismembered in the Partitions of Poland. The militaristic bigotry that manifests itself in many ways, such as the nostalgia for Stalin, is not nationalism if for no other reasons than (a) Stalin was not Russian, and (b) a major animus of the Soviet Union (indeed, of Communist ideology) was to subsume and eliminate nationalistic divisions. I would characterize this as nostalgia for the old patriotism, not as nationalism.
3. In the United States, it is far too common to hear and read remarks along the lines of,

   There is no greater cause of evil in the world than the United States.

   Never mind the blatant untruth of the statement, the attitude expressed by these words completely and utterly discounts, even disdains, the genuine good accomplished by the United States in the world—not so much in military matters (that's an argument I simply do not wish to take up) but in science, culture, the promotion of freedom merely by example, and so forth.

I'm having a hard time expressing my thoughts in those examples, but I hope I'm getting the idea across. Anyway, at this point I'd be very interested in readers' opinions: are my definitions correct, or are Somin's closer to the matter?

Update: Goldberg replies to Somin here. He touches on some of my points, even mentioning tribalism, but seems to contradict my understanding of his notion of nationalism. This is why definitions are, in any discussion, essential.

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There is such a thing as good government

Today I spotted on one of the chalkboards in a hallway,

Wake up America, before you lose all your freedoms! How can the "Fed" fix your grandmother's heart when it can't even fix the pothole in front of your driveway?

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that the "Fed" doesn't fix potholes on local roads: that would be the state and local governments.

That aside, the author had a point. In these parts, the local governments are always complaining that they don't have enough money to perform basic services like, say, fixing potholes on local roads, or putting lights on local roads. When they do spend money, they do it in slipshod ways: interstate highways in Mississippi have short acceleration lanes, and I have yet to see a rest stop (not counting the "Welcome Center" at the border). Every other state in the union has rest stops; God alone knows what Mississippi does with that money.

Don't get me started on how they paint the roads around here. It's like they're asking for accidents.

But hey, however bad it is here, at least we're not as badly run as California.

California, which is struggling to close a $24.3 billion budget gap, faces the prospect of a "multi-notch" downgrade in its credit rating if the state's legislature fails to act quickly to produce a budget, Moody's Investors Service warned on Friday. …The state's current A2 credit rating is Moody's sixth-highest investment grade and makes California the lowest rated of the 50 states.

The A2 rating is just five notches above speculative status and Moody's raised the potential for the rating to tumble toward "junk" status…

(emphasis added)

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Brainwashed into counting

My wife related the following story to me. Our now three-year old daughter wanted a snack, so my wife gave her five M&M's. My wife also seized the opportunity to review counting & colors, so in Russian they said the colors, then counted:

раз, два, три, четыре, пять!

Immediately afterwords, my daughter laid our her five treasures on the table, and started counting again:

One, two, three, four, five!

…just like that, in English.

You think you know where I'm going with this, but you're only partly right. Yes, my daughter is a genius because she can count in two languages.

Rather, my question is: Who taught her to count in English? My wife uses only Russian with them, and I didn't. I use only Russian or Italian with my daughters.

The only answer I can fathom is, PBS (Sesame Street et al). My daughter watches it frequently.

Similarly, she also says sometimes, Come here! or Come on! Again, where did she pick that up? Neither I nor my wife says it to anyone. We generally say, Иди к сюда! and I sometimes say, Vie' cca! (Gaetano/Nnapulitano) or Vieni qua! (Italian, if I'm losing patience).

Again, you think you know where I'm going with this, but now you're wrong. I'm not about to laud the educational value of television, especially of Sesame Street and other shows broadcast by PBS. Yeah, yeah, that's all true, and you should donate, even if they seem magically exempt from the law mandating a switch to digital. (The local PBS continues to broadcast in analog. As usual, the government excepts favored clients from its own regulations.)

What I really want is to point this out: The next time someone tells you that sex and violence on television do not affect the viewer, think about how my daughter is learning to speak English.

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Two neat, surprising reports

Both from the Washington Post:

• Early marriage is better than delaying marriage. What matters more than either is a mature view of marriage.

  The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success.
  
  …Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life.

  Something the author doesn't mention has been on my mind lately: the glorification by the media of unmarried life, a great source of emotional insecurity.
  
• Americans who stop attending churches largely do so because they lose interest (well, that's my choice of words: the article actually says, "a gradual spiritual drift") and not because of scandal or disillusionment.

  Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had "just gradually drifted away" from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently not associated with a faith said that, over time, they stopped believing in their religion's teachings.

  On the other hand, I'm not so sure about this quote in the article:

  The results are a "big indictment" of organized religion, said Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of a book on evangelical leaders.

  I'd love to see the context of that quote. What, exactly, is the indicment for? The usual whipping boy: insufficient hospitality? It seems that mainline chuches are suffocating us with attempts at artificial hospitality. There may be a point that there isn't a sufficiently strong sense of community, but that's not an easy thing to build. I've found myself least comfortable at churches that beat their chests about their great communities.
  
  On the other hand, my son's school requires service hours from the parents, not just the students. So there I was Saturday morning, digging holes for trees with two other fathers and the school principal. I've gotten to know more men in the Church through the school's Dad's Club than through the "grip and grin" that precedes many Masses, and the hospitality hours than postcede them.
  
  Maybe churches should start requiring service to the parish from their members? The Mormons require it of men who turn 18, and that's worked well for them at least. Yet requiring service seems to smack against a few harangues in St. Paul's epistles.
  
  Clearly it's been a mistake to drop the hellfire and brimstone sermons: when people were scared of hell, they didn't allow themselves to fall into "gradual spiritual drift," whatever that is.
  
  That's a joke. I suspect the zeitgeist myself, but what do I know?

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Italian editorial on Durban II

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has published a blistering critique of the upcoming United Nations Conference on Racism. I suspect that Magdi Allam had a hand in writing it. (Not an Italian name, that. Follow the link!) I translate some excerpts here; the entire essay is here. I'll make a few remarks after the editorial.

---

Those who appear this time are wrong

The United Nations Conference on racism opens today in Geneva under the worst of auspices. Western nations are now divided. The United States, Israel, Canada, Australia, and Italy have confirmed that they will not participate, inasmuch as there are no guarantees that the Conference, whose preparatory labors were dominated by Islamic nations, even this time will not conclude in an act of accusation against Israel and aginst the West, as occurred at the previous Durban conference in 2001. Holland and Germandy also turned away at the last minute. Great Britan and France, instead, have decided to show up. Likewise the Vatican. The Iranian president Ahmadinejad has already arrived in Geneva, and has been received with full honors by the highest Swedish authorities—which prompted a strong protest from Israel—and will be among the first to deliver words from the platform the UN has placed at his disposal.

Clearly, many things have gone awry, if at a conference on racism which ought to express the United Nations' task to defend human rights, can take with impunity the word of a man who calls the Holocaust an "invention" and presides over a regime whose typical operation is the assassination of hundreds of political opponents.

However the conference concludes, we can already draw three conclusions from this turn of events. The first is that if the West splits, those who aim to use international institutions as an anti-Western tool have an easy game. …

The second lesson is that human rights cannot be separated easily from the Western cultural background that generated them. … Indeed, it is in the name of "human rights" that the Islamic nations, according to the definition that they give these words, today try impose on the whole West a drastic limitation of freedom of speech and of the press, raising legal barriers that render it impossible to criticize Islam. They tried to do it with Resolution 62/154 in the United Nations Assembly. They returned to this battle during the preparatory labors of the document that should be approved by the Geneva conference, retreating only before Western protests. Whoever imagines that human rights are "transcultural", rather than understood culturally, that they are therefore a minimal common denominator that everyone shares, ought to reflect, for example, on what compatibility there can ever be between human rights in the way that Westerners understand them and the way that Sharia, the traditional Islamic law, understands them.

The third lesson that we can draw from the mess of the Geneva Conference regards the impossibility of separating human rights from politics. … In particular, the presence of Ahmadinejad in Geneva bears attention. Obviously, no sane person expects from his speech a contribution to the "war against racism". Instead they will try to read between the lines and understand whether he gives some signal of flexibility on the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program and on other Middle Eastern issues apart from the regime that Ahmadinejad represents, or if his reply to the overtures of the American president Obama have already been expressed in their entirety in the eight year sentence inflicted on the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi. Naturally, knowing that Ahmadinejad is in any case a president running out of time, and that he must face the electorate's judgement next June.

Paradoxically, the conference on racism has however already obtained one result: it has offered the president of a regime that has little respect for human rights—however one defines them—an international platform from which to begin his personal electoral campaign.

---

My remarks:

1. The former president was commonly reviled for spurning international institutions, but as the editorial makes clear, these institutions were showing systematic problems before Bush invaded Iraq, and even before he began his "war on terror". Aside from its charity work, the United Nations has become, for all intents and purposes, an unreformable joke. That was my opinion back during the 80s, when I was an idiotic teenager, and since then I have seen no reason to believe otherwise.

2. Why is Roxana Saberi not receiving more attention in the American press? Elian Gonzalez received more attention in the American press than Roxana Saberi. Saberi is, at the least, a good example of why we need to care about what goes on in the world: we travel into the world, and some of those crazy people we'd rather avoid happen to live out there, much as those crazy people we'd rather avoid live in neighborhoods we have to drive through. She was born in the United States, and so is a "natural" US citizen, but

Saberi holds both Iranian and US citizenship, although the Iranian authorities do not recognise dual nationality and were believed to be treating her as one of their own nationals.

They might as well, since our press doesn't seem to care about them.

3. The current administration has made a show of "pressing the reset button" with all manner of distasteful regimes, even to the point of presenting a "reset" button to the Foreign Minister of Russia—although the button actually read "overcharged", not "reset". Maybe Obama should have retained Condoleeza Rice at State: for all her supposed faults, at least she is fluent in Russian, which seems to be more than we can say for the people in charge there now.

3. We were told for eight years that the ideological incompetents were only among the neocons in the Bush administration, and that the Democrats would restore sanity in foreign relations. Writing in the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl suggests otherwise. This particular fact is troubling—and like Roxana Saberi, the Western media is largely ignoring it:

Obama offered the Kremlin a new arms control agreement while putting missile defense and NATO expansion on a back burner. Yet in recent weeks Russia has deployed thousands of additional troops as well as tanks and warplanes to the two breakaway Georgian republics it has recognized, in blatant violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended last year's war. The threat of another Russian attack on Georgia seems to be going up rather than down.

Obama sent a conciliatory public message to Iranians, and the United States joined in a multilateral proposal for new negotiations on its nuclear program. The regime responded by announcing another expansion of its uranium enrichment facility and placing an American journalist on trial for espionage. Obama told Iraqis that he would, as long promised, use troop withdrawals to pressure the government to take over responsibility for the country. Since he made that announcement, violence in Iraq has steadily increased.

But hey, chins up over at the post! I'd think you guys would be elated that Sarah Palin isn't President. —er, Vice-President. Who was the presidential nominee on her ticket again? Some old dude with lots of experience in foreign relations? Thank God we don't have that dinosaur in office now, eh?

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Best Superbowl Ad, 2009

The best Superbowl ad was this one:

YouTube is having a competition on the best Super Bowl ad; you can view them and vote here.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

The best shoulda been Superbowl ad was this one—which NBC thought, for some reason, was "controversial".

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The first scandal-free, lobbyist-free administration...

…oh, never mind.

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Worse than Italians trying to figure out the Euro

I was in Italy in January 2002, when they began their three-month switch from the lira to the Euro. Italians handled it true to form: they ignored the news as long as possible, and found themselves completely confused during the three-month period of the changeover. Despite the fact that the nth Berlusconi government had sent to every Italian household a free calculator that converted between lira and Euro, and that the conversion was relatively simple besides, most people had no idea what the conversion rate was. Everyone was convinced that it was just a huge scam to rob them of their money. It's hard to blame them when the news published evidence of government agencies pricing fees and bus fares at twice the proper rate.

My aunt works in a bank, and for an entire week she ended up working from dawn to dusk. (If this doesn't amaze you, you are unfamiliar with southern Italian culture.) The Post Office ran out of money, and had to stop all business. Talk about inconvenient: the Italian Post Office is also where people go to pay utility bills and collect government checks. It took me two hours to mail two postcards, and that was a couple of days after the day I gave up.

I used to find all that amusing. Looking at our switch to digital television broadcasting, however, I find myself less amused. Too many people have put off important decisions until the last minute. Worst among the bunch of rank incompetents is our fine Congress.

You doubt me? Upon hearing that there isn't enough money to pay for all the coupons that citizens requested for digital-to-analog converter boxes, these jokers are seriously considering delaying the transition by another four months, incurring, however inadvertently, punishment on everyone who had their acts together in time.

The sensible thing would have been to allot only one coupon per household. That aside, this same Congress has no qualms about robbing our grandchildren in order to blow $825 billion on a so-called stimulus package—seeing how well the government's last two interventions went, one wonders if the only stimulus they're aiming for is at the polling station—yet they can't find it in their hearts to fund the $160 million that it would take to send out coupons to the last 2 million households who need them. (That's one-fifth of one percent of the money they're planning to spend anyway.)

Welcome to the United States, where we make Berlusconi's governments look competent.

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A party that deserves to lose elections

I thought I'd be happy that the Republican Party would oppose the bloated SCHIP bill making its way through Congress. After all, something's wrong with a bill that thinks my children need government-subsidized health insurance.

But no, the Republicans are quite happy with yet another massive expansion of entitlements. No, they're up in a lather that the bill would allow benefits to legal immigrants. I repeat: legal immigrants. That's right: rather than oppose what's truly wrong with the bill, Republicans have decided to represent themselves as opponents of all those welfare cheats coming here from abroad. People like, say…my wife and son, who have been here fewer than 5 years, and certainly didn't come in order to live high on the US Welfare State—but, should something should happen to me, they will find themselves in dire straits, regardless of the taxes that I've been paying.

When the Republicans lose in 2010, they will have deserved it richly.

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"Why, yes, I would like a creepy adventure!"

I traveled to San Diego today for work-related reasons. Rather than take the $25 shuttle to the hotel, I inquired about mass transit, like a bus. I'd like to say that I wished to express my solidarity with the ordinary people, but no, I just wanted to see a bit of the town. Ironically, I arrived after sunset. I took the bus anyway. Let me start out by saying that San Diego is one of the friendliest towns I've visited. A teenager saw me looking in dismay at a schedule, asked me what bus I wanted, and when I explained that the bus I wanted appeared to have stopped running half an hour prior, he offered me good advice. That's happened to me in New York City, too. Yes—the same New York City that was founded on Manhattan Island. I managed to find a few nice people living there, and God Himself didn't manage to do that when he visited Sodom and/or Gomorrah (I forget which, and don't care to look it up, but hey I'm Catholic so it's a miracle I know any Bible stories anyway, right?). So New York City has that going for it, anyway.

Americans don't value mass transit enough. Where else could one witness the following conversation between an unshaven, ill-dressed man fifteen to twenty years my senior, and a well-groomed, fashionably dressed woman fifteen to twenty years my junior? I'll leave it to the reader to guess who says which words.

[after answering a question by the other] So you're on an adventure, eh?

A nod, and a nervous smile.

I don't know if you'd be interested, but I could accompany you on your adventure, and maybe make it more interesting…*

The smile sinks into an aghast expression. No, I'm not really up for that.

Yeah… (a shrug) I'm not either; I just thought I'd put it out there, and see what happened.

What answer did the guy expect? I didn't ask.

---

*To be honest, I'm not sure those were his exact words (it's been a couple of hours) but they're not far from them.

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Bitterness, patriotism, and my "loser mug"

I'm trying not to be too bitter about Senator McCain's loss, and I'm failing miserably.

I'm happy for Senator Obama's victory, and his supporters' joy makes me smile. The vast majority of them are neither morons, nor socialists, nor terrorists, nor anti-Semites, nor convicted felons (have I left anything out?) but good, decent, hard-working people. They made a choice, and I respect their choice, even while I disagree with it. I hope they'll have the decency to concede likewise that I didn't vote for McCain only because I'm some sort of closet racist, or someone who hates paying his taxes. (For the record: I have, in some years, consciously paid more taxes than I had to.)

I have wanted to hammer the media for their grossly biased coverage of the campaign, and I feel no regrets for that—my outrage, vice though it may be, burns undimmed and unrepented—but it's probably gone on way too long now, so I'll try to put a stop to it.

I'll admit readily that the McCain campaign made several bad errors. I was profoundly disappointed by McCain's performance in the first debate. Readers might have caught that in this entry:

I was most impressed by Jim Lehrer's questions, especially the one asking the candidates how they'd change their priorities due to the financial crisis and the likely bailout. …The surest sign that it was a great question is that both candidates ducked it.

One reason I like McCain so much is that, in general, he answers such questions honestly and frankly. Consider the primary season: McCain told Iowans that he didn't believe the government should subsidize ethanol, and lost Iowa to Huckabee. McCain told Michiganders that thousands, perhaps millions, of manufacturing jobs that had been lost were irreplaceably gone, and lost Michigan to Romney. The same trait that lost McCain Iowa and Michigan worked in other states. One journalist, I forget who, described McCain back then as having the uncanny ability to tell people things they didn't want to hear, and to make them respect him for saying such things.

For some bizarre reason, that characteristic of McCain disappeared after the Republican convention. McCain could easily have answered Lehrer's question truthfully and honestly. He didn't, and it cost him. An insightful journalist (I forget who this one was, too) once wrote that McCain can't speak insincerely: when he does, you know it, and he knows you know it. McCain's response to that question struck me as insincere: I suspect that it struck all the viewers as insincere, and he knew we knew he was being insincere. In my uninformed opinion, that one failure doomed an otherwise brilliant campaign.

All that aside, McCain did something wonderful: for the first time in my life, I voted for a presidential candidate, rather than against one. I had to put aside the post-convention McCain and remember the old McCain, but I did it, and voted for that guy, and felt proud about my vote. I carried my McCain mug to the office the next day and walked around with it, joking with a colleague that I was sporting my "loser mug".

I'm not that unhappy to have lost. Obama has also done something wonderful, although I'd rather not resurrect the ugly barrier he broke by naming it. I do regret many of the policies he promises, and I'm amazed at the credulity of many of his fans. Unlike McCain, Senator Obama delivers insincerity with such polish and panache that I suspect his fans failed even to notice it. Usually political arguments involve an unspoken acknowledgment of a politician's insincerities, and bend over backwards to accommodate them. Senator Obama's advocates have an amazing trait: they seem not even to notice the man's whoppers.

I met lots of people like this, but rather than pick on them I'll beat a dead horse and turn again to the media. I remain flabbergasted that the Washington Post's editorial page criticized Obama one month for using the economic crisis to score political points against Bush and McCain, then a month later endorsed Obama, specifically identifying a supposed refusal on his part to use the economic crisis to score political points—never mind their own previous reporting and editorializing to the contrary!

It may be Machiavellian to say this, but the inability to be insincere is probably a fatal flaw in a president. Senator Obama was no more insincere than any other politician in a presidential campaign—his turnabout on accepting public funds is merely one of many examples—but he pulled each one off with such polish and panache that maybe it's for the better, in a worldly sense. Perhaps his ability to lie with a straight face is what people mean by the "temperament" required to be president.

Time will tell. I love my country, so I hope he's a successful president. I'd even be happy to accept some real socialism if it would contribute to his success—but it wouldn't.

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What is Conservatism?

In the comments to one of his posts, Clemens asks me

But here is the real question if we accept what you say:what is the Conservative movement today? Is there a 'conservative' party? If the two Bushes were not conservatives, then how effective is the movement in projecting its agenda? …I think you regard yourself as a 'true' conservative, mainly on fiscal matters but also social matters. Where do folks like you fit in? Or can you make the argument that a McCain/Palin administration would actually be that rare beast, a Conservative enterprise?

I'll do my best to answer briefly, but out of order. I'll also say a bit more besides, in my pseudo-scholarly habit of preferring the pedantic to the plain-spoken. [In review, I fear the pedantic and the personal obscure the substantive. I've spent too much time on this by now to delete it.]

1) The question of my political identity is interesting. My political identity is this: I am confused.

I do not consider myself a conservative, much less a "true" conservative. The fact that I dreamed wistfully for a President McCain during most of the past 8 years, while "true" conservatives invested energy into vicious and grossly unfair attacks reminiscent more of the mainstream media than of Buckley's wit, will hopefully clarify that.

I did consider myself a conservative many years ago. I'm sure most people would label me a conservative. I have conservative instincts, but becoming a Catholic tempered these instincts. I might like to call myself a believer in Christian Democracy but the more I read of the Christian Democrat parties, the less enamored I become of the term.

I do know that I am not a liberal, not even an "enlightened" liberal, as my father calls himself. I also don't think of myself as either moderate or libertarian.

The only identity I've much held to is Catholicism, but I don't think most Catholics would recognize me as one of them, and a priest once told me that I had a "Lutheran" view of human nature.* Anyway, the point is that I try to let my Catholicism inform, and "convert", my politics. That doesn't mean that I succeed!

2) Is there a "conservative party"? In New York there is one, and you see how effective they've been. Likewise the Green Party and the Libertarians. There is no surer guarantee of political irrelevance than building a political party that is ideologically "pure". This isn't Europe, after all.

People who describe themselves as "true" conservatives are like people who describe themselves as "true" Christians: self-aggrandizing liars who succeed only in besmirching the brand.** It's a miracle McCain runs within 10% of Obama according to current polls, considering that every other column by George Will seeks to depict him as unfit for public office, every other rant by Rush Limbaugh excoriates him as a Republican In Name Only, half the comments on National Review effectively roll eyes at him, and the media has done its best to portray him as wanting to continue the policies of the current president. On the one hand, the conservative media discourages conservatives from voting for him; on the other hand, the moderate media discourages moderates from voting for him. As I wrote some time ago, I considered myself a "true" conservative twenty years ago, but I don't think I would have comprehended how so many conservatives fell over themselves to praise Jesse Helms, who loved earmarks and corporate welfare and opposed free trade, and hold their nose at John McCain, who supports free trade, opposed earmarks so strenuously that he has never requested one, and opposes corporate welfare. Unfortunately Buckley has passed on, so we'll never know his feelings.

3) I am not sure that an increasingly hypothetical McCain/Palin administration would be a "Conservative" enterprise. Most conservative complaints about McCain are ignorant (pretty much anything on immigration—and I say that even though I disagree with McCain on immigration), but some conservatives have good, principled complaints (Will on campaign finance reform). I do think a McCain administration would be far different from the Bush/Cheney administration, and certainly more conservative.

4) Why do I say that? At a minimum, a "conservative" president would support a major new entitlement at any level of government only with reluctance. This separates both Presidents Bush from President Reagan.

• The first Bush believed in a "thousand points of light", a "kinder, gentler government", and all that other rot. He wanted to be known as "the Education President" (the conservative Congress of a few years later tried unsuccessfully to abolish the Department of Education).
• The second President Bush campaigned on "compassionate conservatism" and advocated vigorous government involvement in many sectors, including (but not limited to) health care and education. He has eagerly created new entitlements and expanded government intervention. I have a hard time squaring this with any aspects of conservatism.
• I also don't recall McCain's ever having advocated a new entitlement, which in my opinion is the best sign that he is a conservative, but I could be wrong.

5) What is conservatism, anyway? Should a conservative identify with cutting taxes or cutting the deficit? With pro-life and socially conservative policies, or libertarianism? With unlimited gun rights, or with quiet streets? With an aggressive foreign policy that incorporates nation-building, with realpolitik, or with isolationism?

Historically there has been much tension between conservatives on any of these questions, and conservatives once debated these ideas spiritedly. Buckley favored legalization of marijuana and perhaps even discarding the war on drugs; while one NR author (I forget who exactly) advocated legalizing homosexual marriage fifteen years ago.

The eagerness with which self-described "true" conservatives hold any stain of compromise in disdain makes them ignore legitimate debates within the conservative movement itself. The obsession with lowering taxes has led them to argue that one proof that McCain is not a conservative is that he opposed the Bush tax cuts. The fact that he favored another set of tax cuts appears to be immaterial. I recently heard Rush Limbaugh deride Ross Douthat's proposals in Grand New Party as surrendering to the liberals, accompanied with the trademark sounds he uses to indicate his disdain: balling up paper and tapping impatiently on the table (or perhaps on the microphone, but it sounds as if he's tapping on the table).

Coupled with this is convenient memory loss. Of course all sides tend towards this (progressives with eugenics and their fascist tendencies, for example) but I find it odd that today conservatives criticize the president of South Africa for questioning whether HIV causes AIDS. If memory serves, twenty years ago National Review published articles siding with that point of view.

6) I will try to answer the question posed at the beginning of (5). In the American context, conservatism has generally meant primarily:

• Federalism. The Federal government should not try to solve every problem. In fact, it cannot. Very often, the Federal government makes things worse by meddling. My father (who would not describe himself as a conservative) exhibits this attitude very well when he criticizes the progressive instinct on public housing, welfare, and the rest with words to this effect:

  When you spend thirty years throwing trillions of dollars at a problem, and the problem only worsens, then the most you can say for those government programs is that they did nothing. What is more likely is that they made the problem worse.

  I myself would criticize a similar progressive instinct this way:

  We should not measure compassion by how many dollars are spent, but by how many people are freed from their burdens. Whose policies made our country richer and freer: LBJ's or Clinton's?

  I use "Clinton" because (this may surprise you) I think that the last 6 years of the Clinton administration was one of the more conservative administrations of our time. Clinton takes pride, for example, in his successful reform of Welfare, etc., but it wasn't even on his radar until a conservative Congress forced him to do it, much of it using an idea that conservatives were really big on back then: block grants to the States.
  
  Many problems are best left to communities that can adapt and experiment more quickly: state or local levels, churches, etc. Based on this, a lot of conservatives have opposed in principle the actions of Republican presidents: high military spending, the War on Drugs, Medicare Part D, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Iraq War(s). (I myself did not support the second Iraq War, but we're talking about conservatives, not about me.) Similarly, I support a minimum wage, but oppose it at the federal level. After all, the cost of living in Los Angeles is not the same as the cost of living in Hattiesburg. The minimum wage should be set by states, or better yet by localities. Otherwise we find ourselves in the current situation where the minimum wage is set far too low for someone working in Los Angeles, although it may be a living wage for people in parts of Mississippi. Since it's too low for LA, everyone makes a complaint that I consider ridiculous: the federal government should raise the minimum wage.
• Small government. Even when government action is the most appropriate venue for a certain challenge, it should not overreach, especially at the federal level.
  
  "Small" government does not mean "incompetent" government, even if the Bush administration did its best to conflate the two ideas. The Clinton administration, for example, declared (again, once it faced a conservative Congress) that "the era of big government is over", and set about streamlining government, shrinking the bureacracy, and in general co-operating with ideas Reagan had been unable to implement due to a Congress that believed strongly that the purpose of government was re-election, which required massive spending.
  
  The larger a government grows, the larger the potential for incompetence and corruption. "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely," as Lord Acton famously remarked. People talk a lot about the incompetence and corruption of the Bush administration, but what amazes me about it is how it made us forget the incompetence and corruption of the Clinton administration. For starters, the Secretary of the Interior was held in contempt of court, the Secretary of HUD was indicted for something I forget, and a great deal besides.
  
  A lot depends on the transparence of the bureaucracy, of the legislative process, etc., but the bigger the government, the harder it is to maintain this transparence.
• Economic liberty. If government must intervene, it should do so in such a way as to minimize the effect on personal liberty. We don't need to slide into a Soviet-style centralism in any sector of public life, yet I see this happening in many sectors. Conservatives advanced a lot of good, solid ideas on how government could act without impairing economic liberty:
  • Individual retirement accounts. Many of the elderly depend on Social Security and Medicare. If they had any retirement accounts, these were maintained by their employer. God forbid the employer should, through bad management decisions, encounter financial trouble (hello, General Motors), or defraud employees of their pensions. Government privileged this relationship by taxing such employers less. Employees were dependent on the employer, and now are dependent on the federal government's "compact between generations" which approaches financial disaster.
    
    Thirty years ago or so, Congress fought over, and finally approved, the Individual Retirement Account, which allows companies to place an employee's pension in a tax-privileged account. The employee can manage it, carry the money with him to another employer, and in general not worry that upper management's penchant for multiple mansions, airplanes, and big birthday bashes will endanger his pension. I would call the IRA a conservative idea because of the economic freedom involved and the minimal bureaucracy needed to implement it, but it was introduced before conservative ideas had gained much publicity.
  • Health savings accounts. In a manner similar to pensions, employers often cover their employees' health insurance, partly as a recruitment tool, and partly as a tax advantage. USM offers me two options: a traditional plan or a health savings account. I've chosen the latter. In this circumstance, I maintain an account at my credit union where I save money for health expenses. The interest is tax-free and I can deduct the contributions from my taxes (but not from my income). If I choose to leave my employer, I keep the money and can use it with any health insurance plan of this sort.
    
    Regardless of my choice, however, I have a tax incentive to choose my employer's plan instead of a private plan on the open market. Why? The amount I pay in premiums for my wife and children magically disappears from my income. That's a lot of money that no longer counts as taxes (unlike the contributions I make to my Health Savings Account). If however I want to choose another health plan that is more efficient and costs me less, but which my employer won't subsidize, the amount I pay in premiums for my wife and children magically reappears in my income. I suddenly earn more money and owe more taxes. That form of government intervention makes it a lot harder for me to choose work elsewhere.
    
    In fact, government intervention has made me a slave to my employer, fearful of speaking out or doing anything that might risk my job. (Not me personally, btw, but you get the idea I hope.) Suppose I lose my job. In the intervening period, how do I pay for health insurance? COBRA helps a little, but I have to pay the premiums my employer used to pay for me. If I were free to choose my own health insurance, without the government's favoring my employer's plan for no reason better than that it's my employer's plan, then the same problem would not appear if I lost my job. I would have more "economic liberty".
    
    I'm lucky enough that my employer offers an HSA plan; many don't. I'd prefer someone else's HSA plan, to tell the truth, but I can't choose it under current tax law, because my employer only offers the State of Mississippi's health insurance. I hope we don't get sick outside of Mississippi; that's considered out-of-network. With the insurer I'd prefer, I wouldn't face this problem.
    
    One of McCain's proposals, which comes straight out of the conservative movement, and which Obama's campaign has criticized to the point of being intentionally misleading, would remove the privilege that is given to employer-provided insurance, placing it on the same level as private insurance. Under McCain's plan, I would have more economic freedom: a classical idea of American conservatism.
  • School vouchers. Our public universities are the best in the world, despite the fact that they have to compete for federal funds with private universities and colleges. A math professor at Catholic University or Notre Dame is no less likely to win a research grant than I am, despite the fact that their universities are run by churches. Likewise a bright student at Catholic University or Notre Dame is no less likely to win federal tuition assistance than a student at the University of Southern Mississippi.
    
    In contrast, our public schools are laughed at in the industrialized world, despite the fact that they have a near-monopoly on public funds for education. I cannot understand the reasoning that dictates that my son can receive federal funds to attend Catholic University or Notre Dame, but cannot receive any public assistance to attend Sacred Heart High School. I don't even receive a discount on my taxes, despite the fact that by sending him to a private school I have relieved the public schools of a burden. Appeals to the establishment clause of the Constitution make no sense when no one raises them in the context of higher education. Here, again, it has been conservatives who have sought to expand my economic freedom, while progressives have fought tooth and nail to restrict it. The same progressives who believe in public education—Obama and Biden—send their children to expensive private schools.
• Respect for the rule of law: Many of the freedoms and conveniences we take for granted are based on a respect for the rule of law. In many European countries it is generally accepted that laws are made primarily for the benefit of the governors, not of the governed, and the consequent erosion of civic sentiment, coupled with a glorification of lawbreaking, is devastating. Southern Italy and Russia come to mind.
  
  Thus conservatives tend to favor serious law enforcement, and object to activist judges' and trial lawyers' disrespect for the democratic process and the rule of law. Eroding the plain meaning of the law, whether by deciding to interpret it differently in the future according to evolved societal norms, or even to disregard it altogether, likewise erodes people's respect for the law. You can't rely on contracts (which are legal documents); you can't rely on regulators (who are bound to implement the laws and confirm that companies follow them); and so forth.

For a substantial amount of the Bush administration, Republicans acted against these principles. Many of the more ideological conservatives in Congress voluntarily renounced office, adhering to their promises of serving only two or three terms in Congress. They were replaced by people who had less disinterest, and as for the ones who broke their promises to serve only two or three terms: a few of them are now fighting in the courts.

The Republican Party sought to use government to establish a "permanent Republican majority", cozied up to lobbyists, increased entitlements, and abandoned fiscal restraint. "True" conservatives invested a lot of energy into defending men like Tom Delay, and to what end? Loyalty and patronage—a feature of corrupt politics, such as Southern politics and Democratic city machines in Chicago and Tammany Hall-era New York—outweighed good governance, and positions in the Civil Service were awarded to someone supported the President or played nice with other Republicans, not to someone actually qualified for the position.

I hope this explains why I say that McCain is the most conservative nominee for the presidency we have had since Reagan. I think it also explains why the Republican establishment, and the media conservatives, hate him: he never played nice, called them out when they abandoned their principles, fought corruption (including earmarks), etc.

I'd like to work on this more, but I don't have time, energy, or even interest. I hope it gives you a better insight into what I'm thinking though.

---

*I would sniff that my view is "Augustinian", not Lutheran, but since American Catholics have spent most of the last 40 years attempting to exorcise Augustine's spirit from the Catholic Church, to the point that "Augustinian" is, in many circles, a byword for backwards thinking and sexual repression, that won't help me.

**You will never read me referring to myself as even a "good" Christian, let a lone a "true" one. I do believe in "true" Christianity, but that's the place I hope to travel to, not the place where I find myself.

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Liberal Fascism, pt. 1 1/2

In my previous post on the topic, I mentioned the following:

This is part of the problem with conservatism as it is popularly understood: it attacks liberalism, it attacks government regulation, and it especially attacks taxes. But what does it offer? Unless your name is Terri Schiavo, it doesn't seem to offer much at all.

This is grossly unfair to conservatism, which has a lot of really good ideas that I want to see implemented.

I want to elaborate on that, and I want to do so in a way that illustrates just how grossly unfair conservatism is popularly portrayed. Here is an excerpt from an op-ed in today's Washington Post:

So [conservatives] advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." …But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems.

This should strike the reader as curious.

• Health savings accounts are underutilized. I doubt most people even know they exist, and many people who do know that they exist confuse them with Flexible Spending Accounts, where unused money reverts to the employer.
  
  I had a vague impression of HSAs, but had forgotten about them until I took my current job; USM offers a health plan that carries an HSA option. I jumped at the chance to take it, and would much rather not part with it. I'm hoping to build up enough savings in that account to switch to a lower-cost insurance plan in the near future. Unfortunately, my second daughter slowed the process of building up that account.
  
  If these had been available when I was a younger man, it would be another story. Since HSAs are only 5 years old or so, it is too early to judge their effect. I doubt anyone was convinced that IRAs would be successful after the first 5 years. If all employers offered HSAs, and if people didn't confuse them with Flexible Spending Accounts (where one cannot build wealth, and which employers are happy to offer for all-too-obvious reasons) HSAs could become quite popular.
• Handing out school vouchers: Waitaminut. I live in Mississippi, supposedly the most conservative state in the nation, and I don't have school vouchers available. In fact, I lived mostly in Virginia and North Carolina over the last decade. They're supposedly conservative too, yet they don't offer school vouchers either. What gives?
  
  On the other hand, if I lived in Washington, DC, one of the most liberal locations in the nation, I would have access to school vouchers. Likewise a few other spots (Minneapolis-St. Paul among them, as I recall). My vague understanding has been that school vouchers have been most popular with the people who use them—people who are, often enough, unable to afford private school, near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, and not traditionally identified with conservative voting habits. In spite of the vouchers, Washington DC still spends more per capita on its public schools than any other locality in the nation, and still fails to educate them.
• Privatizing social security never happened, largely because various interest groups managed to scare certain voting blocks—mislead them, often enough— and mobilize them against any reform. The closest genuine privatization I know of Social Security that actually took place is the Individual Retirement Account. According to Wikipedia, the origin of the IRA is nearly forty years ago. Again, I understand that IRA's are quite popular among people who actually have them (my father is ecstatic with his) and IRAs have made Social Security more solvent over time, not less.
  
  The only recent attempts at privatization that I know of involved proposals to allow folks like me to direct part of our Social Security tax towards an IRA-like vehicle. But, as noted, this has never once been enacted.
• Shifting government functions to private contractors: Here the author has a point, but only partially. While it's a favorite whipping boy of liberals that the Bush administration has done this, in fact the Clinton administration did an awful lot of it, with mixed results. In many cases, contracting has made things more efficient and less expensive: a good example bandied about among conservatives is the House Cafeteria, as opposed to the government-run disaster that is the Senate Cafeteria. In other cases, it has made things less efficient and more expensive, even disastrously incompetent. (Hurricane Katrina.) But the picture simply isn't as one-sided as he claims.
  
  Unfortunately, many conservatives do savage government, but I'd like to think that this is a misrepresentation of Reagan's idea. People quote Reagan's phrase, Government is not the solution to our problems; Government is the problem. But this is only a partial quote; it starts with four crucial words: In the current crisis… I maintain that Reagan was essentially correct: government is well-suited to solve certain problems, but not all of them. For the crisis the country faced then, government was not well-suited.
• Curtailing regulations on public health, safety, and more: Ah, yes. Remember President Bush's attempt to poison our children with unsafe drinking water? Government regulations on arsenic in drinking water were not considered problematic until a few weeks before President Clinton left office. That President Bush should have returned the regulations to the state they were for nearly all of President Clinton's term is a disaster.
  
  Likewise, John Stossel of ABC has an excellent documentary about our misconceptions as to how safe we really are. This shouldn't make us any less vigilant in rooting out things that are genuinely unsafe, but the drumbeat that 8 years of President Bush has made us significantly less unsafe strikes me as untenable.

Conservative ideas of reforming government are, to a large extent, much like Chesterton's quote on Christianity: It hasn't tried and failed; it hasn't even been tried.

My biggest gripe the Republican party is that, in six years of controlling both the White House and the Congress, they failed to enact any of the fascinating, genuinely conservative ideas on government reform. Instead, they spent most of their energies enacting a new "New Deal". The biggest accomplishments of the 6-year Republican hold on government was Medicare Part D and removing Saddam Hussein.* Neither of these ever struck me as especially conservative, even if a number of conservative talk show hosts in love with the president went to bat for both.

The previous six years with President Clinton and a Republican Congress enacted many more conservative ideas that not only worked, but were popular: streamlining government, for example; reforming Welfare, for another.

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*Admittedly, "removing Saddam Hussein" may not seem like an accomplishment at times, but while I was not in favor of the war, I am glad that Iraq is no longer under his thumb.

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A citizen for government waste, apparently

I recently received a mailing from Pat Summerall, or at least someone claiming to be Pat Summerall, speaking on behalf of Citizens for Government Waste. CAGW writes,

America's national debt is growing at $1 million per minute. ...What's worse, like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt—now at relatively low interest rates—roll over to higher rates. ...Use this Report to demand that members of Congress halt this spiraling debt and make as many of these needed cuts now before we face a full-blown crisis.

How am I supposed to demand it? It's quite easy, actually. My job is to sign the cover page on the special report, and send it in, preferably with $25, $50, $100, or more (presumably from my (Not) Free Money—I mean, stimulus check) to support the good work of CAGW.

So far, so good. I'm all against frivolous government spending, such as (Not) Free Money, better known as the 2008 Stimulus Checks. Pat Summerall's letter alluded to several examples of frivolous spending that got my digestive juices flowing. I opened the report to see their recommendations.

My heart sank immediately. I don't think they intended that anyone read the report. I doubt Pat Summerall read much of it. Why?

(1) The report consists of nothing more than several hundred (thousand?) recommendations of changes to make. On the right hand side they include predicted savings. The recommendations are typed in small print (is that 6 point type?!?). They are not organized in any fashion: not alphabetically, not by program, not by amount saved. It is, for all intents and purposes, unreadable.

(2) The recommendations are vague. For example, "Consolidate and reduce job training grants." How? They claim this will save $482 million in the first year, and $2.4 billion over five years. How can you justify this without details? I realize that Congress does this all the time, but isn't the point that we want to get away from that?!?

(3) Certain examples of "wasteful" spending... aren't. Here are some examples of things that, at least on the surface, do not strike me as wasteful:

• Consolidate and reduce job-training grants.
• Eliminate rural business grants.
• Eliminate the National Science Foundation Math and Science Program. (I have no idea what this means. Is this a specific program, or are they just advocating the elimination of the Math and Science programs at NSF? Which would leave... what, exactly?)
• Shorten the rental period for oxygen equipment under Medicare. (I can see the headlines now.)
• Eliminate education for Native Hawaiians.
• Reduce funds for Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) school construction. (As if we haven't mistreated the Indians enough...)
• Reduce funding for the Centers for Disease Control.
• Eliminate drug interdiction and international activities to control the supply of drugs.
• Eliminate civic education.

...it goes on. There are a lot of military cuts, too, but no one ever gets in a huff about those, so I won't mention my concern that eliminating the Joint Strike Fighter and buying new F-16s and F-18s might not be the brightest idea.

A lot of these cuts might actually have merit. The problem is that without more details, I can't understand why they think that the Centers for Disease Control is wasting money.

Ironically, CAGW warns starkly that the increase in interest payments on the national debt could lead to... a cut in basic services like Social Security and other government benefit programs, but in fact they recommend cuts to Social Security and other benefit programs. I happen to favor those, but that does seem a little hypocritical?

I personally can't sign this petition & return it, even though I think CAGW and I want the same thing. CAGW boasts that they succeeded in making Congress cut some spending some years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of the spending that they cut over the last decade was all in the wrong places—witness paperwork delays at USCIS and State Dept. for visas and passports, things that the government must do—while new promises have been made, and new programs have been enacted, more than wiping out any savings that we might have realized.

And while we're running deficits to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year, we're handing out (Not) Free Money to our citizens, and CAGW does nothing about that. I wish they'd focus on the real government waste.

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(Not) Free Money!

My high school friends always complained that I was just a little too in touch with reality to have a good time.—Okay, that's not what they said. That's what I said.

What my friends said is that I was a "pessimist", or that I had a talent for killing team spirit. All this fuss just because I had a habit of pointing out that we could, in fact, lose a match, or that maybe I wasn't as good as all that, or that there could be negative consequences to a particular course of action.

You'd infer (correctly) that my friends (all two or three of 'em) were extremely patient, tolerant folks. Not like me. Did I mention that one was an atheist, the other an agnostic? To give you an idea of what they had to put up with, one of 'em wrote in my yearbook,

To John: the only person I know
with a brain the size of a watermelon
and the personality of a fish.

I still have the yearbook, if you don't believe me. You might wonder what a Christian fellow like me was doing hanging out with infidels who wrote things like that in my yearbook. Simple, really: decent Christian folk couldn't put up with me.*

Being a big party pooper and all, I've decided to remind my readers (all one or two of you) that

There ain't no such thing
as free money!!!

That includes this so-called stimulus check coming from the government. I've already explained why this isn't free before, so I won't bother rehashing all that babble.

Still, the emphasis on heading out to a retail store and spending this (Not) Free Money puzzles me. If I choose instead to retire debt with this (Not) Free Money, that money doesn't disappear from the economy; it goes somewhere. Primarily, it goes to the lender, who presumably has a lot of employees to pay. They will almost certainly go out and spend their bonuses. Even if the greedy capitalist pig who runs the corporation keeps money to build yet another mansion, that also stimulates the economy. Someone gets paid for building that mansion.

So imagine that we all decided to use our checks to pay off debts. How could that be a bad thing? Is it bad because we would eliminate so much consumer debt that credit companies would lower their interest rates? That would also stimulate the economy, which is presumably why the Federal Reserve lowered rates so dramatically earlier this year.**

What if I simply invested my (Not) Free Money in stock, or placed it in a savings account? The money invested then goes into very healthy sorts of spending on the supply side of the spectrum, doesn't it? That's what stock is about, after all: raising money for capital investments, hiring new employees, research and development, etc. etc. Indeed, if I put it into my 403(b) (that's like a 401(k), only for people stuck at not-for-profit institutions like most universities claim to be) TIAA-CREF would invest it somewhere, probably more intelligently than I could, would earn interest, and put that back into my account. If my investment averaged only 8% interest a year in the market, that paltry sum would have grown to ten times the amount I started with once I decided to retire.

For years and decades even, scads of know-it-alls have been nagging us Americans on Business and Op-Ed pages of the newspaper that we aren't saving enough money, but are spending too much on frivolous things. Recently these scolds were hysterical about how the savings rate for the country had gone negative and what this meant.*** I think they're still going on about it, in fact.

This set people all atwitter with questions like, "How can we fix this?" Well, here we are with this (Not) Free Money, and instead of being advised to save it for The Coming Financial Apocalypse, I'm told that if I don't go out and buy a home theater system with it I am contributing to the Red Dawn or something.

Dad burn it, now I've lost my train of thought and meandered somewhere pointless. I suspect that I have as much substance at the moment as a creamy meringue. End of entry.

---

*I'm serious about decent Christian folk not being able to put up with me. I'll skip the details.

** This is where I point out that one of my credit card companies recently sent me a letter telling me that they've decided to raise my interest rate to 25%. This, despite the fact that the Fed's lower rates mean that they could lower their rates and still make money, I pay my bills on time, carry no credit card debt, and in fact haven't used that card in about two and a half years. I'd quite forgotten about the card's existence until I received this letter. Yes, I will opt out, thank you.

***In what is probably the finest moment of not listening to a know-it-all since the Trojans laughed at Cassandra, certain economists of the eternally sunny variety (seconded by some very loud would-be economists) argued that the negative savings rate was erased by the equity that Americans had in their houses. One wonders what they think now that the housing market has collapsed.

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