March 31, 2005
One thing that has fallen is the notion of the Republican Party as a bastion of federalism and limited government. Some might argue that this notion was already in doubt .. [But] widespread Republican support for legislation taking an individual case away from state judges and placing it in front of the federal judiciary [takes things to another level].The "if it saves just one life, it's worth it" argument has more typically been associated with gun-control activists, and other groups that are generally looked down upon by Republicans, but now many in the GOP seem to have picked it up as a slogan. Indeed, the entire notion of the "rule of law" -- itself once a favored slogan of conservatives -- seems to have fallen into disrepute.
One of the defining characteristics of conservatism, I thought, was a belief that one didn't know all the answers. And what about all that talk of federalism and limited government? The gist of the complaint here is that Florida has a bad law, and that Terri Schiavo made a bad marriage, neither of which are normally seen as grounds for congressional action .. Even if it's constitutional for Congress to act on individual cases when it doesn't like the outcome in state courts (itself a matter of some debate), it's hardly principled. As Donald Sensing points out, this is the sort of question that state law, and state courts, are supposed to deal with. If Congress thinks that states in general are dealing badly with these kinds of questions in a way that endangers federal constitutional rights, it is empowered to pass general legislation under the 14th Amendment. But deciding individual cases isn't something that Congress is supposed to do, and it's rather shocking to find so many "small government" Republicans supporting it ..
The leadership, at least, of the Republican Party has abandoned the principles of small government and federalism that it used to stand for. Trampling traditional limits on governmental power in an earnest desire to do good in high-profile cases has been a hallmark of a certain sort of [leftism], and it's the sort of thing that I thought conservatives eschewed .. respecting the courts' role in the system, and not rushing to overturn all the rules because we don't like the outcome, seems to me to be part of being a member of civilized society rather than a mob. I thought conservatives knew this. Before things are over, they may wish they hadn't forgotten.
March 30, 2005
(Note well that my thoughts here are my own, and I don't get paid to have them. On the other hand I appreciate the Blog Ads you'll find in the right column, and I'm impressed with their quality. By all means check them out -- I'm proud to have them on my page.
No one needs be told that the appearance of an ad does not constitute an endorsement. But I'm sure that few are surprised that a lot of these are things I'd be all to happy to endorse, whether it be Stephen Hicks' takedown of the postmodernists (on my "to read" list) or the Independent Institute's Garvey Fellowship, which has generated several high quality essays over the years.)
In 1963 a First-Class postage stamp was 5¢. By 1974 it was 10¢. Just seven years later it was 20¢. In 1991 it was 29¢. And now it goes to 39¢. All this while there have been massive productivity advances in the postal industry. These productivity increases -- without inflation -- should have driven the cost of a First-Class stamp well below a nickel. It tells you all you need to know about the mismanagement of the money supply that instead of paying less than a dollar for a sheet of 20 stamp you'll soon pay almost $8.
Check out this chart:
And so now the price of a stamp must rise. Once again.
March 29, 2005
During the Schiavo debate over the past month, one claim made about Republicans, is that there is a divide between the “traditional small- government” Republicans, and the “moral issue” Republicans, a schism between “Law & Order” Republicans and “Crusade” Republicans, from “George Will” soft speakers to “Ann Coulter” rants. We are, it is claimed, divided against ourselves. It begs the question. It should be obvious from the start of our party, that the GOP rose to meet a challenge; if we were the timid sort to accept the obscenities of Dred Scott v. Sanford, or Plessy v. Ferguson, or to allow Dixiecrats to defy the rights of millions of our citizens, or to accept the subjugation of half the world under Communism, or to ignore the rights of the helpless and disabled in our nation, then we should have no need of a Republican Party; we could have left things to Tammany Hall, to Jim Crow, to Hillary’s Nationalized Socialist Health Care.Instead, we fought, our ideological forbears and our teachers and ourselves, for the rights so obvious yet so impugned by the order in place. We fought at times against foreign powers, at times against the Left, and at times have had to wrestle with our own party to work for the Right. But we are tireless in that effort, and shall not quell now.
Donald Luskin wonders is Paul Krugman to blame?
Now if we could only get George Bush and the Republicans in Congress to stop funding the far left -- two-thirds of college faculty are to the left of Congressional Democrats. Instead, Bush and the Republicans are earmarking yet more billions for the Democrat / leftist dominated universities ideology camps. If the Republicans wanted to fund science education, or business education or engineering education, they could do this directly -- as Ike and Kennedy did. Instead they are spending our billions -- and borrowing from China -- to fund a thousand Ward Churchills and a million Paul Krugmans. This is not good for education, his is not good for America, and this is a disaster for the long-term prospects of conservatism, classic liberalism -- and the Republican party
UPDATE: Res Ipsa Loquitur has some notes on Churchill's visit to Berkeley:
First, Ward Churchill is a terrible speaker. Every other person on the panel was more engaging, more enlightening, and more "on-topic" (with the exception of Munoz) than Churchill.Second, the members of the panel all agreed with Churchill. In a discussion on academic freedom and the advancement of unpopular views for the sake of diverse discourse, Berkeley failed to provide any such thing.
The greatest liberal of the 20th century .. philosopher Friedrich Hayek, wrote a famous essay in 1960 called "Why I Am Not a Conservative." He worried that conservatives would be just as eager to impose their views, through government meddling, as socialists. Sadly, as we can see in the Schiavo case, he was right.This is not to say that Americans want something extreme or secularist. The Declaration of Independence founded the new nation on the principle that our rights are bestowed by God, and religion and morality clearly should inform both public and private decisions. But we want to be left alone by government to make up our own minds.
Such an approach not only enhances personal freedom, it also develops personal responsibility. For that reason, perhaps the best name for a new majority party in America is the Responsibility Party. And, yes, on many questions including whether a severely ill loved one lives or dies the responsibility belongs to the individual, not the government.
"There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than [leftists] or more Republicans than Democrats."The original study is available here... the study found, 65 percent [of professors] want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party ..
The researchers say that [leftists], men and non-regular churchgoers are more likely to be teaching at top schools, while conservatives, women and more religious faculty are more likely to be relegated to lower-tier colleges and universities ..
The most [leftwing] faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But [leftists] outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent). The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are [leftists] and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.
"In general .. people gravitate toward other people like themselves."
UPDATE: Todd Zywicki comments:
what I hear from many of my own students [is that] university campuses have become so cartoonishly left-wing that many students are essentially just tuning out their professors. Students report that they just go through the motions of pretending that they are converted, then they just regurgitate the mantra on exams in order to get a good grade. Meanwhile, many students dismiss their professors as risible ideologues. Perhaps the fact that students are largely unchanged by their university experience is the most damning comment of all about what is going on at universities today.In my experience I've seen something else. Most all students internalize a good deal of what they learn at college, with a spectrum of just how much is internalized. I know plenty of people who went into college the conservative kids of conservative parents -- and came out of college to the left of Hillary Clinton. In fact, I'm related to a number of them.
Furthermore, the arguments and facts which most students find close at hand after 4 or 5 years of college have a strong leftist slant. You often find that even "conservative" or "libertarian" studentsmore easily offer up leftist examples, leftist theories and leftist facts than they do non-leftist arguments, facts and examples -- especially when discussing the harder topics. It's what their college years have made them competent at doing. Indeed, these students often struggle when attempting to make arguments for their own perspective -- they simply haven't been given any skills or facts for doing so. Students who have gone out and done non-lefty research one their own are rare. What these students have to do is essential "double majoring" during their college career with a second "degree" in classic liberal or conservative studies. This effort has real costs and still fails to capture the full set of skills students acquire in a classroom setting.
So I think Todd is being a bit of a Pollyanna about all this -- which may simply reflect the fact that he teaches at one of the few universities in the world with a major "classic liberal" presence.
And this is the face of the left:
Tough choice. Quotable:
Last Saturday, a few days after Lebanese people had demonstrated for freedom, some 60,000 Europeans were demonstrating in Brussels against more freedom. The target of their protest: the liberalization and deregulation of services, addressed by the European Commission in the so-called "Bolkestein directive".Read more. (ht Institut Hayek).
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The most predominant topic in this portion of the book is the role of the people in government in promoting growth. Easterly points out that the incentives faced by governments and their workers in developing countries which receive aid are, for the most part, not conducive to actual reforms which might promote growth. Instead the incentives are for corruption, stalling, appropriation, and deception. It is in this section in particular in which truly concrete prescriptions are somewhat lacking. While some ideas are suggested, Easterly seems willing to leave the decisions to the World Bank and IMF, the very institutions which have failed to succeed so often in the past. Overall it is an extremely well done piece of work, although in a way it is just as utopian as Sach's recent book, of which he has been critical. I hardly expect that the World Bank and IMF leadership will come around soon to the sort of hard-hearted attitude that Easterly believes is necessary for these institutions to truly be effective in reducing poverty in the developing world .. I would highly recommend this to just about anyone. It is accessible to even the most casual of armchair economists, but extensive footnotes and references (just a hair under 40 pages combined) allow interested parties to easily verify Easterly's claims if they so desire ..Is the music celebrity -- and African debt savior -- Bono literate? If he is, then instead of nominating Bono to run the World Bank, perhaps Michael Kinsley at the Times could send his friend a copy of Easterly's book and encourage him to give it a go. If we establish he's capable of that book reading thing, then maybe we'll go ahead and put him in charge of global economic development. Ya, right.Regarding debt relief Easterly points out that when debt was forgiven, in most countries "government replaced forgiven debt with new debt." (pg 126) This fact seems to have surprised those responsible for forgiving the debt, but I wonder why this should not have been the obvious outcome. Forgiving the debt does not change the incentives faced by the borrower, except perhaps to make them want to INCREASE their debt load.
What is really alarming about Roper v. Simmons, and other cases citing foreign law (six justices now engage in that practice) is that the Court, in tacit coordination with foreign courts, is moving toward a global bill of rights. Neither our courts nor the foreign courts are bound by actual constitutions. Prof. Lino Graglia was quite right when he said that “the first and most important thing to know about American constitutional law is that it has virtually nothing to do with the Constitution.” That is certainly the case with the Bill of Rights. From abortion to homosexual sodomy, from religion to political speech and pornography, from capital punishment to discrimination on the basis of race and sex, the Court is steadily remaking American political, social, and cultural life. As Justice Antonin Scalia once said in dissent, “Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize.”The courts of the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and almost all Western countries are doing the same thing, replacing the meaning of their charters with their own preferences. Nor are these judicial alterations random. The culture war evident in the United States is being waged internationally, both within individual nations and in international institutions and tribunals. It is a war for dominance between two moral visions of the future. One is the liberal-elite preference for radical personal autonomy and the other is the general public’s desire for some greater degree of community and social authority. Elite views are fairly uniform across national boundaries, and since American and foreign judges belong to elites and respond to elite views, judge-made constitutions tend to converge. It hardly matters what particular constitutions say or were understood to mean by those who adopted them.
Judges are not, of course, the only forces for a new elite global morality. Governments and non-governmental organizations are actively promoting treaties, conventions, and new institutions (the International Criminal Court, for example) that embody their view that sovereignty and nation-states are outmoded and that we must move toward regional or even global governance. American self-government and sovereignty would be submerged in a web of international regulations. The Supreme Court, in decisions like Roper, adds constitutional law to the web. That is the one strand, given our current acceptance of judicial supremacy, that cannot be rejected democratically. What is clear is that foreign elites understand the importance of having the Supreme Court on their side, which is precisely why their human-rights organizations have begun filing amicus briefs urging our Supreme Court to adopt the foreign, elite view of the American Constitution.
And Barro isn't the only classicly liberal economist who's turned on the "private accounts" version of Social Security reform. The WaPost has the story:
In his column, Barro argued that politicians will never allow private accounts to replace the Social Security system. So the accounts system -- as outlined by Bush -- would end up being what Barro views as an unwise supplement to existing benefits. Instead, he argued, the program should be stripped down to a minimum payout to keep the elderly out of poverty while putting Social Security on solid financial footing. "There is no good reason to go beyond the minimum standard; that is why I view personal accounts as a mistake -- they enlarge a Social Security program that already promises too much," Barro wrote.UPDATE: Arnold Kling:
The Washington Post was excited to report this as a split among conservatives on the Social Security issue. In fact, I believe that conservatives are quite united in their belief that it is a fiendishly bad program ..
during an interview in his spacious Capitol office, the celebrity governor gave every indication that he relishes the opportunity to defeat, not compromise with, his opponents. When it was suggested that Schwarzenegger sounded as though he would be disappointed if a face-off were averted by compromise, he responded without hesitation. "There's something very attractive about it," he said. "You're absolutely right."
The future of American family law [is being written by] Elizabeth F. Emens .. who teaches the University of Chicago Law School. [Emens] has published a major legal and cultural defense of polyamory (group marriage) ..Those who still think of the University of Chicago as a bastion of conservatism — including social conservatism — need to think again. The University of Chicago is rapidly becoming just another leftist-dominated campus ..
Up to now, gay-marriage advocates like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch have dismissed the analogy between homosexuality and polyamory by arguing that homosexuality is a far more deeply rooted impulse than the superficial, even frivolous, desire for sex with more than one partner. By contrast, Emens offers a "continuum model" inspired by the radical lesbian thinker Adrienne Rich. In her famous essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" .. Rich argues that all women, whether they identify themselves as lesbian or not, are in some respects lesbians. If women can just find the lesbian within, then, even for women who remain heterosexually identified, the prejudice against homosexuality will fall away. That, in turn, will make it possible for many more women to freely choose lesbianism.
Following Rich, Emens argues that everyone has a bit of "poly" inside. If we can just discover, nurture, and accept our inner polyamorist, then even for those who choose to remain monogamous, the prejudice against polyamory will disappear. This will allow everyone to make an unconstrained choice between monogamy and polyamory. So it's possible to see both homosexuality and polyamory as part of a complex continuum of human sexuality, says Emens. And when we begin to look at things this way, we can finally take down the legal, social, and cultural barriers to both homosexuality and polyamory ..
March 28, 2005
Also, the Ward Churchill sweepstakes: FIND THAT TWIN!
submit an essay, in 500 words or less, describing the professor you have had who most resembles Ward Churchill ..And win $500. Really.
This discription might also aptly decribe fellow Austrian Friedrich Hayek:
(4) A paradoxical blend of free-market economics with a residual Euro-Catholic respect for government as social democracy and safety net.(I'm guessing this fact about Hayek is completely lost on Starr -- see below).
More:
Schwarzenegger wants to become a champion governor. That's the way his competitive mind works, always seeking the best strategy for attaining clearly set goals. So, in his first months in office, he privately pondered the question: Who were the champion governors of California in times past, and what did they do to get that way? Tom McEnery, the former mayor of San Jose, shared with Schwarzenegger the historians' notion that Hiram Johnson, who reigned from 1911 to 1917, was California's first champion governor. McEnery (a Democrat and a published historian) added to the catalog Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight and Pat Brown — each cut from instinctive centrist mold — and Ronald Reagan, considered in his own category as a reforming conservative capable of cutting a deal with Democrats.Nice smear there at the end, don't you think? As a typical lefty Kevin Starr never names these contemptable Republicans -- because he can't. When a lefty like Starr fails to name names it's because he's lying. And this sort of lefty lying isn't a rare thing. It happens again, and again, and again. Are there any honest lefties in the world? It would be great to run into just one. Off hand I can't think of any.The governor came to view Johnson, a reforming Progressive known for taking his case to the people, as all-time champion — the Mr. Universe of California government. And he was determined to emulate this champ's approach. But Johnson's progressive politics are not a natural fit with another keystone of the new governor's self-made intellect. As Schwarzenegger has noted in a PBS series, economist Milton Friedman's free-market theories helped spur his rise to wealth and Americanization. Friedman's recasting of Adam Smith dovetails with those parts the Austrian mind already embedded with the [classic liberal] theories of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and the other economists of the respected Austrian School. These thinkers produced some of the 20th century's most formidable theoretical resistance to socialist ideology, and set the stage for today's free marketeers.
Not only was the governor born and raised in Austria, he remains an Austrian citizen, with his picture on an Austrian stamp. He is also a Catholic, as a matter of overall belief and cultural identity. And if Hiram Johnson-style progressivism is at all palatable to the laissez-faire-leaning Schwarzenegger, it may be because of a paradoxical aspect of the Austrian intellectual landscape: social democracy in the style of Western Europe as reinforced by Roman Catholic social thought. These traditions, including the Catholic emphasis on the public sector and commitment to distributive justice — the "safety net" in American — shaped young Schwarzenegger .. by coming of age as a Roman Catholic in Western Europe, he couldn't help but absorb a measure of social democracy, an orientation no doubt strengthened by his marriage to Maria Shriver, an informed and articulate Democrat of impeccable social democratic lineage, with whom the governor shares a powerful intellectual connection.
And so we have the oddity [sic] of a free-market-oriented governor — a self-made capitalist known to hobnob with such alter egos as Milton Friedman, George Shultz and Warren Buffett — who is possessed simultaneously of an almost instinctive respect for the public sector and its safety nets..
Faced with two budget years of revenue shortfalls, Schwarzenegger has been forced to cut, to borrow money through a bond issue and to make imprudent deals (with teachers, for example) that he cannot make good on. But he has never blatantly attacked the premise of supporting schools, parks, clean water, fire protection and public safety, the preservation of the environment, the transportation infrastructure and the like. Yes, a tax revolt the majority of Californians support forced him to cut. But he has never joined other Republicans in suggesting that government's responsibility to the poor, the abandoned, the sick or the disabled be off-loaded to the private sector.
March 27, 2005
What non-conservative Radical "right to life" Republicans wish to do in the Terri Schiavo case is to have the Federal courts over-ruling Florida state law in the name of "the right to life", which will then allow the the courts to impose the Radical Republicans preferred public policy result upon the nation as a whole. But there is no universal "right to life" clause in the Constitution as this notion is understood by "right to life" activists, whether Catholic, Protostant, atheist or Jew. And there never has been. There is a right to due process clause. There is an equal protection clause. But there is nothing resembling the evolving position on "the right to life" constructed in recent times by political activists, the priestly sects, media personalities, and medical ethicists.
The Radical Republican positon is suggested by Steven Greenhut:
there is a reasonable legal case made for Congress' intervention in the Schiavomatter. As Hugh Hewitt's blog points out, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution states: "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article." Those provisions include this one: "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law."See also the links found in this comment by Andrew Sullivan. Quotable:I'd be dishonest, I should point out, if I argued that I come to my conclusion, that of wanting to save Schiavo's life, based purely on my constitutional reasoning. I come at the issue with a moral perspective that wants to preserve life, to give the benefit of the doubt to those who wanted to save this woman, rather than to those who want her life ended - and ended in what strikes me as a particularly cruel and unusual way. "True, there is an arguable federalism issue: whether taking the issue out of a state's jurisdiction is constitutional," wrote the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes. "But it pales in comparison with the moral issue." Sullivan used that quote as proof of the religious right's nefarious influence in the GOP, but I see it as an obvious point. The case of Terri Schiavo is a moral one, and one's views about the nature of life and humanity will instruct one's position on this matter. During our Editorial Board meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday, he, too, echoed this moral position, deferring to professor James Q. Wilson's column in the Wall Street Journal that day: "What is lacking in this matter is not the correct set of jurisdictional rules but a decent set of moral imperatives," wrote Wilson. "That moral imperative should be that medical care cannot be withheld from a person who is not brain dead and who is not at risk for dying from an untreatable disease in the near future." ..
I'm ultimately swayed by this moral sentiment, in the words of the Declaration of Independence: "all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Did Congress act to uphold Terri Schiavo's unalienable rights? It seems so ..
Beneath all this is a struggle between conservatives who place their faith in the formalities of constitutionalism and those who place their literal faith in the God-revealed truths they believe are enshrined in the Declaration, truths that alone give meaning, in their eyes, to America as a political project.
March 26, 2005
[Columbia U. President Lee] Bollinger's comments are especially interesting because they reflect a new reality: Universities are coming under fire for their anti-Americanism, leftism and ideological rigidity. Thanks to aggressive reporting by Campus-watch.org, Frontpagemag.com, bloggers like Powerline and the cutting-edge New York Sun, light is now shining on the Stalinist atmosphere at many American campuses ..
the Big Three [auto makers] remain prisoners of their past, not only in terms of retiree obligations that run to $2,500 per car, but also .. inflexible industry-wide labor agreements and an entire system geared to maximizing volume rather than profit .. Years ago, the United Auto Workers decided to accept lower pay raises in exchange for company promises to pay laid-off workers 90 percent of their regular wage. The perverse result is that Ford and GM run plants even when there is no demand, forcing dealers to take cars they don't want and automakers to spend $3,000 in incentives to move them off the lots. As a result, much of the dealer profit has been squeezed out of new car sales.The big union / big business / big government monstrosity deserves to die -- every single part of it. But this cancer metastasizes faster than the marketplace can kill it. The newest food for the union/corporation/government cancer is the Federal government's Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. which promises to funnel your paycheck into the pockets of overpayed retirees who never produced the wealth to justify their lifestyle.Government has also contributed to the industry's structural problems. By one estimate, state governments subsidize foreign transplants such as BMW and Honda plants to the tune of $1,000 per car. And state franchise laws make it prohibitively expensive to rationalize dealer networks and nameplates. Worst of all are clean-air rules that essentially require companies to produce and sell low-pollution passenger cars at a loss, just to offset the environmental damage done by all their trucks and SUVs.
Finally, it's just not possible for any firm in any country to stay in the game paying $60 an hour in wages and benefits to workers at every stage of the supply chain. Like it or not, the market now demands that parts be fabricated offshore, at "China rates." That still leaves opportunity for U.S. firms to combine those components into major subassemblies -- but only if the UAW accepts lower wages and benefits at these first- and second-tier suppliers.
UPDATE: Billy Beck weighs in.
UPDATE: Thomas Sowell supports Hewitt's view of the situation. Quotable:
Judge Whittemore ignored the clear meaning of the law passed by Congress .. All federal courts except the Supreme Court are created by Congress. The Constitution itself gives Congress the authority to define or restrict the jurisdictions of federal courts, including the Supreme Court ..[The] important issue is whether self-government in this country will live or die. Judges who ignore the laws passed by elected representatives are slowly but surely replacing democracy with judicial rule.
March 25, 2005
Andrew Stuttaford comments:
Quite why any of the EU’s Eastern European leaders should now want to be in the same room as Chirac now escapes me. He has insulted their history, and belittled the memory of their dead. What a disgrace.
It's not as if there isn't some precedent for this rejection of conservatism in the history of the Republican party. The Civil War era Republicans weren't called "Radical Republicans" for no reason -- conservatism was abandoned regularly by these folks in favor of the abolitionist ideology of the moment. Right to lifers have long drawn parallels between their own movement and that of the first Republicans. I think there is some truth in this -- a truth which helps give us a proper name for today's right to life Republicans. Not conservatives. Radicals. Not conservative Republicans. Radical Republicans.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has related thoughts here and here.
We hate them because they are thieves. We hate them because they don't steal enough from others for our own purposes. We hate them because they don't give us the freedom to live our lives. We hate them because they allow others the freedom to live their own.
Last week [Schwarzenegger] chose to support the “California Live Within Our Means” initiative sponsored by the Business Roundtable and others, instead of a competing initiative sponsored by state Sen. John Campbell and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. This “live within our means” measure is a toothless tiger incapable of controlling state spending. It would have allowed most if not all the spending of Davis’s fiscal irresponsibility orgy. In contrast, the Campbell/Jarvis measure would have halted the spending bacchanalia, and California today would enjoy a multi-billion dollar budget surplus. Word from Sacramento is that the governor may not even know how futile the “live within our means” proposals is ..
