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Stephen Moore with a story we can not hear often enough. It’s about the optimists among us including the late great Julian Simon. Simon famously challenged the population scold Paul Ehrlich to a 10 year wager. Simon claimed the earth’s bounty was becoming more plentiful. John Tierney gave the results in the December 2, 1990 NY Times Sunday Magazine. Since this is a classic, it has been posted to Pickings.
I’m old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: “Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off.” And I will never forget that era’s “educational” films of what life would be like in the year 2000. Played on clanky 16-millimeter projectors, they showed images of people walking down the streets of Manhattan with masks on, so they could avoid breathing the poison gases our industrial society was spewing.
The future seemed mighty bleak back then, and you merely had to open the newspapers for the latest story confirming how the human species was speeding down a congested highway to extinction. A group of scientists calling themselves the Club of Rome issued a report called “Limits to Growth.” It explained that lifeboat Earth had become so weighed down with humans that we were running out of food, minerals, forests, water, energy and just about everything else that we need for survival. Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling book “The Population Bomb” (1968) gave England a 50-50 chance of surviving into the 21st century. In 1980, Jimmy Carter released the “Global 2000 Report,” which declared that life on Earth was getting worse in every measurable way.
So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we’re not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called “State of the Future” concludes: “People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer.” …
A blogger posts on life in Zimbabwe. Couldn’t think of a better juxtaposition with the above Stephen Moore story about what markets can achieve.
Standing outside over yet another smoky fire late one afternoon this week, a Go-Away bird chastised me from a nearby tree. I’m sure this Grey Lourie is as fed up of me intruding into its territory as I am of being there – trying to get a hot meal for supper. For five of the last six days the electricity has gone off before 5 in the morning and only come back 16 or 17 hours later a little before midnight. “Go Away! Go Away!” the Grey Lourie called out repeatedly as my eyes streamed from the smoke and I stirred my little pot. My hair and clothes stink of smoke, fingers are yellow and sooty but this is what we’ve all been reduced to in Zimbabwe. …
Max Boot on the Times spin of the Iran/Syria axis.
… But of course this being the New York Times, the writer can’t stick to the facts—facts that suggest that some of us have reason to be increasingly alarmed about the Tehran-Damascus Axis. He has to throw in a jab at the Bush administration, too. Naylor claims that Iran and Syria are cementing their ties only because neither one can do business with America, since they’re both under American-led sanctions. He cites anonymous “Western diplomats and analysts,†who say “that Washington has effectively pushed Damascus and Tehran into deepening their alliance of nearly three decades.â€
This is pretty much the party line at places like the Times whenever other countries align against the United States: It can’t be because they don’t like us, or because our interests are mutually incompatible. It must be because we spurned their generous and deeply felt offers of friendship. …
The Economist on Putin’s politics.
The Captain posts on Al-Quds Day speeches in Iran and the latest jobs report.
The celebration of Al-Quds Day is a tradition in Iran since the revolution. It rallies people in the cause of Israel’s destruction, in a manner reminiscent of the Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s. In fact, both celebrations aimed at destroying the same kind of people. What an odd coincidence, that! Today, as always, Iranian mobs burned Israeli and American flags in an effort to show what a rational and civilized culture does when they have a holiday that wishes for genocide.
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Not much has changed in the past year. The economy is still expanding, and employment remains steady at historically excellent levels. Last month’s report was simply wrong, and it serves as a reminder that the BLS often underestimates job gains in the first month of reporting. Analysts should wait to see what adjustment occurs in the following month before basing predictions on the data.
In this case, the BLS estimate was not just significantly off but pointing in the wrong direction. That was enough to out all the Chicken Littles. I wonder how many of them will acknowledge the error today.
Power Line posts on the economy too.
It’s time to start taking seriously the proposition that the American economy under the Bush administration is the best in the nation’s history. This morning the White House expressed entirely appropriate pride in the country’s economic achievements on its watch:
Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new jobs figures – 110,000 jobs created in September. September 2007 is the 49th consecutive month of job growth, setting a new record for the longest uninterrupted expansion of the U.S. labor market. Significant upward revisions to employment in July and August mean employment growth has averaged 97,000 per month over the last three months. Since August 2003, our economy has created more than 8.1 million jobs, and the unemployment rate remains low at 4.7 percent.
Real after-tax per capita personal income has increased by over 12.5 percent – an average of over $3,750 per person – since President Bush took office. More than 30 percent of the Nation’s net worth has been added since the President’s 2003 tax cuts. …
Mark Steyn creates another new word – Islamoparanoia. That’s the disease afflicting Dodi Fayed’s father.
National Review’s David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He’s lived there for years, it’s been good to him, he owns Harrod’s and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He’s one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to “the other.” And yet he’s convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by “Islamophobia” that the queen’s husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.
Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di’s Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family’s assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.
Mark Steyn Corner posts on the Dems 12 year-old spokesman.
NY Post editorial says it’s time for Chris Matthews to go. If you’re like me and long ago gave up watching Hardball, this will be a surprise.
Bill Kristol says you’ll want to read the Clarence Thomas book.
… Thomas’s memoir raises fundamental questions of love and responsibility, family and character. His book is a brief for the stern and vigorous virtues, but in a context of faith and love. It’s a delightful book–you really can’t put it down–but it’s also a source of moral education for young Americans. It could be almost as important a contribution to his beloved country as Clarence Thomas’s work as a Supreme Court justice. …
Professor Bainbridge has a book to suggest also. Pickerhead likes this sound of this too.
Columnist David Harsanyi offers us Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children: …
Village Voice with the story of yet another innovation killed by government. New York’s City Council is set to pass pedicab regulations that will strangle the service. Sounds like a case for the Institute for Justice. Chip, Kramer, Dana, Neil, Scott, where are you?
… Thanks to the brilliant maneuvers of a City Council that remains beholden to the same permanent government interests that always speak loudest, these so-called electric-assist motors are now illegal on city streets. The politicians did not stop there. The law they passed in response to the lobbyists for the taxi and theater owners also bans pedicabs from using city bike lanes, forcing them into the traffic stream. They cannot go on bridges. They are limited in entering the parks and can be barred entirely from midtown during the Christmas holiday season, or any other two-week period during which officials deem traffic especially heavy.
Stretch limousines, Hummers, vans all come and go freely. Pedicabs risk tickets and confiscation.
There was more yet: The council decided there should be just 325 pedicabs at any one time. There is no exact count of how many are in operation, but 500 is the estimate. Instantly, 175 workers are unemployed. And still more: When city bureaucrats sat down to devise rules for this law, they decided that no one owner could have more than five licensed cabs. This effectively destroys the fleets that have employed hundreds of people, most of them young, who cheerfully haul passengers through the streets, leaving behind nothing more harmful than a small tailwind and the tinkling warnings of a bicycle bell. …
… Pedicabs would not be the first transportation novelty to die of political strangulation in City Hall. In 1870, inventor Alfred Ely Beach sought permits to excavate for something he called a subway. Back then, William “Boss” Tweed controlled all political levers and already had a nice piece of the action going with elevated railways and stagecoach lines. Tweed made sure that Beach’s brilliant plan was snuffed in its cradle. The inventor managed to get a single block-long tunnel built and then hit Tweed’s roadblock. Subways had to wait 30 years to get past it. …
Slate with more on the bustification of ethanol.
For years, economists, environmentalists, and poverty activists have been hating on ethanol. It’s impractical; it boosts food prices and promotes industrial farming. Their scorn didn’t much matter, because there was huge political and social momentum for ethanol production. But now the market is turning on ethanol, too. Ethanol stocks are sinking. Check out this two-year chart of Verasun, Aventine Renewable Energy, and Pacific Ethanol against the S&P 500. All three are down more than 60 percent. Earth Biofuels, which traded at $7 a share in May 2006, now trades for about 5 cents. A gallon of ethanol for November delivery trades at about $1.57 per gallon today, down from about $1.90 in July. As the Wall Street Journal put it (subscription required) earlier this week: “Ethanol Boom is Running out of Gas.” …