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Pickings today is a Clinton free zone. We will return to beating them up tomorrow.
Imprimis from Hillsdale College is first today with Mark Steyn. He writes comparing the Canadian economy to ours.
I WAS A bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?†I wondered. “Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?†It is a Saturday night, and the Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.
Unlike America, Canada is a resource economy: The U.S. imports resources, whereas Canada exports them. It has the second largest oil reserves in the world. People don’t think of Canada like that. The Premier of Alberta has never been photographed in Crawford, Texas, holding hands with the President and strolling through the rose bower as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was. But Canada is nonetheless an oil economy—a resource economy. Traditionally, in America, when the price of oil goes up, Wall Street goes down. But in Canada, when the price of oil goes up, the Toronto stock exchange goes up, too. So we are relatively compatible neighbors whose interests diverge on one of the key global indicators.
As we know from 9/11, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia use their oil wealth to spread their destructive ideology to every corner of the world. And so do the Canadians. Consider that in the last 40 years, fundamental American ideas have made no headway whatsoever in Canada, whereas fundamental Canadian ideas have made huge advances in America and the rest of the Western world. To take two big examples, multiculturalism and socialized health care—both pioneered in Canada—have made huge strides down here in the U.S., whereas American concepts—such as non-confiscatory taxation—remain as foreign as ever. …
What do our favorite economists think of the stimulus package? Thomas Sowell first.
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a “stimulus package” of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.
That alone should be enough to make us remember that “the devil is always in the details,” because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.
A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.
The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government could do to make things better in the economy.
Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do. …
Some Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls are preaching economic doom and gloom, disappearing middle class, and failing health care industry. What’s their solution? The short answer is give them more control over our lives. Baltimore’s political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken, explained this strategy, saying, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The imaginary hobgoblin this time is the threat of an oncoming recession, even though it is by no means clear that the U.S. economy is in a recession. To head off a recession, politicians, including President Bush, are calling for a stimulus package. …
WSJ with a look at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.
This country’s most famous temple may be 900 years old, but the message it sets out to convey is timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one of hundreds built by kings of the Khmer Empire to commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to worship their gods. But Angkor Wat stands out from the rest — in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.
One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the only religious monument to appear on a national flag, Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its most powerful — when it was the seat of the Khmer Empire, stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on visitors today as when it was first built. Angkor Wat has but a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third of a mile long (that’s as long as six football fields end-to-end). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my guide assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of the compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres and once supported a town of about 100,000 people. …
British historian Paul Johnson reviews Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
No political term has been more overused and misused than “fascism.†Since the 1930s it has been a word of indiscriminate abuse by the Left for anyone a scintilla to the right of them. And from the 1970s onward many right-wing commentators have used the term “fascist Left†to denote authoritarian tendencies on the socialist, liberal, or Democratic side of the political equation. I have used it myself when in a bad temper. Jonah Goldberg has now produced a comprehensive book that summarizes all the ways in which the liberal Left, principally in America, can legitimately be accused of fascist policies and states of mind.
The book is meaty with little-known facts, audacious intuitions, and sophisticated persiflage. Republican activists, whether in the media or on the platform, will find it an indispensable handbook for rough-and-tumble debate. Here are some of Goldberg’s thrusts, for which he supplies energetic evidence. Woodrow Wilson was responsible for “the birth of liberal fascism.†FDR’s New Deal was essentially fascist. So was the street-and-campus agitation of the 1960s. JFK’s myth and LBJ’s dream were both hallmarked by the fascist “cult of the state.†The liberal stress on race politics reflected “the eugenic ghost in the fascist machine.†Liberal economic theory and practice have fascist characteristics. So has Hillary Clinton’s “New Village.†…
The Freakonomics dudes on unintended consequences.
… well-meaning laws surely don’t end up harming animals as well, do they?
Consider the Endangered Species Act (E.S.A.) of 1973, which protects flora and fauna as well as their physical habitats. The economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael wanted to gauge the E.S.A.’s effect on the red-cockaded woodpecker, a protected bird that nests in old-growth pine trees in eastern North Carolina. By examining the timber harvest activity of more than 1,000 privately owned forest plots, Lueck and Michael found a clear pattern: when a landowner felt that his property was turning into the sort of habitat that might attract a nesting pair of woodpeckers, he rushed in to cut down the trees. It didn’t matter if timber prices were low. …