Download Full Content -Printable Pickings
Don Boudreaux, from Cafe Hayek devotes his Tribune-Review column to the late Julian Simon. He recounts the famous Simon wager with doomster Paul Ehrlich.
Last Friday, Feb. 8, marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the great economist Julian Simon. Although he never received the professional or popular acclaim of economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson or F.A. Hayek, Simon’s insights and work rank with those of history’s greatest social scientists.
Simon’s most important contribution was to crystallize and explain an insight that even the best economists before him only glimpsed — namely, that human beings in free societies are “the ultimate resource.” Nothing — not oil, not land, not gold, not microchips, nothing — is as valuable to the material well-being of people as is human creativity and effort.
Indeed, there are no resources without human creativity to figure out how to use them and human effort actually to do so. Recognizing the truth of this insight renders silly the familiar term “natural resources.”
No resources are “natural.”
Take petroleum. What makes it a “resource”? It’s certainly not a resource naturally. If it were, American Indians would long ago have put it to good use. But they didn’t. I suspect that for Pennsylvania’s native population in, say, the year 1300, the dark, thick, smelly stuff that bubbled up in watering holes was regarded as a nuisance. …
Christopher Hitchens thinks the US press is not serious.
… Take, just for an example, the obituaries for Earl Butz, a once-important Republican politician who served Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as secretary for agriculture until compelled to resign after making a loutish and humorless observation in the hearing of the Watergate whistle-blower John Dean. In the words of his New York Times obituarist, Butz (who “died in his sleep while visiting his son William,” which, I must say, makes the male offspring sound exceptionally soporific) had “described blacks as ‘coloreds’ who wanted only three things—satisfying sex, loose shoes and a warm bathroom.” There isn’t a grown-up person with a memory of 1976 who doesn’t recall that Butz said that Americans of African descent required only “a tight p—y, loose shoes, and a warm place to s–t.” Had this witless bigotry not been reported accurately, he might have held onto his job. But any reader of the paper who was less than 50 years old could have read right past the relevant sentence without having the least idea of what the original controversy had been “about.” …
While much of that press in the US is in full Obama swoon, some foreigners are listening to his foolishness. David Warren is first.
… It is in this sense that a vote for Obama is a vote for Osama.
This has nothing to do with Barack Obama’s race, creed, or ideology. I do not doubt for a moment that Mr. Obama is a sincere Christian and patriotic American, and that he truly believes himself the New Man for the New Age.
I fear him rather on two accounts. The first is that he has no policies. He offers vague “feel good” on every domestic issue, and magic in foreign policy. Simply by his being Obama, and not Bush, the conflicts will go away. He will withdraw from Iraq. He will ignore Iran. And he will invade Pakistan (to get at Osama). People who say things like this, whether or not in a dream-like trance, are not eligible to be commander-in-chief. Or rather, should not be.
For the second problem with Mr. Obama is that he is eminently electable. Republicans do not seem to realize just how electable. For while Barack Hussein Obama does not entirely resemble the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau (who had his policy wonk side, and more native malice), he has that mystical androgynous quality that comes across hypnotically on TV.
It was the women who put Trudeau in power, and kept him there: the women’s vote in English Canada, plus the Liberal fiefdom in Quebec. It is the ditzier range of women in the borderline Red States that could elect President Obama: lonely women, and to some extent, their weak, “sensitive” men. …
The Australian notes his Neanderthal free trade ideas.
The Economist wants to climb on, but deep down there’s some vestigial common sense.
… But what policies exactly? Mr Obama’s voting record in the Senate is one of the most left-wing of any Democrat. Even if he never voted for the Iraq war, his policy for dealing with that country now seems to amount to little more than pulling out quickly, convening a peace conference, inviting the Iranians and the Syrians along and hoping for the best. On the economy, his plans are more thought out, but he often tells people only that they deserve more money and more opportunities. If one lesson from the wasted Bush years is that needless division is bad, another is that incompetence is perhaps even worse. A man who has never run any public body of any note is a risk, even if his campaign has been a model of discipline.
And the Obama phenomenon would not always be helpful, because it would raise expectations to undue heights. Budgets do not magically cut themselves, even if both parties are in awe of the president; the Middle East will not heal, just because a president’s second name is Hussein. …
A blog at The Nation reports on Obama’s plagiarism. The source was the Clinton campaign.
When The New York Times revealed this morning that Barack Obama had borrowed extensively from a speech by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to develop the soaring rhetoric of his recent addresses defending the politics of hope, the story was sourced only to “a rival campaign.”
But now Congressman Jim McGovern, a Clinton backer from Massachusetts, and the Clinton campaign’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, are out peddling the comparison in conference calls and interviews. …
American Thinker posts on our three worst presidents. All Dems; Carter, Buchanan, and LBJ. In the interest of brevity the middle was deleted. Follow the link if you’re curious.
…The actual consequences of Johnson’s Great Society were disastrous for blacks, discouraging initiative, encouraging a sense of entitlement and victimhood, and creating a permanent dependency class. Until 1965, 82% of black households had both a mother and a father in the home — a statistic on par with or even slightly higher than white families. After 1965 (the year the Democrats and President Johnson decided it was time to stop oppressing blacks and start “helping” them), the presence of black fathers in the home began a precipitous decline; today, the American black out-of-wedlock birthrate is at 69% …