Click on WORD or PDF below for full content
Gabriel Schoenfeld teams up with Aaron Friedberg producing a WSJ OpEd on what the world might be like with a diminished U. S. presence.
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America’s geostrategic dominance likely to diminish? If so, what would that mean?
One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year’s federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief programs.
In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction — foreign aid. This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden’s comment hints at where we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America’s world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-induced isolationism.
Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular. Precipitous withdrawal — attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion — might well become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions.
Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of protectionism will blow. …
David Warren writes on Obama as “savior.”
… The hysteria over global warming, the hysteria over the banking crisis, the hysteria over Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy — to name just three hysterias in a rich international field, and not even mention Islamist terrorism or the word “Eurabia” — combine in strange ways to make a reading tour of any major newspaper (or Internet news aggregator for that matter) into a simulated space flight.
We live in a country that just re-elected a Conservative Party that has tried very hard to remain boring, generally; and more specifically, inoffensive to our media, bureaucratic, academic, and legal elites. They barely limped home, owing largely to the fact that the principal opposition party was led by a man (I wouldn’t be so cruel as to name him) who could not formulate sound bites in English (or any other language).
But had we recently joined those United States of America, in some alternative universe, Mr. Obama would be in no need of the estimated $700 million he will have raised, in total, to pump into swing states in the final fortnight of the U.S. election. For according to casual polls up here, Obama would sweep all ten hypothetical ex-Canadian states by breathtaking margins, without a nickel of advertising. …
Different view of Obama from Richard Epstein, ChiLaw prof.
… Put otherwise, Obama’s vague calls for change that “you can believe in” are, to my thinking, wholly retrograde in their implications. At heart, he is an unreconstructed New Dealer who can see, and articulate, both sides on every question–but only as a prelude to championing the old corporatist agenda with a vengeance.
That program has three key components, which, taken together, can convert a shaky financial situation into a global depression. The first of these is his anti-free trade attitude that loomed so large in the primaries. But even Obama cannot repeal the principle of comparative advantage. Any efforts to scuttle NAFTA, deny fast-track approval to other agreements, or limit outsourcing will not be as dramatic as the Smoot-Hawley tariff. But combined, they would act as a depressant on general economic growth. Everyone would suffer.
Second, Obama is committed to strengthening unions by his endorsement of the Employer Free Choice Act, a misnamed statute that forces union recognition without elections and employment contracts through mandatory arbitration thereafter. That one-two punch could tie up the very small businesses that Obama seems determined to help. Tax relief won’t work for firms that won’t get formed because a labor fight is not in their initial budget.
And third, he is in favor of progressive individual taxes and high corporate taxes. It is as though the U.S. does not have to compete for labor and capital in global markets. My fear is that with his strong egalitarian bent, he has not internalized the lesson that high rates do not offset declining revenues.
Thus, even before we get to the added bells and whistles of the modern welfare state–windfall profits taxes, ethanol subsidies, health care–an Obama administration could lock us into a downward spiral by ignoring the simple fundamentals of sound governance. Boy, does this stalwart libertarian ever hope that his friends are right and his gloomy prediction is wrong!
Michael Barone with a learned discussion of polls.
Can we trust the polls this year? That’s a question many people have been asking as we approach the end of this long, long presidential campaign. As a recovering pollster and continuing poll consumer, my answer is yes — with qualifications.
To start with, political polling is inherently imperfect. Academic pollsters say that to get a really random sample, you should go back to a designated respondent in a specific household time and again until you get a response. But political pollsters who must report results overnight have to take the respondents they can reach. So they weight the results of respondents in different groups to get a sample that approximates the whole population they’re sampling.
Another problem is the increasing number of cell phone-only households. Gallup and Pew have polled such households, and found their candidate preferences aren’t much different from those with landlines; and some pollsters have included cell-phone numbers in their samples. A third problem is that an increasing number of Americans refuse to be polled. We can’t know for sure if they’re different in some pertinent respects from those who are willing to answer questions.
Professional pollsters are seriously concerned about these issues. But this year especially, many who ask if we can trust the polls are usually concerned about something else: Can we trust the poll when one of the presidential candidates is black?
It is commonly said that the polls in the 1982 California and the 1989 Virginia gubernatorial races overstated the margin for the black Democrats who were running — Tom Bradley and Douglas Wilder. The theory to account for this is that some poll respondents in each case were unwilling to say they were voting for the white Republican. …
John Stossel reminds us of Hayek’s “spontaneous order.”
… The only times we have shortages in America are after governments intrude, like when President Nixon appointed an energy czar to regulate gas prices, and this year, when some states’ anti-”gouging” laws prevented gas stations from raising prices after storms.
Despite the repeated failure of central planning, the political class acts as if politicians can direct our lives. When there are problems, politicians will solve them. They’re going to give us prosperity and cheap health care, fix education, lower gas prices, stop global warming and make us energy “independent.”
And that’s just the beginning. A speaker at the Republic convention said, “If you want to fight childhood obesity, then John is your man.”
Who do people think these guys are?
“We actually think that some people can do magic,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Voters would have to believe that every politician is some combination of Superman, Santa Claus and Mother Teresa. Superman because he can do anything. Santa Claus because he’s going to give us things.
“It’s kind of an instinctive reaction,” says Boaz. “But a president can’t fix all the problems in your life.”
That’s OK. Most of life works best when you are in charge.
So how effective is TSA airport screening you ask? Jeffery Goldberg has answers in The Atlantic Monthly.
If I were a terrorist, and I’m not, but if I were a terrorist—a frosty, tough-like-Chuck-Norris terrorist, say a C-title jihadist with Hezbollah or, more likely, a donkey-work operative with the Judean People’s Front—I would not do what I did in the bathroom of the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, which was to place myself in front of a sink in open view of the male American flying public and ostentatiously rip up a sheaf of counterfeit boarding passes that had been created for me by a frenetic and acerbic security expert named Bruce Schneier. He had made these boarding passes in his sophisticated underground forgery works, which consists of a Sony Vaio laptop and an HP LaserJet printer, in order to prove that the Transportation Security Administration, which is meant to protect American aviation from al-Qaeda, represents an egregious waste of tax dollars, dollars that could otherwise be used to catch terrorists before they arrive at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, by which time it is, generally speaking, too late. …
… As I stood in the bathroom, ripping up boarding passes, waiting for the social network of male bathroom users to report my suspicious behavior, I decided to make myself as nervous as possible. I would try to pass through security with no ID, a fake boarding pass, and an Osama bin Laden T-shirt under my coat. I splashed water on my face to mimic sweat, put on a coat (it was a summer day), hid my driver’s license, and approached security with a bogus boarding pass that Schneier had made for me. I told the document checker at security that I had lost my identification but was hoping I would still be able to make my flight. He said I’d have to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor arrived; he looked smart, unfortunately. I was starting to get genuinely nervous, which I hoped would generate incriminating micro-expressions. “I can’t find my driver’s license,” I said. I showed him my fake boarding pass. “I need to get to Washington quickly,” I added. He asked me if I had any other identification. I showed him a credit card with my name on it, a library card, and a health-insurance card. “Nothing else?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“You should really travel with a second picture ID, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“All right, you can go,” he said, pointing me to the X-ray line. “But let this be a lesson for you.”