Click on WORD or PDF for full content
The Mexican Ambassador writes on the problems when congress and the president let labor unions run the country. Pickerhead reminds readers it was labor unions that created apartheid in South Africa, and it was labor unions seeking to protect members from competition from southern blacks that created laws like Davis-Bacon here in the US.
Nobody can argue that Mexico hasn’t worked tirelessly for more than a decade to avoid a dispute with the United States over Mexican long-haul trucks traveling through this country. But free and fair trade hit another red light this past week. The U.S. Congress, which has now killed a modest and highly successful U.S.-Mexico trucking demonstration program, has sadly left my government no choice but to impose countermeasures after years of restraint and goodwill.
Then and now, this was never about the safety of American roads or drivers; it was and has been about protectionism, pure and simple. Back in 1995, the U.S. unilaterally blocked the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s cross-border trucking provisions, just as they were about to enter into force. In response, and after three years of constant engagement, Mexico had no alternative but to request the establishment of an arbitration panel as allowed under Nafta. A five-member panel, chaired by a Briton and including two U.S. citizens, ruled unanimously in February 2001 that Washington had violated the trucking provisions contained in Nafta, authorizing Mexico to adopt retaliatory measures. Yet once again, Mexico exercised restraint and sought a resolution of this issue through further dialogue. …
Today’s Pickings contains a 5,000 word essay by Charles Murray derived from an address he gave upon receiving the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Peter Wehner in Contentions introduces us to Murray and his talk.
Last week Charles Murray received the American Enterprise Institute’s highest honor, the Irving Kristol Award, and delivered a lecture, ”The Happiness of the People,” a title taken from James Madison’s phrase in The Federalist Paper #62. Murray’s lecture began with his assertion that President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalents of Europe’s social democrats. According to Murray, the European model is fundamentally flawed because it is not suited to the way human beings flourish. The goal of social policy should be to ensure that the institutions of family, community, vocation, and faith are robust and vital; the European model, Murray argues, enfeebles every single one of these institutions.
Beyond that, Europe has become a continent that no longer celebrates greatness. While some worry the European model will be embraced here in America, Murray argues there is reason for strategic optimism, based on discoveries in neuroscience and genetics. According to Murray, these discoveries undermine two premises about human beings that are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: “the equality premise” (in a fair society, different groups of people will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life, and when that doesn’t happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society) and “the New Man premise” (human beings are malleable through the right government policies).
Murray concludes his lecture with a reflection on American exceptionalism, and he argues, …
The new administration created a committee of 18 that would oversee the auto industry. Turns out only 2 of those owned American cars. Charles Murray addresses the problem of the American elites who have fallen out of love with all the things that make this country unique.
The advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe? President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.
Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.
But the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.
So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe’s demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?
I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem. …
… I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish—it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right. …
… Earlier, I said that the sources of deep satisfactions are the same for janitors as for CEOs, and I also said that people need to do important things with their lives. When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t. I could give a half dozen other examples. Taking the trouble out of the stuff of life strips people—already has stripped people—of major ways in which human beings look back on their lives and say, “I made a difference.” …
… I use the word “elites” to talk about the small minority of the population that has disproportionate influence over the culture, economy, and governance of the country. I realize that to use that word makes many Americans uncomfortable. But every society since the advent of agriculture has had elites. So does the United States. Broadly defined, America’s elites comprise several million people; narrowly defined, they amount to a few tens of thousands.
When I say that something akin to a political Great Awakening is required among America’s elites, what I mean is that America’s elites have to ask themselves how much they really do value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it.
American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close. …
… Why do I focus on the elites in urging a Great Awakening? Because my sense is that the instincts of middle America remain distinctively American. When I visit the small Iowa town where I grew up in the 1950s, I don’t get a sense that community life has changed all that much since then, and I wonder if it has changed all that much in the working class neighborhoods of Brooklyn or Queens. When I examine the polling data about the values that most Americans prize, not a lot has changed. And while I worry about uncontrolled illegal immigration, I’ve got to say that every immigrant I actually encounter seems as American as apple pie.
The center still holds. It’s the bottom and top of American society where we have a problem. And since it’s the top that has such decisive influence on American culture, economy, and governance, I focus on it. The fact is that American elites have increasingly been withdrawing from American life. It’s not a partisan phenomenon. The elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities—“gated” literally or figuratively—where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class.
Haven’t the elites always done this? Not like today. A hundred years ago, the wealth necessary to withdraw was confined to a much smaller percentage of the elites than now. Workplaces where the elites made their livings were much more variegated a hundred years ago than today’s highly specialized workplaces.
Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers—and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There’s nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children.
But the fact remains: It is the elites who are increasingly separated from the America over which they have so much influence. That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America. …
“Man-caused disasters? Mark Steyn tells us what they are.
Mark Steyn notices the latest teleprompter problem.
Which leads us to Maureen Dowd’s column. After the pull quote, the column goes downhill.
Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.
On St. Patrick’s Day, the president spoke a bit of Gaelic, dyed the White House fountains green and talked about his distant relatives in the tiny Irish town of Moneygall, aptly named since money and gall are the two topics now consuming him.
But Mr. Obama is still having trouble summoning a suitable flash of Irish temper at the gall of the corrupt money magicians who continue to make our greenbacks disappear into their bottomless well. He’s got to lop off some heads.
As he watches the fury of ordinary Americans bubble up at those who continue to plunder our economy, he should keep in mind one of my dad’s favorite Gaelic sayings: “Never bolt the door with a boiled carrot.”
His lofty team of economic rivals is looking more like a team of small forwards and shooting guards. At the White House on Monday, the president read reporters some tough talk from the teleprompter …
Jonah Goldberg posts on President Burgundy.
Scrappleface says Pelosi is concerned now that newspapers are cutting back on printing we will be overcome by forest growth.
… “The primary role of newspapers for the past 50 years or so has been to control the tree population,” said Rep. Pelosi, D-CA. “Without street editions of these papers, we’ll see unchecked multiplication of the worst sorts of pulp-producing species.” …
Click on WORD or PDF for full content