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Walter Williams writes a great essay about what it means for a culture to be civilized.
During the 1940s, my family lived in North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen housing project. Many families didn’t lock doors until late at night, if ever. No one ever thought of installing bars on their windows. Hot, humid summer nights found many people sleeping outside on balconies or lawn chairs. Starting in the ’60s and ’70s, doing the same in some neighborhoods would have been tantamount to committing suicide. Keep in mind that the 1940s and ’50s were a time of gross racial discrimination, high black poverty and few opportunities compared to today. The fact that black neighborhoods were far more civilized at that time should give pause to the excuses of today that blames today’s pathology on poverty and discrimination.
Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.
So what kind of people are the Palestinians? One of their courts just sentenced a citizen to death for the crime of selling land to a Jew. Jonathan Tobin has the story in Contentions.
… All of this ought to highlight a key truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict: though Israel is routinely depicted as a “racist” or “apartheid” state, it is actually the Palestinian nationalist movement that is predicated on hatred and exclusion — not Israel, which protects the political and property rights of its Arab minority.
It will be interesting to see whether the State Department or the White House, both eager to portray the P.A. as a worthy peace-partner and deserving of statehood, will call upon Abbas to pardon or commute the sentence of Brigith. We’ll also be waiting to see whether this outrage is taken up by the United Nations and its various agencies that are usually busy condemning Israel for having the temerity to defend its citizens against terrorism.
Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb posts on the 100 days of BO.
… One thing that is certain: Obama’s answers weren’t nearly as weak as the questions that prompted them. Jeff Zeleny embarrassed himself and his paper when he asked Obama what was the most “enchanted” moment of his first 100 days. I was unable to see whether the question was read out of a My Little Unicorn notepad. Readers of the New York Times may wonder why the Obama administration approved a dramatic reenactment of the 9/11 attacks using real fighter planes and a lifesize 747. They won’t find the answer in tomorrow’s paper, though they’ll be delighted to learn that “the ship of state is an ocean liner; it’s not a speed boat.”
In other words, Obama wants credit for closing Gitmo even though there’s only one less prisoner there than when he was inaugurated and his administration has no good answer for what to do with the rest. Obama wants credit for his handling of the economy even though the economy contracted at a worse than expected 6.1% in the first quarter of this year. Obama wants credit for rejecting the false choice between our security and our ideals even though you only get credit for that if your policies keep the American people safe.
Karl Rove comments on 100 days of outsourcing the presidency.
… What happens in a president’s first 100 days rarely characterizes the arc of the 1,361 that follow. Jimmy Carter had a very good first 100 days. Bill Clinton did not.
Still, a president would rather start well than poorly — and Mr. Obama has a job approval of 63%. That leaves him tied with Mr. Carter, one point ahead of George W. Bush, and behind only Ronald Reagan’s 67%. Four of the past six presidents had approval ratings that ranged between 62% and 67%, a statistically insignificant spread.
Mr. Obama is popular because he is a historic figure, has an attractive personality, has passed key legislation, and receives adoring press coverage.
However, there are cautionary signs. …
… Mr. Obama is a great face for the Democratic Party. He is its best salesman and most persuasive advocate. But he is beginning to leave the impression that he is more concerned with the aesthetics of policy rather than its contents. In the long run, substance and consequences define a presidency more than signing ceremonies and photo-ops. In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.
David Goldman, the writer we have known as Spengler, writes for First Things on our evolving society and how its changes might alter the way we approach economics.
Three generations of economists immersed themselves in study of the Great Depression, determined to prevent a recurrence of the awful events of the 1930s. And as our current financial crisis began to unfold in 2008, policymakers did everything that those economists prescribed. Following John Maynard Keynes, President Bush and President Obama each offered a fiscal stimulus. The Federal Reserve maintained confidence in the financial system, increased the money supply, and lowered interest rates. The major industrial nations worked together, rather than at cross purposes as they had in the early 1930s.
In other words, the government tried to do everything right, but everything continues to go wrong. We labored hard and traveled long to avoid a new depression, but one seems to have found us, nonetheless.
So is this something outside the lesson book of the Great Depression? Most officials and economists argue that, until home prices stabilize, necrosis will continue to spread through the assets of the financial system, and consumers will continue to restrict spending. The sources of the present crisis reach into the capillary system of the economy: the most basic decisions and requirements of American households. All the apparatus of financial engineering is helpless beside the simple issue of household decisions about shelter. We are in the most democratic of economic crises, and it stems directly from the character of our people.
Part of the problem in seeing this may be that we are transfixed by the dense technicalities of credit flow, the new varieties of toxic assets, and the endless iterations of financial restructuring. Sometimes it helps to look at the world with a kind of simplicity. Think of it this way: Credit markets derive from the cycle of human life. Young people need to borrow capital to start families and businesses; old people need to earn income on the capital they have saved. We invest our retirement savings in the formation of new households. All the armamentarium of modern capital markets boils down to investing in a new generation so that they will provide for us when we are old.
To understand the bleeding in the housing market, then, we need to examine the population of prospective homebuyers whose millions of individual decisions determine whether the economy will recover. Families with children are the fulcrum of the housing market. Because single-parent families tend to be poor, the buying power is concentrated in two-parent families with children.
Now, consider this fact: America’s population has risen from 200 million to 300 million since 1970, while the total number of two-parent families with children is the same today as it was when Richard Nixon took office, at 25 million. In 1973, the United States had 36 million housing units with three or more bedrooms, not many more than the number of two-parent families with children—which means that the supply of family homes was roughly in line with the number of families. By 2005, the number of housing units with three or more bedrooms had doubled to 72 million, though America had the same number of two-parent families with children. …
… Our children are our wealth. Too few of them are seated around America’s common table, and it is their absence that makes us poor. Not only the absolute count of children, to be sure, but also the shrinking proportion of children raised with the moral material advantages of two-parent families diminishes our prospects. The capital markets have reduced the value of homeowners’ equity by $8 trillion and of stocks by $7 trillion. Households with a provider aged 45 to 54 have lost half their net worth between 2004 and 2009, according to Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. There are ways to ameliorate the financial crisis, but none of them will replace the lives that should have been part of America and now are missed. …
… The graying of the industrial world creates an inexhaustible supply of savings and demand for assets in which to invest them—which is to say, for young people able to borrow and pay loans with interest. The tragedy is that most of the world’s young people live in countries without capital markets, enforcement of property rights, or reliable governments. Japanese investors will not buy mortgages from Africa or Latin America, or even China. A rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese unless, of course, the poor Chinese first moves to the United States. …
… The rest of the world lent the United States vast sums, rising to almost $1 trillion in 2007. As the rest of the world thrust its savings on the United States, interest rates fell and home prices rose. To feed the inexhaustible demand for American assets, Wall Street connived with the ratings agencies to turn the sow’s ear of subprime mortgages into silk purses, in the form of supposedly default-proof securities with high credit ratings. Americans thought themselves charmed and came to expect indefinitely continuing rates of 10 percent annual appreciation of home prices (and correspondingly higher returns to homeowners with a great deal of leverage).
The baby boomers evidently concluded that one day they all would sell their houses to each other at exorbitant prices and retire on the proceeds. The national household savings rate fell to zero by 2007, as Americans came to believe that capital gains on residential real estate would substitute for savings.
After a $15 trillion reduction in asset values, Americans are now saving as much as they can. Of course, if everyone saves and no one spends, the economy shuts down, which is precisely what is happening. The trouble is not that aging baby boomers need to save. The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth. …
Debra Saunders wants to know what Pelosi knew and when did she know it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a “truth commission” to investigate the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding – until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.
Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, “but she still realizes the political reality” – as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 – and did not protest. …
Anyone who’ll write a book titled Free Range Kids deserves a lot of space in Pickings. First a Contentions post on the author, Lenore Skenazy.
I’d like to nominate Lenore Skenazy as “Heroine of the Day” for her sane approach to child rearing. She is the so-called “worst Mom in America” who agreed to let her 9-year-old son get home on public transportation alone. He successfully rode the subway solo, she wrote a column about it, tons of angry mail and lots of media attention followed and poof a movement was born: Raising kids to be safe but without all the worry. Her book, Free-Range Kids is out today and she’s been hitting the airwaves, including a great interview with Brian Lehrer. One thing she said that is especially significant: “We’ve forgotten how competent our kids are.” …
Then a book WSJ review of her book and one other – both on raising children.
… One effect of parents’ over-involvement in their children’s’ lives has been the demise of those arenas of childhood that were once inviolably the province of children themselves: unsupervised play, neighborhood baseball games and other settings where children first exercised their moral imaginations and were forced to cope independently with their own shortcomings. Parents who lament this turn of events may welcome Lenore Skenazy’s “Free-Range Kids,” which, like Mr. Weissbourd’s book, argues that adults should not always try to protect children from failure.
Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.” …
News Biscuit reports Somali pirates are going to wear more traditional clothing.
… International shipping insurers have welcomed the shift to more traditional pirate methods. The response came after Lloyds of London announced it had paid the latest ten million dollar ransom demand for the release of a U.S. registered oil tanker; ‘But the treasure be buried on a desert island in the Spanish Main; ten paces north from dead man’s tree. Yo ho ho!’
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