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In case you wondered why you should care, John Tierney discusses one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel prize for economics. It is about how we get along without an overbearing government.
Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment. His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application. …
…But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. …
…Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
“She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.
One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high (altitude wise), and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.” …
…”The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units”. …
Mark Steyn contrasts a made-up quote attributed to Rush with a hair-raising quote from Anita Dunn, White House communications director.
…Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired Leftie agitators have to invent racist sound bites to put in his mouth.
But the White House communications director is so undivisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.
From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book “Modern China,” is the great man in a nutshell:
“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 million to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”
Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to within 30 million. Still, as President Barack Obama’s communications director says, he lived his dream, and so can you, although if your dream involves killing, oh, 50-80 million Chinamen you may have your work cut out. But let’s stick with the Fenby figure: He killed 40-70 million Chinamen. Whoops, can you say “Chinamen” or is that racist? Oh, and sexist. So hard keeping up with the Sensitivity Police in this pansified political culture, isn’t it? But you can kill 40-70 million Chinamen, and that’s fine and dandy: You’ll be cited as an inspiration by the White House to an audience of high school students. You can be anything you want to be! Look at Mao: He wanted to be a mass murderer, and he lived his dream! You can, too! …
David Warren looks at journalism and teaching, and the barriers to entry, and administrative expense, that have developed in both.
There was a time when teachers did not necessarily require a high school certificate. Most were taught, even self-taught, on the job, which is an extremely effective way to weed out those not suited to it. The number of teachers tended to swell and shrink with the number of pupils to be “educated,” and of course there were no unions.
And hardly any administration, either. Our ancestors couldn’t afford such things, and the unavoidable administrative tasks tended to be pieced out among the teachers. A principal was in effect the senior-most teacher, captain of the team hired by a very local school board.
Today, we have layers of specialized administration, reporting to a vast provincial bureaucracy, and while a teacher may aspire to be promoted into the administrative ranks, the people who make the key pedagogical decisions have generally no experience of teaching whatever. …
…Administrative departments are smaller than in the “public sector,” but nevertheless huge, because of the scale and complexity of the government reporting requirements to which they must answer from hour to hour.
Looking back, over 40 summers, I realize that this is by far the biggest change: the metastasis of bureaucracy. …
…By contrast, the way of the world, before, was simpler and more comprehensible. You learned, you mastered, or you were out. …
David Harsanyi takes aim at Republican mavericks.
…It is always curious to hear irascible members of one political party accuse members of the opposing party of “playing politics” as if it were a bad thing. Can you imagine? Politics. In Washington, no less.
As you know, Democrats claim to be above such petty, divisive and low-brow behavior, especially on those days they are running both houses of Congress and the White House. What this country really needs, we are incessantly reminded, are more mavericks. Well, Republican mavericks. Folks who say “yes.” …
…Consider that for possibly the first time in American history, a vote in a Senate committee was the lead story for news organizations across the country, simply because the ideologically bewildered Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, used her inconsequential vote to move forward a government-run health care bill. …
…”Forget Sarah Palin,” remarked The Associated Press. “The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.” …
…Mavericks dismiss ideology because it would bind them to consistent and principled votes. John McCain, for example, often displays the muddled and mercurial thinking of a person with no political, intellectual or economic philosophy. …
Bet against Biden’s horse if you want to win, says Toby Harnden, in the Daily Telegraph, UK.
Want to know how to deal with a momentous issue of war or grand strategy? You could do a lot worse than check out what Vice-President Joe Biden thinks – and plump for the opposite. …
…On all the big questions, he has been – to put it politely – on the wrong side of history. In 1990, he voted against American forces expelling Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. He voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and advocated splitting it into three states along ethnic lines. He opposed the Iraq troop surge of 2007 that pacified the country and rescued the US from the jaws of defeat.
Now, Mr Biden is pushing a policy of what he terms “counter-terrorism plus” …
We have shorts from National Review.
Remember the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran? It was a cruise missile fired by an intellectually dishonest State Department bureaucracy into the heart of George W. Bush’s Iran policy. In a footnote, the authors very cleverly defined the term “nuclear-weapons program” to refer only to facilities and activities explicitly dedicated to the production of warheads; then they revealed that Iran had once operated such a program but had abandoned it in 2003. “Iran Abandoned Nuclear-Weapons Program in 2003” became a headline the world over, as the authors knew it would. Of course, even as those headlines were published, Iran was ramping up its enrichment efforts at sites that could be devoted to civilian or military use. It was these nominally ambiguous sites that had prompted fears in the first place — and the new information that Iran had as recently as 2003 operated an explicit weapons program, if presented non-tendentiously, would only have heightened them. As presented, it tricked the public into thinking the time was right to release a flock of doves in Tehran’s direction. The revelation of the Qom site and further displays of Iranian bellicosity (cf. its recent missile tests) confirm the foolishness of the strategic view that motivated this NIE. But time favors the proliferator, and the price has been paid.
The Federal Trade Commission has embarked upon a daft assault on free speech, specifically social-media users’ endorsement of products or businesses. The FTC has propounded rules that will impose fines of up to $11,000 on bloggers, Facebook users, or Twitter tweeters (for whom surely we could invent a more dignified name?) who fail to disclose financial relationships with businesses they write about. Such relationships include the receipt of merchandise gratis — meaning that online critics who receive free books or press passes to a concert will find themselves in violation of federal law if they fail to satisfy Washington’s disclosure demands. Such arrangements are longstanding custom and are of particular value to small, independent publications (print or electronic) that cannot afford to pay retail prices for access to the materials they review. And it ought to go without saying that the FTC has no business policing Facebook updates, period. That the FTC would make a federal case out of such a triviality suggests that this bloated and arrogant agency is overdue for a deep cut in staff and budget. If some unemployed bureaucrats become bloggers, all the better.
Christopher Hitchens thinks we should have noticed Australia’s dust storms.
… There’s no absolutely firm evidence about this, but the huge dust storms that have been hitting China, Iraq, and East Africa are thought by some experts to be harbingers of worse than just deforestation, dust bowls, and further drought. It also seems probable that they can carry alarming diseases such as meningitis among humans in Africa and foot-and-mouth among animals in Britain. (Saharan dust is now reportedly being blown far north of the Alps—last year the British Meteorological Office detected it in “old” South Wales.) There is also the problem of soot, which is thought by some to be the cause of the shrinkage of the Himalayan glaciers, coated in fine carbon particles that have reduced their ability to reflect back the warming rays of the sun. As with all arguments that touch on climate change, it’s hard to be sure whether the seemingly mounting occurrence of massive dust storms reflects an upward trend or a cyclical one (Sydney had a storm like this in the 1940s), or just better reporting. But the increasing probability is that dust from somewhere you hardly ever think about is on its way to somewhere near you.
In the New York Times, Joe Nocera reviews The Great Depression: A Diary.
In January 1931, a lawyer named Benjamin Roth, 38 years old, solidly Republican, a solo practitioner in Youngstown, Ohio, decided to start a diary. Realizing that he was “living through an historic thing that will long be remembered” — as he put it in one early entry — he wanted to keep a record for posterity. …
…Events that we know about from the history books he was reacting to in real time. He was furious to learn, thanks to a series of highly publicized Congressional hearings, that some of the nation’s most prominent bankers did terrible things during the Roaring Twenties. (“By manipulation the officers boosted and unloaded on the public their own stock in National City Bank as high as $650 per share when its book value was only $60.”) But he makes no mention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose birth was the direct result of those incendiary hearings.
Mr. Roth is skeptical of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and worries that the president’s fondness for deficit spending will ultimately be disastrous. He keeps thinking inflation is right around the corner. He worries about the rise of Hitler. He writes about gangs of farmers who threaten sheriffs, judges and anyone else who tries to foreclose on a farm. …
Reuters look like fools for not doing some basic fact-checking. Iain Murray posts on The Corner. Even though they’re based in Great Britain, they are full fledged members of our biased media.
Jaws dropped around Washington today as Reuters reported on a press release from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announcing that high-profile defections had led to a reversal of their stance against the job-destroying global-warming bill.
Far more jaws dropped, however, in disbelief that Reuters could have fallen for such an obvious hoax. The press release is not on the Chamber’s website, but on a fake one. And who owns it? That happy band of anti-capitalist culture jammers, The Yes Men.
What amazes me is that this sort of fact-checking takes just a couple of mouse clicks. …
…All of which suggests that major news organizations are simply machines for regurgitating press releases, real or not, that accord with their view of where the world should be going. …