Click on WORD or PDF for full content
John Tierney reviews Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist. Ridley posits that markets have created the wealth, technology, health, and standard of living we currently enjoy. Market forces will continue to improve living standards, if unfettered by the dead hand of government.
… “At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”
The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers. Unlike the contemporary Neanderthals, who apparently relied just on local resources, those modern humans could shop for imports.
“The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”
As they specialized and exchanged, humans learned how to domesticate crops and animals and sell food to passing merchants. Traders congregated in the first cities and built ships that spread goods and ideas around the world.
The Phoenician merchants who sailed the Mediterranean were denounced by Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Greek intellectuals like Homer. But trading networks enabled the ancient Greeks to develop their alphabet, mathematics and science, and later fostered innovation in the trading hubs of the Roman Empire, India, China, Arabia, Renaissance Italy and other European capitals.
Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process. …
…Our progress is unsustainable, he argues, only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the precautionary principle requiring advance proof that they’re risk-free. Americans are turning more protectionist and advocating byzantine restrictions like carbon tariffs. Globalization is denounced by affluent Westerners preaching a return to self-sufficiency.
But with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
…“We cannot absolutely prove,” he wrote, “that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.”
In Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein laughs at nanny-state assumptions.
Jack Conway, Kentucky’s attorney general and one of the two leading candidates for the Senate seat on the Democratic side [said about Rand Paul, who has won the Republican nomination for Kentucky Senator]: “He wants to do away with the Department of Agriculture. He wants to do away with the Department of Education.”
Lt. Gov Dan Mongiardo, the other major Democratic candidate said, “Rand Paul says here’s your gun, here’s your land, God bless you, good luck. That’s his form of government.”
But surely his Democratic opponents have something bad to say about Dr. Paul?
So, why the loss in PA-12? Weekly Standard Blog post suggests some answers.
… The only competitive statewide primary Tuesday was on the Democratic side, and that helped boost Democratic turnout (Dems outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 at the polls in PA-12). That advantage will be gone in the fall. Critz ran as a conservative Democrat–his ads portrayed him as a pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-cap & trade candidate, who would have voted against Obamacare. That’s an advantage many Democratic incumbents in GOP-leaning districts won’t have in November. Their voting records will tell a different story.
And for that matter, PA-12 didn’t lean that much in the GOP’s favor. Yes, as Democrats and MSNBC reporters are enthusiastically pointing out, it is the only district that flipped from voting for John Kerry in ’04 to John McCain in ’08. But McCain only carried it by 900 votes. And that was after Obama had personally insulted western Pennsylvanians as bitter xenophobes who cling to their guns and God because of economic alienation. Fifty-eight percent of voters in the district were still willing to vote for Democrat John Murtha in 2008. …
Christopher Hitchens reviews some Iranian current events, including one Ayatollah’s threats to other Muslim countries. With Obama literally bowing out of world leadership, the West may no longer be the biggest concern for Iran’s neighbors.
…On May 15, we were subjected to a tirade by Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, leader of Iran’s Hezbollah party and proprietor of the newspaper of the same name, which carried his incendiary article. The need of the hour, intoned the ayatollah, was for a “Greater Iran” that would assume hegemonic control over much of the Middle East and Central Asia (stretching from Afghanistan to Palestine, according to the broad-brush ambitions disclosed by his polemic). This new imperialism would, he urged, possess two very attractive attributes. It would abolish the Jewish state, and it would assist in the arrival of the long-awaited Mahdi, or hidden imam, whose promised reign of perfection has been on hold since his abrupt disappearance in the ninth century. …
…It seems to me obvious that the Iranian mullahs do not desire to immolate their profitable system of corruption and exploitation in a last-ditch fight with states that can actually obliterate them. There may be some Mahdi-fanciers who dream of this apocalypse, and they should not be completely discounted. But what could be clearer in the medium run than that Tehran wants the bomb in order to exert nuclear blackmail against other Muslims? …
David Warren gives us an interesting inside look into the unrest in Thailand.
…The same thing happens in the East, faster through the absence of constitutional inertia. Bangkok and Thailand offer an especially vivid example: one country has become two worlds. We have watched the emergence of a conflict between Yellow Shirts (essentially urban) and Red Shirts (essentially not), which may be progressing toward civil war. …
…This is backed with some marketing savvy, as the Red Shirt slogans have shifted from supporting Thaksin Shinawatra, the freely-elected demagogue who was “Toxin” to Bangkok voters. He was deposed and exiled after urban Yellow Shirt demonstrations. They also deposed his party after it won the election, and then a compliant Supreme Court banned Thaksin’s party, lest it embarrass Bangkok by winning yet again.
Now the Red Shirts demand “democracy” in the abstract. There have been shows of loyalty to the king, to defeat the charge of “republicanism.” And, for the most part, the crowds from upcountry have remained edifyingly peaceful. But stubborn; more stubborn than Bangkok can understand. …
In Jewish World Review, Paul Greenberg follows Mark Steyn’s lead last week in discussing the cultural decline in Great Britain.
…A country can rebound from economic difficulties and even political demoralization — see the New Deal, or the Reagan Years — but how restore the social fabric, the very culture of a country, once it’s been allowed to deteriorate? The collapse of educational standards may be only the most pervasive and influential symptom of what ails us.
…It is such visions of the American future that may explain the rise of the latest political phenomenon on this side of the pond–the Tea Party, a variegated collection of Americans who have only this much in common: Like Howard Beale in Network, they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take this anymore! They’re opening the nearest window and shouting their rage. Yes, they’re reactionaries — but they have much to react against. What intelligent observer wouldn’t?
No, the Tea Partiers may not know what to do about the problem, but at least they know we’ve got one. And they’re not going to be all nice and quiet about it.
Mark Steyn writes a cautionary tale: how big government in England and Canada is eroding Western culture and values, increasing the power of the governing over the governed.
…in December Tohseef Shah sprayed the words “KILL GORDON BROWN,” “OSAMA IS ON HIS WAY” and “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” on the war memorial at Burton-upon-Trent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided his words were not “religiously motivated.” Phew! Thank goodness for that, eh? So a week or so back he walked out of court a free man, except for £500 in compensation to the municipal council for cleaning off his non-religiously motivated “ISLAM WILL DOMINATE THE WORLD” graffito. …
…in today’s advanced Western society, there are no absolute rights—for all individual freedoms must be “balanced” against the state’s commitment to “multiculturalism” or “equality” or whatever other modish conceit tickles its fancy. … Real “rights” are restraints upon the state—“negative” rights, as constitutionalists have it; they delineate the limits of the sovereign’s power. But in the modern era “rights” are baubles in the state’s gift, and the sovereign confers them at the expense of individual liberty. Truly, this is an Orwellian assault on the very foundations of freedom. …
David Goldman offers an odd juxtaposition of stories and commentary on some cultural crossroads. We highlight the most positive aspect.
…The strictures of traditional society are a flimsy defense against modernity. The moment that members of traditional society cease to live under a regime of compulsion, they tend to adopt the habits of the ambient culture. The most dramatic expression of this trend is the collapse of Muslim birth rates, especially among Muslims who have emigrated to the West. As Martin Walker wrote in the Woodrow Wilson Center Quarterly in 1999, “the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.”
There is a straight-line correlation between literacy and birth rates in the Muslim world, as I documented here, which suggests that the moment that Muslims enter modernity, for example, through reading, the habits of traditional society die quickly. Islam is fragile, and that helps explain why radical Islam is so aggressive.
Thomas Sowell brings the truth into sharp focus.
One of the many shallow statements that sound good — if you don’t stop and think about it — is that “at some point, you have made enough money.”
The key word in this statement, made by President Barack Obama recently, is “you.” There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope.
Politicians with the power to determine each citizen’s income are no longer public servants. They are public masters. …
David Harsanyi comments on the blatant authoritarian condescension of the intelligentsia.
…”One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” according to Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”
Of course, some form or another of Friedman’s rationale has been used in nearly every embryonic dictatorship. Now, if only Venezuela and Sudan funded more solar farms, Friedman could embrace their progressive forms of governance, as well.
Friedman isn’t alone. The lure of enlightened autocracy is why MSNBC’s Chris Matthews can casually ask, as he did on his show this week, why the oil industry hasn’t been nationalized yet. It is why Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan can stand in front of the Supreme Court, as she did last year, and defend book banning (for the administration, via bipartisan legislation). …
…It seems that the negative externalities of our freewheeeling ways have become too much for some of the enlightened to bear. Progressivism is the belief that we have too much freedom with which to make too many stupid choices. …
In the WSJ, Julia Martin reviews Samuel Zipp’s new book about a previous generation’s intelligentsia wreaking havoc on city neighborhoods and economies.
The disaster that befell many American cities in the post-World War II era is drearily familiar. We know that the building of interstate highways, combined with the Federal Housing Authority’s red-lining of inner-city neighborhoods, encouraged the flight of the urban middle class to the suburbs. We also know that the federal government then ensured the ruin of much of what was left by pursuing “urban renewal”—that is, by demolishing working-class neighborhoods, destroying the traditional street grid and gouging the classic urban fabric with fortress-like public-housing projects.
In “Manhattan Projects,” Samuel Zipp offers a fresh perspective on this dispiriting tale. Unlike many of his scholarly predecessors, who regarded the anti-urban agenda of policy makers as a given (why else would they have so destroyed our cities?), Mr. Zipp tells his story from the point of view of policy makers who loved cities—and who thought they were making a “benevolent intervention.” …