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Mark Steyn takes us back to the speech. 

The President of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kansas, last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness that archeologists of the future, sifting through the rubble of our civilization, will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.

“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc., remain the most inviting target, and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to re-election and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. … And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. … It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”

This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less “on their own” in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life – and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.

It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics – the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. …

More of this from Michael Barone.

Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama’s December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.

Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. …

… What we have here, it seems a president who has no serious interest in public policy. He has spent nearly half his 15 years in public office running for other public office. The only difference now is that, having run out of higher offices to run for, he is just running for reelection instead. Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed.

Ed Morrissey revisits LightSquared.

The saga of LightSquared added a new chapter last night, as Bloomberg reported on the preliminary result of tests of the satellite Internet provider’s service in relation to GPS devices.  The Obama administration has pushed LightSquared as a provider for its ambitious broadband expansion over the objections of the military, which warned that LightSquared’s operations would interfere with the satellite-based navigational system.  The draft summary of the November testing shows that the military was right to be concerned: …

 …Why is this important?  Philip Falcone is a big donor to the Democratic Party, and he has billions of dollars at stake in LightSquared’s approval.  Also, Obama himself was an investor in LightSquared at one point, as were or are a number of his associates.  The resounding failure in this test makes it look like the White House pressured witnesses to back off of exposing LightSquared’s product as exactly the kind of dangerous problem that critics had maintained all along — with the intent to mislead Congress into moving forward with LightSquared’s government contracts. …

Andrew Ferguson tracks down the nutty origins of the nutty ideas of the administration’s nuttiest.

Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?

Stay with me here, seriously. I’m thinking now of the administration’s much-publicized devotion to behavioral economics. Not long after his election, Time magazine noted that Barack Obama had surrounded himself with a “dream team” of behavioral economists, outside-the-box envelope-pushers like Peter Orszag, who became the administration’s first head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cass Sunstein, whom the president appointed as his “regulatory czar.”

Behavioral economics is très chic. All the coolest economists are into it. It partakes of the obsession with social science that has lately gripped the  country’s smart people, who exhibit a grinding need to quantify human behavior so that it will become more predictable, describable, and controllable. To meet demand, a steady flow of “studies” in human behavior passes through the sluice gates of university departments of accounting, psychology, marketing, sociology, business, and of course economics. From these the behavioral economists build vast edifices of theory and now, thanks to President Obama, public policy too.

The most salient of these policies was the Making Work Pay tax credit of 2009 and 2010. It was an essential element of the president’s famous $250 billion “middle-class tax cut,” which was slapped like a defibrillator onto the limp and supine figure of the American economy a couple years ago. The MWP was carefully designed according to the principles of behavioral economics, and now it seems not to have worked the way it was supposed to. 

Behavioral economics is based on the belief that we human beings behave irrationally in measurable and predictable ways, and quite often we don’t have the slightest idea why we do what we do, though social scientists can do experiments that will tell us. This point of view contrasts with the working premise of more traditional economics, which assumes that people will pursue their economic self-interest, rationally defined. 

When the Bush administration decided on a temporary tax cut to stimulate the economy, in 2001 and again in 2008, they merely sent everybody a lump-sum check, assuming that we’d all spend it and send a good jolt through the ol’ defibrillator. 

The Bush administration, as we all know, was not très chic. It was full of fuddy-duddies. They didn’t understand the up-to-date social science experiments with which behavioral economists keep current. The Obama administration, by contrast, decided it would be scientific. Its economists designed what a headline in the New Yorker called “A Smarter Stimulus.”  …

… In predicting they would do otherwise, the très chic economists thought they had science on their side. In fact, they didn’t have science on their side?—?they had a flimsy record of fewer than 150 undergraduates who told a handful of graduate students in a Texas classroom in early 2007 how they thought they might behave in a fanciful situation. 

Who knew that 141 students in Corpus Christi would wield so vast an influence over U.S. economic policy? Who knew that the government would be run by intellectuals silly enough to let them wield it?

Andrew Malcolm lets Speaker Boehner tout the Keystone bill.

… Another bipartisan provision in this bill supports the job-creating Keystone energy project.

As you may know, the Keystone energy project would create tens of thousands of American jobs and reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East. This jobs project has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. It’s backed by a broad-based coalition, from small businesses to organized labor. 

You’ve heard President Obama say the American people ‘can’t wait’ to take action on jobs. Well, the Keystone project is the very definition of an idea the American people can’t wait for Washington to take action on. 

As a matter of fact, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, has warned that if the United States doesn’t approve this project, Canada will be forced to move forward with other customers, potentially China. We can’t stand by and allow that to happen. Those jobs are too important.

Unfortunately, the president wants to put off a decision on the Keystone project until after next year’s election. Not only that — he now says he will reject the House’s jobs bill if it includes support for the project. 

This is no time for the same-old my-way-or-the-highway theatrics. …

Editors at Investor’s.com on Keystone.

The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree.

You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global’s Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

In the president’s view, extending the payroll tax cuts is more important than adding more people to the payrolls, unless they are making electric cars that catch fire or work for solar-panel makers that go bankrupt. …

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Russ Roberts contemplates apocalypse.

On my exercise bike at the gym the other day, I caught a snippet of the Stuart Varney Show. Three guests were discussing the European crisis. John Stossel argued for letting market forces work–if I remember correctly, he wanted those banks that had lent money to Greece and Italy and Spain to bear costs, possibly severe costs like losing their money. One of the guests (I don’t know who it was) strongly disagreed. His argument was that Stossel’s solution would lead to the apocalypse. That was his argument. We risked the end of civilization–banks could go broke leading to a depression and then we’d all be worse off. Varney agreed. Stossel’s idea of market discipline was simply too dangerous.

Stossel gave a good answer. He said but what if we get the apocalypse anyway? Maybe all we’re doing is kicking the can down the road and making the reckoning even worse than it otherwise would be. His answer is made more powerful by recent history. In 2008, we rescued the creditors relentlessly that helped pave the way for this crisis. What will the next one look like?

I have a different problem with the apocalypse argument. How do you know if it’s true? Where’s the evidence that letting banks lose some, or most or even all of the money they unwisely lent or invested in bonds is going to lead to a disaster? Where are the data that make this claim credible other than a bald assertion?

But I have an even bigger problem with the apocalypse argument. If the threat of banks taking a haircut risks the apocalypse then we may as well admit the game is over. Just give the banks our wallets and checkbooks and go home. It’s the end of capitalism and the end of democracy. I’d prefer an apocalypse.

Writing in Commentary, Kevin Williamson profiles Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell? is that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken. This characteristic, a by-product of both his innate temperament and the intellectual courage for which nature does not deserve the credit, surely has been bad for his career. (Intellectual courage tends to impede the career path of an intellectual.) If he were the obfuscating sort, he might have made Harvard don; if he were the cheaply poetical sort, he might have made U.S. president. His plain speaking also makes him dangerous, and that danger is intensified by the fact that Sowell is black. And not just black, but unassailably black: He’s Southern-born, Harlem-raised, brought up poor, and the first of his family to be educated beyond the sixth grade.

If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell, whose input is data and whose output is socioeconomic criticism in several grades, ranging from bemused observation to thorough debunking to high-test scorn—all of which are represented in The Thomas Sowell Reader (Basic Books, 404 pages).

Now 81 years old, Sowell is known as a libertarian-leaning conservative, which he is, and he has a thriving sideline in debunking racial platitudes. But he is first an economist, which means he is first an observer and reporter of facts, and if those facts take him to uncomfortable places, so be it. No, the prevalence of black men in the NBA doesn’t mean that the NBA is racist, it means that reality is racist. Yes, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats really do practice the same kind of ethnic politics that resulted in the Rwandan genocide and the Sri Lankan civil war, even if they do not practice them to the same extent. Yes, affirmative action is naked racism. No, rent-control laws don’t control rent. No, gun-control laws don’t control guns. No, standardized exams are not culturally biased—but, yes, life is culturally biased.

Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.

One of the great and brilliant things about Thomas Sowell is that he, like most nerds, appears to be simply immune to certain social conventions. This is a critical thing about him—because the social conventions of modern intellectual life demand that certain things go studiously unnoticed, that certain subjects not be breached, or breached only in narrow ways approved by the proper authorities. Sowell does not seem to me to be so much a man who intentionally violates intellectual social conventions as a man who does not notice them, because he cannot be bothered to notice them, because he is in hot pursuit of data about one of the many subjects that fascinate his remarkable brain.

Sowell is a writer with many interests: international development, child development, language, law, restitution, rednecks, Marx, manners, markets, Marines, mascots, the process of growing old, and, because he is an American conservative, baseball. That comes under the heading of “Social Issues” in the Reader, and the essay is “‘Dead Ball’ Versus ‘Lively Ball’.” Baseballologists will be familiar with the debate: Relatively few home runs were hit before 1920, after which the number grew very quickly. Legend has it that the Powers That Be in MLB introduced a so-called lively ball in 1920, hoping to produce a crop of exciting new home-run hitters to distract the public from the recent scandal of the Chicago “Black Sox,” who had fixed the 1919 World Series. “Denials by baseball officials that the ball had been changed have been dismissed out of hand,” Sowell writes, “in view of the dramatic and apparently otherwise inexplicable changes in the number of home runs hit in the 1920s and thereafter.”

Sowell, as is his habit, does not accept the orthodoxy, in baseball or in politics. …

… Even his gratitude is unsentimental. Consider his account of the happy coincidences that contributed to his success and how they have shaped his views:

“I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me and just before racial quotas made the achievements of blacks look suspect. That kind of luck cannot be planned.

Crucial pieces of good fortune like these would have made it ridiculous for me to have offered other blacks the kind of advice which the media so often accused me of offering—to follow in my footsteps and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The addiction of the intelligentsia to catchwords like “bootstraps” has made it all but impossible to have even a rational discussion of many issues. As for following in my footsteps, many of the paths I took had since been destroyed by misguided social policy, so that the same quality of education was no longer available to most ghetto youngsters, though there was never a time in history when education was more important.” …

Speaking of education, Neal McCluskey writes about the failed policies of the administration.

Want to do exactly the wrong things to fix US higher education? You can’t do much better than the recent offerings from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. To a system blackout-drunk on taxpayer money, the Obama administration would deliver even more booze while only whispering about tough love.

Speaking at a Nov. 29 Las Vegas gathering of financial-aid administrators, Duncan addressed exploding college costs, a problem highlighted by Occupy Wall Street protesters angry over rising student debt. He lauded loan forgiveness and repayment reduction, and exhorted colleges to do, well, something to become more efficient.

While trumpeting the bogus claim that the average college graduate will earn $1 million more over his lifetime than someone with just a high-school diploma, he didn’t even hint that taxpayer-funded student aid (including easily forgiven loans) enables schools to blithely raise their prices.

In short, Duncan said all the wrong things. …

Virginia Postrel has more on mistaken education policies. 

The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a “higher education bubble” is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.

This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders “to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality.” The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.”

It’s a phenomenon familiar to economists. If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. The classic example is farm subsidies, which increase the price of farmland. …

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Charles Krauthammer starts our look at the Kansas speech.

… In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!

Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.

This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?

He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.

What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?

Debra Saunders is next.

… Fair share? In the Kansas speech, Obama extolled Minnesota manufacturer Marvin Windows and Doors for laying off workers only once in 100 years. During tough times, Obama noted, Marvin’s unnamed owners shared the pain of reduced compensation with their workers.

So who is Obama’s jobs czar? Not the suckers at Marvin. General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt, whose compensation doubled last year as GE was seeking concessions from workers, is Obama’s go-to guy on jobs. The New York Times reported that General Electric didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes in 2010 – even though the multinational corporation earned $5.1 billion in U.S. profits.

Obama’s other model rich guy is investor Warren Buffett, who frequently complains that his taxes should be higher. Now Buffett doesn’t pay what he says he should pay, but he says he wants to do so, and that’s enough. Thus, Buffett is a member in good-standing in Obamaland’s fellow big-shot club.

Besides, Obama told the audience gathered in the Osawatomie High School, under his plan the rich would only have to “contribute a little more.” This administration is dedicated to never telling voters that they have to pay for his agenda. Only the top 1 percent – who already pay 38 percent of federal income taxes – have to pay for big government, and then just a skooch more.

Same rules? Please. The Obama way is to talk up fairness while your cronies hire a stable of lawyers and lobbyists to grease the path for favorable tax loopholes. This is where high tax rates come in handy – they create an incentive to cozy up to the administration to win tax incentives for pet training and technology.

That’s the problem with Obama’s prescription for the middle class: Sure, he wants to create more jobs, as long as all jobs go through Washington.

James Pethokoukis says the president would take us back to the stagnation of the “70′s.”

1. Obama clearly thinks the “last few decades” have been a disaster for the U.S. economy, that America’s 30-year economic experiment in enhanced economic freedom—lower tax rates, less regulation, freer trade—has been a failure. Indeed, Obama says that although the “theory fits well on a bumper sticker … it has never worked.” Reagan and Clinton blew it. (Tax cutting JFK, too, apparently.) Time for a different formula. Time to raise taxes and create more rules for business with a goal of “shared prosperity and shared responsibility.”

2. But what Obama is really saying is this: “Let’s go back to the 1970s.” It was a Golden Age of Equality, with the top 1 percent’s share of national income at its lowest level of the 20th century. And the nostalgia surely doesn’t stop there. It was also a time of strong unions, expensive oil, regulated industry, and high tax rates. This is exactly the Obamacrat agenda. Of course, the 1970s were also a time of economic chaos and stagflation that led voters in 1980 to reject Jimmy Carter by a crushing landslide. Yet Obama wants give that formula another shot.

3. Back during the success-punishing 1970s, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent. And guess what? Liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, and Peter Diamond—whose nomination by Obama to the Federal Reserve thankfully failed in the Senate—think the top tax rate should zoom back there again. More evidence that Clintonomics is dead in today’s Democratic Party. Then again, Obama, like many Democrats, never thought the Reagan tax cuts made much sense. As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope: “The high marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest … but they did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters.” So the only downside was excessive tax planning?

4. Here is the real record of cutting taxes and regulation: The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation—the scourge of the 1970s—was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. (These numbers are even more impressive when you recall that heading into the 1980s, experts were predicting a dystopian, Solyent Greenesque, Age of Limits future for America.) Obama would be lucky to fail like this.

Believe it or not, the ignorant one is still ranting against ATM’s. Peter Ferrara has the story.

… He explained the roots of the problem as,

“Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.”

This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy.  Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and hence wages and standards of living.  Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.

He identifies the solution in the speech as increased government spending as the foundation for rising prosperity.  He says,

“Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world.  That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do.  They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.”

Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity.  But today Obama tells America “It doesn’t work.  It’s never worked.  It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

Instead he tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as the model that works.  But American economic growth is not suffering because of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country.  It is suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every policy that would free the economy to produce and boom.  Under such Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a reliable energy grid like a third world country. …

Daniel Henninger writes about the “Godfather” speech.

… About two-thirds through Mr. Obama’s Kansas speech, I started to think of “The Godfather.” After slapping around the “wealthy” for about a half hour, Mr. Obama said, “This isn’t about class warfare.” Maybe that’s true. In “The Godfather,” when awful things are about to be done to people, Michael Corleone or Tom Hagen reassure those about to get hit, “It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.”

But I could be wrong about that. There is that defining moment when Michael Corleone says to Fredo, his brother, “You’re nothing to me now.” When even as party leader, a president of the United States gives a major speech in which people get singled out repeatedly as basically enemies of “the middle class,” one has to wonder if they are nothing to him.

You then have to wonder about the tenor of another Obama term in office. If in fact there are categories of Americans he simply doesn’t like, a second Obama term, like the last half of “Godfather II,” could be a clinical exercise in hammering the people he singled out in this speech. Metaphorically speaking.

The Kansas speech was built around one concrete policy idea: that the rich and millionaires (officially still defined as families with before-tax income above $250,000) should send him more money so he can “invest” it. This single policy, if we heard correctly, will end high unemployment, raise middle-class incomes, put children through college, make America fair and defeat countries that pollute.

But will it? …

Next to last on the speech today from Peter Wehner.

… The shame is that there is a genuinely interesting and important debate of ideas to be had over the size, reach, and role of the federal government in our lives. Honorable people have very different views on this matter; some, like Obama, are drawn to a European-like model of social democracy, one that wants to centralize more and more power with the federal government as a means to eliminate income inequality and ensure greater fairness. Others believe the federal government has dramatically exceeded its constitutional authority, that it is leading us down a path to fiscal ruin, and in the process it is undermining civic character.

The great divide between conservatives and liberals today is over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Those are serious intellectual differences to discuss, but Obama apparently wants no part of it. He would rather turn his opponents into brutish, cartoon characters. …

William Voegeli writing for the Ashbrook Center provides interesting back story to the president’s ode to Marvin Windows.

Near the conclusion of his big speech in Kansas this week, President Obama praised business leaders who understand “their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders.” The president singled out Marvin Windows and Doors, based in Warroad, Minnesota, for not laying off a single employee during the recession, and choosing instead to cut the pay and perks of both workers and management.

This section of the speech is apparently based on a recent New York Times article about the company, one which complicates some of Obama’s arguments, however, and highlights other things he declined to address:

1. Marvin Windows and Doors has the latitude to consider obligations beyond those to its shareholders because it doesn’t have shareholders. The 107-year-old company is privately held: the president is the founder’s granddaughter and her brother is the chief executive. The firm’s work force of 4,300 included 16 members of the Marvin family.

2. Marvin also doesn’t have, apparently, any obligations to unions; its workers don’t seem to belong to any. When housing starts – and orders for new windows and doors – plummeted, management cut salaries by 5 percent, put hourly workers on 32-hour weeks, stopped paying tuition reimbursement, stopped allowing employees to cash in unused vacation days, and encouraged them to take unpaid leaves. Through attrition, the workforce is 14 percent smaller than at its housing-boom peak. The only things the company hasn’t cut are jobs and health insurance benefits. There’s not a hint in the Times article of any of these changes being voted on or negotiated with anyone – all appear to have been the owners’ unilateral decisions. …

Good post from Roger Simon showing how the LA Times covers for the prez.

Trust the Los Angeles (“Khalidi Tapes”) Times to take every opportunity to protect the “unsullied” reputation of St. Barack Obama. Latest: today’s article on the Mormonism of Mitt Romney includes this gem:

“George W. Bush is a born-again Christian; President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades; Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school. But no previous president or serious candidate can rival Romney for the time and energy spent in running a religious organization and ministering to its members.”

“President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades”? Say what? Let’s leave aside the eye roller that with “regular” church-going Obama was still somehow able to miss the multiple racist and anti-American excrescences of his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (or so the then candidate assured us) and cut straight to the chase – the life of our president since he has been in the White House.

From Time Magazine (Dec. 23, 2009) – No Church-Going Christmas for the First Family:

“But there’s one common Christmas practice not on the First Family’s schedule: a visit to Christmas Eve church services.

Church, in fact, has been a surprisingly tough issue for the Obamas. …” 

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Foreign Policy magazine points to Western corporations that have sold internet technology to Mid-East tyrants.

Pick a country, any country, touched by the Arab Spring, and chances are that Western technology has been used there to suppress pro-democracy movements. Even though this directly undermines U.S. efforts to promote democracy and Internet freedom in the Middle East and elsewhere, President Barack Obama’s administration has remained oddly silent about it. If the White House won’t act, it’s time for Congress to pick up the slack.

European companies have provided software to security services in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen to monitor email and voice communications. In Bahrain, dissidents were confronted by interrogators with intercepted email messages and were tortured. U.S. surveillance technology was reportedly provided to Egypt (from Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing) and Syria (from the Silicon Valley-based firm NetApp), though both companies deny knowledge of the sales.

The use of Western technologies to censor Internet content is even more widespread. Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, among others, have blocked access to content deemed undesirable by their governments by using U.S.-made SmartFilter products. Syria got hold of Internet-filtering devices from California-based Blue Coat without the company’s knowledge, despite the U.S. trade embargo on Syria. These devices were used to block websites of opposition groups and news about the anti-regime protests. Other countries, including Qatar, Kuwait, and Sudan, use Canadian or European technologies to filter content on a large scale. …

According to Andrew Malcolm, CA voters are beginning to choke on the cost of high-speed rail.

Let’s face it: Our president, the one who had so many outstanding parking tickets when he was just Barack Obama, has rail envy.

Just judging from the number of times he’s mentioned the high-speed rail system of China, which has one party rule so no problem with messy democracy stuff. Or bipartisanship, there being no bi- in Chinese politics, just uni-. Or the wonderfully modern airports that communist China has constructed that we should emulate with Obama’s newest stimulus spending ideas.

Well, it seems many Americans are not as enamored of China’s choo-choos as the president who spent much of his childhood living in Asia. Remember Florida’s new Gov. Rick Scott? He took one look at Obama’s $10 billion high-speedrail program and said, “It’s going to cost way more and we can’t afford it.” Joe Biden made fun of him for not having any vision.

Well, now it’s California’s turn. …

Jonathan Tobin thinks Teddy would have found Obama’s ideas as ignorant as we do.

… The great dilemma facing the nation is not the grinding poverty of 1910, when no safety net was available. It is the enormous debt that has been created by a system of entitlements that will bankrupt the nation. The middle class Obama says he wants to save will be crushed by that debt. But Obama has ridiculed proposals to reform the system and harps instead on raising taxes on the wealthy, a measure that will kill job creation while doing virtually nothing to fix the problem.

Roosevelt’s proposals in 1910 were an attempt to head off the coming of class warfare that he rightly believed would destroy American liberty if the choice before Americans were only that of J.P. Morgan’s worldview or that of leftist radicals. By contrast, Obama’s political agenda consists of precisely the sort of class war rhetoric TR despised. Obama and his cheering section in the mainstream press may think he is channeling the 26th president. But Roosevelt would have had no patience for either his economic strategies or his vision of America’s place in the world.

Mark Steyn thinks the words he used to dismiss Newt in a piece published 13 years ago are just as apt today.

Since Ramesh, Mona, Yuval & Co have got out the tire irons, I figured I might as well pile on. But then a reader from the Cayman Islands reminded me that I’d said pretty much everything I have to say about Newt in November 1998 — in the London Spectator, upon his resignation as speaker. For those Newtroids who huff that I must be in the tank for Mitt (that’s some tank), November 1998 is 13 years ago, when I’m not sure I’d even heard of Mitt Romney.

Anyway, back then, after a brisk trot through his collected Brainstorms-of-the-Week — “The Triangle of American Progress,” “The Four Great Truths,” “The Four Pillars of American Civilization,” “The Five Pillars of the 21st Century,” “The Nine Zones of Creativity,” “The Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilization,” The Thirty-Nine Steps to the Five Year Plan of the Six Flags of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers of the Nine-Inch Nails of Renewing Civilizational Progress for 21st Century America, etc, I concluded:

“The Democrats demonised Newt as an extreme right-wing crazy. They were right — apart from the ‘extreme’ and ‘right-wing’, that is. Most of the above seem more like the burblings of a frustrated self-help guru than blueprints for conservative government. For example, Pillar No. 5 of the ‘Five Pillars of American Civilisation’ is: ‘Total quality management’. Unfortunately for Newt, the person who most needed a self-help manual was him — How to Win Friends and Influence People for a start. After last week’s election, Republicans have now embarked on the time-honoured ritual, well known to British Tories and Labour before them, of bickering over whether they did badly because they were too extreme or because they were too moderate. In Newt’s case, the answer is both. He spent the last year pre-emptively surrendering on anything of legislative consequence, but then, feeling bad at having abandoned another two or three of his ‘Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilisation’, he’d go on television and snarl at everybody in sight. . . . For Republicans it was the worst of all worlds: a lily-livered ninny whom everyone thinks is a ferocious right-wing bastard.”

That’s how it would go this time round. We’d wind up with a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and Alvin Tofler who canoodled on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi demanding Big Government climate-change conventional-wisdom punitive liberalism just as the rest of the planet was finally getting off the bandwagon . . . but the media would still insist on dusting off their 1994 “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” graphics.

A very thoughtful post from Yuval Levin comparing and contrasting Mitt and Newt.

What an odd pair of front runners Republicans appear to have ended up with. Not the usual conservative vs. moderate pairing, but two quite unusual political figures with remarkably similar policy and political profiles but remarkably different temperaments and dispositions.

Let me say first: I used to work for Newt Gingrich. In the last year of his speakership, I was a “staff assistant” in his congressional office.  I was 21 when I started there. No offense to anyone reading this who is now a staff assistant on the Hill, but that’s a very junior job—or at least it certainly was in my case: some policy research, some note-taking in meetings, some answering of phones, and the like. I didn’t spend all that much time with Gingrich (when I did, he was always very nice to me and to other junior staffers), and I don’t pretend to have learned much about him that you wouldn’t have learned from just following politics. So I offer my views as an observer of politics, not as any kind of expert on Gingrich.

What stands out about Romney and Gingrich, to me, is that they have in common a very unusual profile for a Republican politician. Both of them are fundamentally moderates: Very wonky Rockefeller Republicans who moved to the right over time as their party moved right and maybe as events persuaded them to move right, and they both still very much exhibit the technocratic countenance of the Rockefeller Republican—a program for every problem. Conservative humility about human nature and about the potential of technical solutions is not readily discernible in either one.

They’re also essentially in the same place politically—I can’t think of a single major issue on which Gingrich is more conservative than Romney, and with the possible exception of immigration (and perhaps Medicare reform, as I mention here, though it’s hard to be sure) I can’t think of one where Romney is more conservative. Substantively, their views are largely indistinguishable from one another. They’re part of a very broad consensus on policy among Republicans this year, which is one of the underreported stories of the year and is frankly in many ways a testament to Paul Ryan, who really defined the Republican agenda with his budget. The House Republican budget caused both Romney and Gingrich to take significantly more conservative positions on entitlement reform in particular than either one would otherwise have taken. …

Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor calls our attention to a nifty beat down of the insufferable Bill Keller.

My colleague, economist and historian of Russia Paul Gregory, delivers a beatdown on former NYT editor Bill Keller for Keller’s attempt to define who is a real economist and who is a crank.  And I mean beatdown: make sure no children are present when you read it.

Keller’s views on economics are a pitch-perfect display of the insular Pauline-Kael-I-don’t-know-anybody-who-voted-for-Nixon worldview so characteristic of the Upper West Side.  Sadly, although Keller is not an economist and wouldn’t know good economics if it bit him where he sits (his head, apparently), he is joined in his narrowmindedness by Krugman and David Warsh, who have taken it upon themselves to read Hayek out of the respectable economics canon.   I can guarantee you, by the way, that Krugman has no prayer of being remembered and cited 40-75 years after the publication of his most important scholarly works, as Hayek is. Eat your heart out, Paul–teh Krugman, not Gregory.

The Keller-Krugman-Warsh effort to define respectable economics as “people who agree with Keller-Krugman-Warsh” is actually kind of pathetic and defensive.  It also brings to mind the frantic efforts of the climate clerisy to discredit and stifle contrary voices.  These efforts actually betray a rather acute insecurity.  An insecurity that is quite warranted, by the way, as Paul Gregory brutally points out.

And here is Paul Gregory’s piece from Forbes.

… Keller is particularly incensed that “shouting economists” claim that the Obama stimulus created no new jobs (He should say no net new jobs). After all,  Keller tells us that a Pulitzer prize winning fact-checking service and the  “still trustworthy” CBO prove that the stimulus “created or saved a couple of million jobs.” Case closed, but no, the rascally Republicans “just went on repeating the claim.”

Keller’s irritation sent me to the CBO study to check for myself.  Table 2 told me all I need to know. The CBO simply attached to the different categories of stimulus spending low and high multipliers “based on past experience.”  (A multiplier is the dollar increase in GDP for every dollar of stimulus spending.) Once the CBO plugged in positive multipliers, the positive effects on jobs was assured. The CBO “proof” therefore depended on its “assumptions,” not on any real facts. Most people appear to believe not the CBO but their “lying eyes” (to use Groucho’s term) when they see their jobs disappear.

I am not the first to notice this little trick, as Keller’s economics tutors would know. Stanford’s John Taylor concluded the CBO estimates are “wrong because they assume ‘multipliers’ for temporary one-time payments or tax changes far in excess of the basic “permanent income” or “life cycle” models (which we teach in Economics 1).” Nor do “they do not take account of the negative growth effects of expected future permanent increases in tax rates.” Keller’s tutors also failed to brief him on Harvard’s Robert Barro, who finds near-zero multipliers in his research. I guess distinguished economists like Taylor and Barro are poor practitioners of “mainstream economic science.”

Keller is particularly incensed that House Speaker John Boehner published a list of 132 economists who endorse Republican spending cuts, tax cuts and deregulation that “will do more to boost private-sector job growth in America in both the near-term and long-term than the ‘stimulus’ spending approach favored by President Obama.”

Keller finds this outrage easy to discredit. The signers (myself included) are “academics from off-the-beaten-path colleges,” bloggers, and economists from “devoutly libertarian think tanks.” As one of Keller’s “lesser economists,” I should enjoy my “moment of fame as witnesses on behalf of dubious claims.” Although distinguished economists from top ten departments are among the 132 signers, the Ivy Leagues are indeed underrepresented, and we regular folks should know who really counts in elite circles. …

Late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Fallon: Obama had three New York City fundraisers for his reelection campaign the other night. Seriously? How about holding a fundraiser to raise money for the United States?

Conan: A new study debunks the idea that men think about sex every seven seconds. The study says men only think about sex once every 50 minutes. It was conducted during a taping of The View.

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David Harsanyi was listening to the president’s speech in Kansas yesterday.

… Smart people can grouse all they want about the supposed zealotry of the tea party or the conservative presidential field (and sometimes, they might be right), but Obama‘s mimicking Teddy Roosevelt’s end-of-career hard left turn tells us a lot about the president’s worldview. In his speech in Osawatomie, Kan., Obama dropped almost all pretenses and made the progressive case against an American free market system, which he called “a simple theory … one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. … And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work.”

Obama, after all, is such a towering economic mind that in Osawatomie, he once again blamed ATMs (and the Internets) for job losses. This is a man we can trust. “Less productivity! More jobs!”

That‘s not to say capital isn’t useful occasionally, of course. Not long ago, Obama hosted a $38,000-a-plate fundraiser for wealthy Manhattanites. The president — with the Democratic National Committee — has hauled in more cash from rent-seeking financial-sector companies than all Republican candidates combined. This president has supported every big-business bailout with taxpayers’ money, even though he claims they shouldn’t be on the “hook for Wall Street’s mistakes.”

But it is refreshing to hear Obama come out and give us a clear picture of this country in all its ugly class-conscious, unjust, menacing glory rather than veil his arguments with any of that soothing rhetoric that got him elected last time. It’s time, my friends, for a new square deal.

Tony Blankley says to the administration, “Nice job in Egypt.” 

One of the nice things about human history is that no matter how much people or their leaders misjudge events and make a hash of things, within a few centuries, the debris is cleared away and we can have a another go at getting things right.

Yes, I am thinking about the Middle East and the latest mix-up by the experts – their assessment just a few months ago of the nature of the Arab Spring and its democracy movement. Back in the spring, leading experts – from the Obama administration to the neoconservatives on the right to the major liberal media to most of the academic area specialists – were overwhelmingly predicting that all those great secular, liberal, college-educated kids with their iPhones in Tahrir Square represented the new Egypt and would bring all their wonderful values to the revolution. It was primarily us cranky right-wingers who have been writing about radical Islamic politics (and, of course, the Israelis, who can’t afford to get it wrong on Muslim political habits) who warned that this was all going to end in the rise in still-ancient Egypt of radical Islamist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti American, anti-Western governance.

So our government – as I said, cheered on by neoconservatives as well as liberals – undercut Hosni Mubarak’s regime and told us not to worry about the Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood was a group of really old, tired men who were no longer really radical and had been propped up just to provide the regime with an opposition punching bag. Armed with their social-media devices, the kids would run rings around the sorry excuse for Islamists and deliver real democracy.

Hadn’t any of those experts been to Egypt? There are not a lot of secular liberals hanging out – even at the universities – let alone in the thousands of villages and urban slums. Who the heck did the experts think those angry, bearded men were who were roaming around glaring at Westerners and Muslim women who dared to walk on the street? I saw them back in the 1960s and ‘70s, and they were scary even then. …

Caroline Glick says the U. S., under Obama, is no longer an Israeli ally.

With vote tallies in for Egypt’s first round of parliamentary elections in it is abundantly clear that Egypt is on the fast track to becoming a totalitarian Islamic state. The first round of voting took place in Egypt’s most liberal, cosmopolitan cities. And still the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists received more than 60 percent of the vote. Run-off elections for 52 seats will by all estimates increase their representation.

And then in the months to come, Egyptian voters in the far more Islamist Nile Delta and Sinai will undoubtedly provide the forces of jihadist Islam with an even greater margin of victory.

Until the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt served as the anchor of the US alliance system in the Arab world. The Egyptian military is US-armed, US-trained and US-financed.

The Suez Canal is among the most vital waterways in the world for the US Navy and the global economy.

Due to Mubarak’s commitment to stemming the tide of jihadist forces that threatened his regime, under his rule Egypt served as a major counter-terror hub in the US-led war against international jihad.

GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for “democracy.”

Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt’s Islamic revolution: Israel.

Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hammered Israel, the only real ally the US has left in the Middle East after Mubarak’s fall. Clinton felt it necessary — in the name of democracy — to embrace the positions of Israel’s radical Left against the majority of Israelis. …

The Economist writes on the man who envisioned the internet.

“FROM its very beginnings, the software industry has suffered from having too many engineers,” says David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University. “There are too many people who love computers and too few who are impatient with them.” He blames his fellow technologists for making computers too difficult for non-specialists to use effectively. “The industry doesn’t grasp the fundamental lack of sympathy between, conservatively, at least half the population and the software they’re using.” But what about the late Steve Jobs of Apple, who was obsessed with building elegant and easy to use products? He and Dr Gelernter ought to have been natural allies. One of the many oddities of Dr Gelernter’s unusual career, however, is that they ended up as adversaries instead.

More than two decades ago, Dr Gelernter foresaw how computers would be woven into the fabric of everyday life. In his book “Mirror Worlds”, published in 1991, he accurately described websites, blogging, virtual reality, streaming video, tablet computers, e-books, search engines and internet telephony. More importantly, he anticipated the consequences all this would have on the nature of social interaction, describing distributed online communities that work just as Facebook and Twitter do today.

“Mirror Worlds aren’t mere information services. They are places you can ‘stroll around’, meeting and electronically conversing with friends or random passers-by. If you find something you don’t like, post a note; you’ll soon discover whether anyone agrees with you,” he wrote. “I can’t be personal friends with all the people who run my local world any longer, but via Mirror Worlds we can be impersonal friends. There will be freer, easier, more improvisational communications, more like neighbourhood chatting and less like typical mail and phone calls. Where someone is or when he is available won’t matter. Mirror Worlds will rub your nose in the big picture and society may be subtly but deeply different as a result.” …

More on David Gelernter from Holman Jenkins at WSJ.

Is it David Gelernter’s time to be rich?

Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is already destined to be remembered as the man nearly murdered by the Unabomber. After a painful recovery, he blossomed as a conservative social critic and continued to pursue his personal vocation of painting. He’s also written books on subjects as diverse as the future of technology, the meaning of Judaism, and the 1939 World’s Fair. Today, the still-revolutionary opportunities of computing are again taking a central place among his varied interests.

To him, Facebook and Twitter are partial fulfillment of something he’s been writing about and thinking about since the early 1990s, an evolution of the Internet into a form far less chaotic and more useful than today’s. His preferred term is “lifestream.” Whatever you call it, the cybersphere as it now exists is due for an overhaul.

Prophecy comes naturally to Mr. Gelernter. He is credited in some circles for having coined the term “the cloud.” But what preoccupies him is the inadequacy of our conventions and practices for organizing the wildly expanding array of digital objects that populate the cybersphere.

On the desktop, he says, “The file system was already broken in the early ’90s, the hierarchical system. Namespaces were saturated. I was sick of making up names like nsfproposal319. The file system got too crowded and people started crowding their desktops with icons.” …

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Charles Krauthammer says it has come down to Mitt v. Newt.

It’s Iowa minus 32 days, and barring yet another resurrection (or event of similar improbability), it’s Mitt Romney vs. Newt Gingrich. In a match race, here’s the scorecard:

Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.

Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.

Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.

The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from .?.?. nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative. …

Bill Kristol explains what we don’t know about the GOP race, and why it is good we don’t know.

… Confident pundits who treat the choice among them as an open-and-shut matter are behaving as .??.??. mere pundits. As are those who confidently proclaim which of the candidates is “most electable.” For example, right now, Romney seems a stronger general election candidate than Gingrich. That’s what most of the polling so far would suggest. But these polls don’t capture the implications of the last couple of weeks of the campaign, which suggest that Gingrich can make the case for himself to heretofore unconvinced voters in a way Romney cannot. Admittedly, these are mostly Republican voters Newt has been charming. Can he similarly win over independents, or disaffected Democrats?

We don’t know. We do suspect, however, that the mainstream media’s view—and conservative elites’ view—of who the swing voters are is somewhat distorted. Every journalist knows upper-middle-class, suburban, socially moderate independents on the East and West Coasts who (for now, at least) would be more likely to vote Republican if the nominee were Romney rather than Gingrich. Journalists do not tend to know the lower-middle-class, non-college-educated, churchgoing voters of exurban Tampa, or the working-class Reagan Democrats of Toledo, who are also swing voters, and who might prefer Gingrich. In any case, for now we don’t really know which of the two frontrunners—or, for that matter, which of the other candidates—would have a better chance to win. And that’s without factoring in possible third and fourth parties, which could well appear on the scene in 2012 and would have different kinds of appeal depending on the identity of the GOP nominee.

We do not know. But if it’s not given to us mere humans to know, we are capable of learning. We’re a month away from the Iowa caucus. There are three months before 90 percent of the Republicans in the nation begin voting, and even then, further information will be produced and processed as the primaries unfold. The Democrats are stuck with their nominee—a failed and unpopular president. Republicans, by contrast, are free to choose. They are in no way required to rush to judgment. And they need not defer to pundits whose “station, office, and dignity” impel them to claim to know what they do not know.

We need to spend some time on last week’s unemployment numbers. David Harsanyi is first.

… What would the unemployment rate look like if we had the same level of active workers as we did when the recession first struck? The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis tweeted: “If labor force size was same as Oct., U-3 unemployment rate would be 8.9%; same as when Obama took office, 11%”. Eleven percent.

Apologies for my cynicism, but though the unemployment rate does not offer us the full story, politically speaking, it is an important political ingredient that could help President Obama — the man who helped turn a recession into a new state of normal – win a deeply undeserved second term for a couple of reasons:

1- Unemployment rates will decline and the economy will look a lot healthier than it actually is to many less- informed voters. Everyday Americans don’t have the time to parse unemployment statistics – they just want to see the right trajectory. In the end, though, none of the underlying fundamental problems have changed.

2- The more Americans drop out of the work force the more Americans will be tied to some form of government dependency, the lifeblood of progressive politics. We are already experiencing record number of citizens relying on government, and while progressives might find dependency moral and beneficial, it is a sure sign of an ailing nation. …

James Pethokoukis with seven reasons it is better, but still terrible.

1. The red flag here is the sharp drop in the size of the labor force versus October. The participation rate fell from an already low 64.2 percent to 64.0 percent. In a strong jobs recovery, that number should be rising as more people look for work. If the labor force participation rate were back at its January 2009 level, the U-3 rate would be 11.0 percent.

2. As it is, the broader U-6 rate — which includes part timers who wish they were full timers — is still a sky-high 15.6 percent, down from 16.2 percent last month.

3.  The broadest measure of employment is the employment/population ratio and it rose to 58.5 percent from 58.4 percent. But as MKM Partners notes: “The employment/population ratio has averaged 58.4 since December 2009, meaning there has essentially been no real progress on employment in two years’ time. …  In other words, we are not growing fast enough to reduce the so-called output gap/labor market slack.”

4.  The workweek was flat, at 34.3 hours in November, but aggregate hours worked actually fell 0.1 percent  after two months of relatively strong gains. (MKM)

Peter Wehner says the drop in labor force participation is disturbing.

On the surface, the new jobs report, which shows the unemployment rate dropping to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent the previous month, is good news. Below the surface, however, the news is actually quite disturbing.

According to the Department of Labor, 120,000 jobs were created last month, which is an unusually low figure for what is supposed to be a recovery. But what really stands out about the DOL report is that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor market in November. To put it another way: The number of people dropping out of the labor force in November was more than two-and-a-half times as large as those joining the labor force. In fact, the labor participation rate fell to 64 percent from 64.2 percent in October – nearly matching the lowest figure we’ve seen (63.9 percent in July) since the early 1980s. The long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) increased as well, even as the average hourly earnings went down. (Wages are up by only 1.8 percent over the past 12 months while overall inflation increased by 3.6 percent.)

What this means is that we’ve got a very weak labor market.

Often a decreasing unemployment rate is a sign of economic strength. In this case it’s a sign of economic weakness. And all the political spin in the world won’t change that.

Pethokoukis looks deeper at political implications.

Despite a sharp drop in the U-3 unemployment rate last month to 8.6 percent from 9.0 percent, there was no triumphalism coming from the Obama White House this morning. As economic adviser Alan Krueger wrote on the White House blog about the November employment numbers:

Today’s employment report provides further evidence that the economy is continuing to heal from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but the pace of improvement is still not fast enough given the large job losses from the recession that began in December 2007. … The monthly employment and unemployment numbers are volatile and employment estimates are subject to substantial revision. Therefore, as the Administration always stresses, it is important not to read too much into any one monthly report.

Sobriety is certainly called for when the main reason the unemployment rate dropped so much was due to a shrinking labor force. And the broader U-6 rate, which includes part timers who wished they were full timers, is at a stomach-churning 15.6 percent. (Also recall that the unemployment rate during the last pre-Great Recession year averaged 4.6 percent.) But at least jobs are being created and the unemployment rate is falling.

So politically the November jobs report is a net plus for the Obama reelection effort. Or is it? …

Margaret Wente says suppression of debate is a disaster for climate science.

Environment Minister Peter Kent has done us all a favour by stating the obvious: Canada has no intention of signing on to a new Kyoto deal. So long as, the world’s biggest emitters want nothing to do with it, we’d be crazy if we did. Mr. Kent also refuses to be guilted out by climate reparations, a loony and unworkable scheme to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from rich countries and send it all to countries such as China. Such candour from Ottawa is a refreshing change from the usual hypocrisy, which began the moment Jean Chrétien committed Canada to the first Kyoto Protocol back in 1998.

Yet even though a global climate deal is now a fantasy, the rhetoric remains as overheated as ever. Without a deal, we’re told, the seas will rise, the glaciers will melt, the hurricanes will blow, the forest fires will rage and the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will do their awful work.

Or maybe not. As Roger Pielke Jr., one of the saner voices on the climate scene, points out, the hurricanes have failed to blow since Hurricane Wilma hit the Gulf Coast back in 2005. Despite the dire predictions of the experts, the U.S. has now experienced its longest period free of major hurricanes since 1906.

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Perhaps this election will have a brush with “Who lost Egypt?”  Mark Steyn has the story.

… The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its Finance Minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as Finance Minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact two decades ago we have lived in a supposedly “unipolar” world. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem like that, does it? The term Facebook Revolution presumes that technology marches in the cause of modernity. But in Khartoum a few years ago a citywide panic that shaking hands with infidels caused your penis to vanish was spread by text messaging. In London, young Muslim men used their cell phones to share Islamist snuff videos of Westerners being beheaded in Iraq. In les banlieues of France, satellite TV and the Internet enable third-generation Muslims to lead ever more dis-assimilated, segregated lives, immersed in an electronic pan-Islamic culture, to a degree that would have been impossible for their grandparents. To assume that Western technology in and of itself advances the cause of Western views on liberty or women’s rights or gay rights is delusional. …

Writing in Hot Air, Tina Korbe posts on the Cooperman open letter to the president.

Dear Mr. President,

It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social agenda. And I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited, even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.) I understand that when surrounded by cries of “the end of the world as we know it is nigh”, even the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse.

But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is you and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare”. Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents. …

Jennifer Rubin asks if Gingrich was a lobbyist.

Mitt Romney has finally begun to engage Newt Gingrich. Yesterday, he went after Gingrich, if not by name, by attacking him as a creature of Washington. The timing couldn’t have been better for Romney.

Today, the New York Times has a front-page piece documenting Gingrich’s activities, which by any reasonable person’s definition, constitute lobbying. This brings into focus the hypocrisy that is at the core of Gingrich’s personality. His view of himself (Churchillian, ”transformational,” “historian”) doesn’t match his own track record, which is a history of milking the Washington lobbyist-legislator connection for great personal wealth.

Federal law defines lobbying activity as “Lobbying contacts and any efforts in support of such contacts, including preparation or planning activities, research and other background work that is intended, at the time of its preparation, for use in contacts and coordination with the lobbying activities of others.” And a lobbying contact is “Any oral, written or electronic communication to a covered official that is made on behalf of a client with regard to” congressmen and senators, among others.

Even before the Times story, there was ample evidence suggesting that Gingrich was engaged in this sort of lobbying activities. …

Similar commentary from Contentions’ Jonathan Tobin.

In the years between his stepping down as Speaker of the House and running for the presidency, Newt Gingrich became a wealthy man. While no one I am aware of has alleged that he did anything illegal or even improper in amassing his fortune, as a feature in today’s New York Times makes clear, his attempt to portray his Center for Health Transformation as a think tank rather than a lobbying firm is somewhat disingenuous.

Gingrich was not registered as a lobbyist, and his work on behalf of the Center’s “members” — companies that paid up to $200,000 to belong to the group in exchange for access to Gingrich and for his help in promoting their efforts — did not conform to the legal definition of lobbying in that he did not specifically write bills or advocate on behalf of legislation that would benefit his clients. But as the article makes clear, much of what he did do appears to be indistinguishable from the sort of tasks lobbyists routinely perform. …

Streetwise Professor highlights the irony of Russians once again aligned with the American left.

… Hence, it is doing what comes naturally to Sovoks: propaganda.  It is pulling out all the stops to discredit shale and fracking, not just in Europe, but elsewhere.  The next time you hear anti-fracking flacking, it’s fair to ask who’s paying for it. No, not all the opposition is from Gazprom: some is from the well-intentioned, some from those who reflexively oppose any kind of energy production.  But knowing the way Gazprom works, no doubt some Gazprom money is funding anti-fracking lobbying, politicking, and information campaigns

But the enviro angle is really just too much.  Sorry, but lectures on environmentalism from the direct descendent of the Soviet Ministry of Gas (the USSR being history’s largest environmental catastrophe), and a company with a pretty poor environmental record to boot (witness the huge problems with leakage from Gazprom pipelines), are enough to challenge the strongest gag reflex.

But the fact that the company feels compelled to engage in such risible hypocrisy is actually encouraging news.  The more Gazprom execs squeal about shale, the more you know that it is a threat to them.

So yet again: Gazprom gripes–music to my ears.

True to form, the federal government has slowed down fracking, this time in Ohio. Seth Mandel who is running for the Ohio Senate seat writes for WSJ.

On the same day two weeks ago, Ohioans saw the following diverging headlines:

In the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Republic Steel to add 450 jobs to Lorain as oil and gas exploration booms.” This story reported Republic Steel’s announcement of new jobs in one of Ohio’s hardest-hit counties, to manufacture products in support of the state’s growing oil and gas industry.

In the Marion Star: “Ohio national forest halts sale of drilling rights.” This story reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to suspend the auction of leases for oil and gas drilling on more than 3,000 acres of federal land in the most economically depressed region of Ohio.

You might be asking yourself: Why would Washington block drilling in Ohio at the same time that Ohio manufacturers are adding jobs to support the state’s growing oil and gas exploration? Thousands of middle-class families and out-of-work Ohioans are asking that same question. …

Tony Blankley reviews a new China book.

A just-released book, “Bowing to Beijing” by Brett M. Decker and William C. Triplett II, will change forever the way you think about China – even if, like me, you already have the deepest worries about the Chinese threat. As I opened the book, I was expecting to find many useful examples of Chinese military and industrial efforts to get the better of the United States and the West.

Indeed, there are 100 pages of examples of the most remorseless Chinese successes at stealing the military and industrial secrets of the West and converting them into a growing menace – soon to be a leviathan – bent on domination and defeat of America. The authors itemize the sheer unprecedented magnitude of this effort. But the opening chapters deal with human rights abuses, and my first thought as I started reading was that I wanted to get right to the military and industrial examples.

But the authors were right to lead with 50 pages itemizing in grisly detail Chinese human rights abuses – for the profound reason that after reading those first 50 pages, the reader will be impassioned to resist Chinese domination not only on behalf of American interests, but for the sake of humanity.

Many people think America is in decline and mentally acquiesce to the thought that the rise of China is inevitable. Those 50 pages will stiffen your resolve to be part of the struggle never to let such a malignancy spread to the rest of the world – let alone to America. One of the authors, Brett M. Decker, is a friend – and I have never been more proud of his (and his co-author’s) accomplishment of providing such a deep moral vision in this carefully factual book. …

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David Brooks, writing on the spirit of enterprise, graces our pages for the first time in months.

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.

Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe. …

Mohamed ElBaradei who headed up the UN atomic agency did his best to defeat Bush in 2004 by leaking false compromising documents to both the NY Times and 60 minutes just one week before the election. (Here’s a contemporaneous account from one of National Review’s blogs – The Kerry Spot.) For that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. He also maintained for years that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons. Now we learn, from his own agency, he was wrong. Claudia Rosett wonders if the Nobel committee should seek a return of the prize.

Since Mohamed ElBaradei retired from leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, at the end of 2009, the IAEA has made great strides toward an honest assessment of an Iranian nuclear program that is obviously hell bent on developing nuclear weapons. On Nov. 8, ElBaradei’s successor, Japan’s Yukiya Amano, delivered a devastating report to the IAEA board of governors. It details abundant signs that for years Iran has been working not only toward a supply of enriched uranium that could fuel nuclear warheads, but also on detonators, on missiles to deliver them, and on preparations for a nuclear test — in sum, widely sourced and credible information gathered by the IAEA “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”

All of which ought to be mortally embarrassing to ElBaradei, who, together with the IAEA that he ran, collected a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for “their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” Even in 2005, this was a farce. In the face of alarming signs that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, ElBaradei down-played information he evidently had, leading to an official farewell in 2009, in which he visited Iran and –speaking from Iran — stressed that the IAEA had “no concrete proof that there is an ongoing weapons program in Iran,” and reassured Iran’s rulers that the IAEA did not view their missile program as “nuclear-related.”  He added that in his post-IAEA capacity as a private citizen, he hoped to return often to Iran: “I would be very happy to come here as many times as I can.” …

New Editor’s Tom Elia posts on the life and career of Barney Frank.

All other criticisms of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) aside, however valid they may or may not be, Barney Frank is really a poster boy for what is wrong with our government: that is, professional lives spent in practically nothing but government.

From about 1968-1972 Frank was first an aide to the mayor of Boston and then a US congressional aide; from 1972-1980, he was a Massachusetts state representative; and from 1980 until now he has been a representative in the US House. For more than 40 years, from the time he was 28 until now, Frank has been involved in government.

How is that for a ‘breadth of experience’? How does Frank’s lack of a broad and varied experience — like so, so many in our political leadership — actually benefit this country?

No wonder the policies he advocated seemed so foreign to so many, and in the end, were frankly just so goddamned piss-poor.

More on our leader’s lives from Al Davis’ blog at WSJ. 

People who say Washington should be run like a business don’t realize that it is a business.

First, you pretend you’re in it for the people, or America, or some nonsensical ideology. Then you get elected. Then you chase money.

Remember, you are not a lying, self-dealing scoundrel, you are a bold entrepreneur, entitled to speaker’s fees, consulting contracts, and insider stock and real-estate deals. And if you end up taking a spin through the revolving door, you can be a highly paid lobbyist one minute and America’s greatest hope the next.

The GOP’s Newt Gingrich, now leading in the polls, denied last week that he ever lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One of his Republican challengers, Michele Bachmann, called it “shilling.”

Over the past decade, Mr. Gingrich reportedly bagged $1.6 million from the government-seized mortgage giants that Mr. Gingrich would tell you contributed mightily to America’s decline and its $15 trillion worth of debt. Mr. Gingrich says the money was for his work as “a historian.” …

Andrew Malcolm peers into Joe Biden’s future.

… On one level, keeping Joe makes sense. He’s tall. Genial. He’s prone to gaffes and calling Republicans “terrorists.” But he’s generally obedient and good for laughs. Seemingly harmless. Abraham Lincoln did it during the Civil War, but a modern incumbent president seeking reelection hasn’t dumped his VP in 67 years. It just looks messy.

But it’s a long time until next August in Charlotte. The economy’s not likely to surge, regardless of this morning’s jobs numbers. So, neither is approval of the O-B administration.

Come next summer the Chicago Gang could decide it needs a real game-changer on the ticket — an Hispanic, a woman, a Westerner. Someone who brings more than Delaware’s whopping three electoral votes to a table that needs 270.

And Joe would be advised in a Windy City kind of way how much he wanted to spend more time with his family after four decades of Washington service.

John Steele Gordon notes India has allowed big box stores and hopes New York City will catch up.

The economic revolution in India continued this week, when the cabinet voted to allow in big box stores such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot?.

This is a major change, as Indian retail has long been dominated by an endless number of mom-and-pop stores. Indeed India has one of the highest densities of stores to people in the world, with one store for about every ten people. With each store doing only a tiny business, economies of scale are impossible and prices are high. The distribution network behind these stores is primitive, inefficient, and causes much spoilage, which again assures high prices.

There are, of course, restrictions. Foreign firms will need domestic partners who will have 49 percent ownership and the stores can be located only in cities with a population of at least 1 million. But India has an astonishing 51 cities with more than a million people (the U.S. has nine). …

… Now, if only New York City would follow India’s example and allow its citizens to enjoy lower prices, more choice, and higher quality, it might aspire to first-world status as well.

Andrew Ferguson reports on frauds at the intersection of journalism and the academy.  

Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue. 

A rather extreme example of this third option emerged last month when an internationally renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. No jokes, please: This social psychologist is a fraud in the literal, perhaps criminal, and not merely figurative, sense. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career. 

Perhaps “falsified” is too mild a word. Stapel didn’t just tweak and twist numbers, he made stuff up. With his colleagues, Science Insider reported, “he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place.” Questionnaires are the mother’s milk of social science, given (most often) to collections of students who are easily accessible to the scientist. After being rewarded with course credits or money, the students go on to serve as proxies for humanity in general, as the scientist draws from their questionnaires large conclusions about the way human nature compels us, all of us, to think and act. 

The conclusions that Stapel drew were large indeed. One thing he liked to demonstrate in his studies was the exploitive nature of democratic capitalism. Last year, the New York Times reported on a typical Stapel study, called “The Self-Activation Effect of Advertisements.” It proved that advertising for cosmetics and fancy shoes “makes women feel worse about themselves,” as the Times put it. …

… The experiments are preposterous. You’d have to be a highly trained social psychologist, or a journalist, to think otherwise. Just for starters, the experiments can never be repeated or their results tested under controlled conditions. The influence of a hundred different variables is impossible to record. The first group of passengers may have little in common with the second group. The groups were too small to yield statistically significant results. The questionnaire is hopelessly imprecise, and so are the measures of racism and homophobia. The notions of “disorder” and “stereotype” are arbitrary—and so on and so on. 

Yet the allure of “science” is too strong for our journalists to resist: all those numbers, those equations, those fancy names (say it twice: the Self-Activation Effect), all those experts with Ph.D.’s! 

To their credit, the Stapel scandal has moved a few social psychologists to self-reflection. They note the unhealthy relationship between social psychologists and the journalists who bring them attention—each using the other to fill a professional need. “Psychology,” one methodologist told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “has become addicted to surprising, counter-intuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye.” 

That’s a scandal, all right. Stapel’s professional treachery is a scandal, too. But the biggest scandal is that the chumps took him seriously in the first place.

The best part of today’s Pickings is the story of the “Migrant Mother” – the iconic depression era picture by Dorothy Lange of a migrant woman and her children. You’ll be pleased with how it all worked out. The story was in James Altucher’s blog.

Last night I was on CNBC’s Fast Money. Everyone seems to want to talk about the impending Great Depression: Europe fails, contagion spreads it to here, all of our banks fail, everyone loses their jobs, blah, blah, blah. The world feels like it’s ending.

But it’s not. I listed my reasons why. I won’t list them again here. It’s not important. Innovation is happening. The economy is growing. And Europe is not going to disappear.

Look at the above photograph. That’s when the world was ending. But it wasn’t ending even then.

Realist photography is an interesting art form as it doesn’t seek to “create” but rather to document intensity exactly as it is, without embellishment. Dorothea Lange took the above photograph called, “Migrant Mother” which became one of the most iconic photographs documenting the dustbowl era during the Great Depression. Lange’s life underlines several themes that I try to cover throughout this blog:

A) you don’t need a formal education to become a huge success at a field you are passionate about. Lange didn’t go to college (as was more common then) and trained herself in her style of  photography.

B) you don’t need anyone’s approval to fail or to succeed. her mother wanted her to be a teacher. When Lange tried to teach, all of the fifth graders climbed out the window and went to play in the yard. So Lange quit and became a photographer. …

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BBC News Magazine reports on two Holocaust survivors.

Two remarkable women living hundreds of miles apart were fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust – one became a famous pianist, the other fought with Tito’s Partisans.

Jamila Kolonomos leafs slowly through the ageing photographs, her finger tracing the outline of her family members.

“My mother Estef, my father Isaac,” she begins, moving through them slowly. “Then my brothers and sisters.”

She goes on, naming all 18 of her relatives killed in the Holocaust.

“I was the only one not taken. I didn’t even say goodbye to them,” she muses, grappling with the memories.

Jamila Kolonomos is one of the few Jews still remaining in Macedonia – a country that lost 98% of its Jewish population, the highest proportion anywhere in the world. I stopped off at her house in Skopje on the way to the city’s new Holocaust museum.

At 89 years old, she is one of the few who remembers the deportation of the Macedonian Jews, sent by the occupying Bulgarian forces to the Nazi German death camp at Treblinka in Poland.

The Economist on the chances for the Euro.

EVEN as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.

A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). The euro zone could shatter into different pieces, or a large block in the north and a fragmented south. Amid the recriminations and broken treaties after the failure of the European Union’s biggest economic project, wild currency swings between those in the core and those in the periphery would almost certainly bring the single market to a shuddering halt. The survival of the EU itself would be in doubt.

Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being smashed apart have risen alarmingly, thanks to financial panic, a rapidly weakening economic outlook and pigheaded brinkmanship. The odds of a safe landing are dwindling fast. …

John Tamny gives a look at one side of the 1%.

The rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought with it a renewed emphasis on the impoverishing notion of envy. To the Occupiers, along with much of the political class, society’s economic rules favor the top 1 percent at the certain expense of the other 99.

Great rhetoric for sure, but also quite a lot of nonsense. People who should know better bemoan the economic means possessed by the 1 percent, but rarely do they consider the gargantuan efforts required by those at the top to get there in the first place.

To show why this is true it’s useful to reference an opinion piece written by Thomas Sowell long, long ago. Having witnessed a caricature artist draw a willing individual, when the artist collected his payment after services rendered he was dismayed to hear the customer complain about the “high” cost of something which took five minutes to draw. But as the artist correctly pointed out, the customer didn’t see the 25 years of hard work and practice that preceded his ability to sketch an individual in five minutes.

The age of Sowell’s op-ed can be measured in decades, his point within concerned the huge upfront investment required by pharmaceutical firms ahead of tiny pills that “cost way too much”, but his reasoning surely applies much the same to successful individuals today. The envious see the success on the way to obnoxious anger and calls for wealth redistribution, but very few see all the work and sacrifice that precedes entrance into the 1 percent club.

Considering the myriad business owners that dot the American landscape, as owners they’re often demonized for their possession of the means of production. What’s left out is the grand deal they’re offering the 99 percenters who work for them.

Basically the owners provide the capital, conceive the business plan, and then if the plan fails, as owners they stand to lose all that they ventured. As for the allegedly exploited laborers, they get paid no matter what. Not a bad deal. …

NY Times profiles Harvard psychologist who has argued there is less violence in human affairs today.

Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection.

He has also become a withering critic of those who would deny the deep marks of evolution on our minds — social engineers who believe they can remake children as they wish, modernist architects who believe they can rebuild cities as utopias. Even in the 21st century, Dr. Pinker argues, we ignore our evolved brains at our own peril.

Given this track record, Dr. Pinker’s newest book, published in October, struck some critics as a jackknife turn. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (Viking), he investigates one of the most primal aspects of life: violence.

Over the course of 802 pages, he argues that violence has fallen drastically over thousands of years — whether one considers homicide rates, war casualties as a percentage of national populations, or other measures.

This may seem at odds with evolutionary psychology, which is often seen as an argument for hard-wired Stone Age behavior, but Dr. Pinker sees that view as a misunderstanding of the science. Our evolved brains, he argues, are capable of a wide range of responses to their environment. Under the right conditions, they can allow us to live in greater and greater peace.