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Andrew Malcolm says this is a critical week for Romney.
… Then Romney’s off to Britain, Israel and Poland for a week of high-level, high-profile meetings. Romney’s style, obviously, is not to make large splashes. So, don’t look for any grand policy pronouncements.
The point, of course, for presidential candidates with limited diplomatic experience is to be seen back home on a foreign stage, conferring on a par with other leaders. Romney will not be doing anything as stunningly arrogant as Obama’s $750,000 campaign rally in Berlin in 2008.
But he will be at the London Olympics, no accidental reminder of Romney’s fiscal and PR rescue of the scandal-plagued, deficit-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics, turning it into a 2002 international showcase of executive acumen and leadership. That exercise in business planning ended up turning a $101 million profit when organizers had once hoped just to break even. …
…Romney’s travel agent should get a bonus for the Republican’s brilliant itinerary. What do all three stops — Britain, Israel and Poland – have in common? Each one has been roundly and repeatedly dissed by the Obama administration.
Romney doesn’t need to say one word about Obama; the contrast with the Chicago pol is apparent and striking. All Romney need do is look conceivably presidential. And not bow to anyone.
No reminders necessary of the slights to Britain and its leaders, the insulting gifts, the leaks about her “lightweight” prime minister (as opposed to Obama heavyweights like, say, Jay Carney?) and the unnecessary U.S. involvement in Britain’s Falklands dispute with Argentina.
No reminders necessary of Obama’s overheard whine about having to talk with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regularly, his unwillingness to visit the Israeli state during this term that saw so many Obama trips to Muslim countries, Obama’s undercutting of Israeli positions on Palestinian talks and demands and Israel’s growing impatience with Obama’s impotent sanctions on Iran. …
… No reminders necessary either of Obama’s early abandonment of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe or his failure to inform Poland before giving them up as part of his ongoing and ineffective suck-up to Russia. Or Obama’s reference to World War II “Polish death camps” when he presumably meant Nazi. Not to mention Obama’s decision to cancel attendance at the funeral of Poland’s president — in favor of another round of golf.
Romney will also have a private meeting with Nobel laureate and Solidarity hero Lech Walesa, whose request for a similar get-together with Obama was denied. …
David Harsanyi has five ways to fix the economy. He says a little benign neglect might be in order.
Step one? Please, stop.
It would probably strike the average politician as absurd to argue that the best way to fix the economy is to stop trying to “fix it.” But as John Taylor, former economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and professor of economics at StanfordUniversity, argues, the most effective way to regain our edge is to change the way we think about the economy. This means returning to “first principles.” As an economic matter, Taylor defines this by saying that “families, individuals, and entrepreneurs must be free to decide what to produce, what to consume, what to buy and sell, and how to help others.”
Not exactly a radical notion. Yet, from health care reform to environmentalist policy, from fiscal reform to the gutting of welfare reform, the economic agenda of Washington the past four years—and even longer—has corroded our traditional understanding of economic freedom.
Washington has many immediate tasks in front of it, of course: stopping the fiscal cliff that would result in a bevy of 2013 tax hikes, reforming entitlements and dealing with the explosion of dependency programs. But on a macro level, what the nation needs most, as Taylor argues, is predictable government, the rule of law, incentives that derive from the free-market system rather than activist government.
In other words, we need to get back to basics. Here are five ways Washington can stop “fixing” and start helping:
1. Austerity now!
Not long ago, few Americans knew, or cared, about the Baltic nation of Estonia. Nowadays, the small country is mentioned regularly within free-market economic circles as a pristine example of how cutting back government spending can spur economic growth. As Daniel J. Mitchell, an expert on supply-side tax policy at the Cato Institute who recently toured some Baltic nations tells Human Events, the turnaround in Estonia is real and so are the cutbacks. “They asked themselves a simple question,” Mitchell says, “What do we want? Our government to spend our money or the productive sector of our economy to spend it? Estonia—even though they haven’t been perfect—came up with the right answer.” …
WSJ OpEd on how the internet was really created.
A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way. …
Nat Hentoff on “what really shocks me about Obamacare.”
… What still shocks me about this law is the government’s interference with the doctor-patient relationship. Many government bureaucracies will not pay for doctor-prescribed treatments costing more than a predetermined figure. And none of these bureaucracies’ members will have actually seen the individual patient.This may affect elderly patients in particular, but it can happen at any age.
What has also been hardly mentioned about the high court’s decision is its effect on a tax in Obamacare that could have a powerful — and for some, fatal — impact on Americans at any age. …
In Forbes, John Tamny reviews a book on the new geography of jobs.
… Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs makes the essential case in support of individual mobility, and for doing so is easily the most important read of 2012. The Cal-Berkeley economic professor’s book is extremely necessary for politicians and commentators alike, and it is despite some conclusions from the author that make very little sense. But before addressing some of the book’s wrongs, it’s worthwhile to address just why it’s so worthwhile.
First up is the worship within the political and economic classes of manufacturing jobs. In a book that artfully slays myriad myths that cloud the economic debate, Moretti makes the very important point that to “remain prosperous, a society needs to keep climbing the innovation ladder.” As he notes, China and India are moving heavily into manufacturing at the moment, but that speaks to intense poverty that is the rule in both countries. We’re rich precisely because we’ve evolved upward from the prosaic. In short, the capital markets are the source of all funds for jobs, and investors view factory work as something anyone can do. A rush to factory work, assuming investors would fund it stateside, would mark a move among workers to the jobs of yesterday; albeit at exponentially lower pay.
Rick Santorum took his nostalgia for manufacturing to 2nd place in the recent GOP presidential primary, but lost on his partisans is the simple and happy truth that manufacturing of the labor intensive variety, no matter the tax subsidies, will never return to the United States. Moretti properly sees this as good thing, all the while channeling the late great Warren Brookes (Brookes’ The Economy In Mind another essential read) in reminding readers that yesterday’s (literally and figuratively) manufacturing hubs like Flint, Detroit and Cleveland have repelled capital and talent on the way to becoming ghost towns.
The productive, vital few in the U.S. have put manufacturing in their proverbial rearview mirror, and Moretti chronicles this positive economic evolution. As he so effectively points out with Apple Inc.’s iPhone, the assembly of it (in Shenzhen) is the easy, low-margin aspect of the production process, and as such, “can be done anywhere in the world.” The real money is in the iPhone’s design, that takes place at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, but with regard to the innovative phone’s production, American “hands” happily have no role. As Moretti exults, “when it [the iPhone] reaches the American consumer, only one American worker has physically touched the final product; the UPS delivery guy.” Brilliant, and in describing the process Moretti channels Henry Hazlitt who reminded readers that we can only do so much given the limits of a 24-hour day, and because we’re limited, it’s best to farm out low-margin work so that we can paid for pursuing that which the markets value.
Moving to the China question more broadly, Moretti reminds the reader of the tautology that trade is a two-way street, that amid China’s rise as a productive nation its consumers have come to desire the finer things on the way to a 500% increase of American exports to the country, “more than ten times faster than exports to the rest of the world.” As for Chinese goods that happily reach these shores, Moretti notes that the prices of consumer goods have fallen the most where Chinese imports have increased the most. Far from a negative for the poor and middle class, Moretti writes that “the price index for the poorest 20 percent of families has grown three times more slowly than the price index for the richest 20 percent.” Translated, not only has China’s embrace of manufacturing sped our positive. …
Now it turns out compact fluorescent bulbs can cause skin damage because of UV radiation. Ken Green has the story.
As I’ve written before, (here, and here, for example) there are many good reasons to remove the ban (pardon me, “unattainable performance standard that will serve as a de-facto ban”) on incandescent light bulbs.
Now there’s another reason to add to the list of objections. Besides being expensive, undimmable, slow-to-brighten, giving off ugly light, and containing mercury, compact fluorescent bulbs apparently give off UV radiation that will damage your skin. …