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David Warren has a warning.
A spectre is haunting Europe, and America — the spectre of Keynesianism finally gone nuts.
What began, not very innocently, as a suggestion that governments should run deficits in bad times, and surpluses in good times, gradually “evolved.” In the next phase, governments tried to balance at least the operating account during the best of times. In phase three, governments ran deficits by habit during the good times, but much bigger “stimulus” deficits during the bad times. We are now entering phase four. …
… our governments have created vast bureaucracies, employing immense numbers whose livelihoods depend entirely (whether they realize it or not) upon the capacity of profit-earning people to pay constantly increasing taxes.
It should have been grasped, decades ago, that the constant transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive must eventually tip the ship. And when it does, real people go over the side, who get angry when they are thrown in the water. There are consequences to that anger.
The idea that we can spend our way out of a debt crisis — or what I called above, “Keynesianism gone nuts” — has already been rejected by the Tea Party movement in the U.S., and has always been rejected by voters of conservative tendency. They know what’s wrong with the present order, and have an important teaching function to the rest of the electorate, which doesn’t get it yet.
But more urgently, we are in need of a positive conception of how to rebuild economy and society, when Nanny State collapses under her own weight. For yelling “run!” is only a short-term solution.
Mark Steyn comments on the dangerous incompetence of governments that take away our liberty under the guise of “protecting” us, but fail in the most basic duty of government: to protect us from real threats to our existence.
In Britain, it is traditional on Shrove Tuesday to hold pancake races, in which contestants run while flipping a pancake in a frying pan. The appeal of the event depends on the potential pitfalls in attempting simultaneous rapid forward propulsion and pancake tossing. But, in St. Albans, England, competitors were informed by Health & Safety officials that they were “banned from running due to fears they would slip over in the rain.” Watching a man walk up the main street with a skillet is not the most riveting event, even in St. Albans. In the heat of the white-knuckle thrills, team captain David Emery momentarily forgot the new rules. “I have been disqualified from a running race for running,” he explained afterwards.
…This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of “keeping you safe.” If you’re minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than 4 miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It’s for your own good. …
…On the other hand, when it comes to “keeping you safe” from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. …
Speaking of threats to our existence, Mark Helprin says we need the F-22.
… As we rapidly disarm, China is just as rapidly arming. Perhaps because Americans do not play much chess we seem not to understand that a nation can be defeated without war, that after failing in the art of balance and maneuver the king may still stand, but motionlessly in check, “soft power” notwithstanding. “Soft power” in the absence of hard power is like flesh without a skeleton.
With self-destructive enthusiasm disguised as reasonableness, we now court costs of a future war (or defeat by maneuver) far greater than those of preparation or deterrence—in this economy or any other. Despite the Pacific interface with China, our fleet is smaller than at any time since 1916, and potentially halved due to China’s physical control of the Panama Canal. The second President Bush built fewer ships than even his feckless predecessor. In abandoning effective missile defense and decimating the nuclear arsenal, we invite proliferation among the minor players, and, after half a century, are making a first strike by the major ones feasible once again. This year, the Air Force will keep 150 fighters in all of Europe, as at one time, while it declined but before it burned, Rome kept only a shadow of legions upon the Rhine and Danube.
In the very long list of such things is the F-22. Its stealth, speed, agility, and advanced sensors are such that in a 2006 exercise against F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, the F-22, its pilots scarcely accustomed to it, scored 241 kills to 2. Famously, before its opponents know it’s there, their aircraft are exploding. Former USAF Lt.-Col. Joseph Sussingham, F-16 Experimental Command Pilot, put it best: “To face a flight of F-22s is to face a wall of death.” …
In Contentions, Abe Greenwald reports on an Obami admission that the US will not use force in dealing with Iran.
In case you missed it, the Obama administration has unequivocally taken the option of a military strike off the Iran-policy table. Here is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a February 15 Al Jazeera interview:
MR. FOUKARA: Just as a follow-up to what you said about Iran, Madam Secretary, you said in your speech before the U.S.-Islamic World Forum that more pressure should be applied to Iran. And there are a lot of people in the Middle East wondering if the United States is planning, at any one time, whether before the withdrawal from Iraq or after the withdrawal from Iraq, planning to launch a military attack of one kind or another against Iran.
SECRETARY CLINTON: No. …
Abe Greenwald then contrasts the US response with the Canadian one.
…“Prime Minister (Stephen) Harper has made it quite clear for some time now and has regularly stated that an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada,” said Kent, minister of state for foreign affairs (Americas).
Kent made the comments in an interview with the news site Shalom Life, based in Greater Toronto. …
…“I think the realization that it’s a dangerous situation that has been there for some time. It’s a matter of timing and it’s a matter of how long we can wait without taking more serious pre-emptive action.”
He said military action, while a long shot, is still on the table.
What a strange time indeed that finds the U.S. trailing Canada (and France) in its boldness toward a near-nuclear Iran.
Jennifer Rubin comments on Greenwald’s posts and the Obami’s inability to act.
…So what’s up here? Could it be that the Obami are — I know it’s hard to imagine — foot-dragging and trying to downplay the urgency of the situation? Might it be that the policy of do-nothingism only works as long as the public doesn’t get the idea that the mullahs are doing something, namely making steady progress toward a nuclear weapons capability. Once that becomes apparent, the Obami may be called upon to do something.
At this point, the Obami look feckless (more so than usual) and can only float the idea that, yes, they might be revising that now entirely discredited 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. But for now, it seems that’s the extent of their concern. …
…Thus, the Obami are paralyzed. They show no determination to prevent Iran from moving closer and closer to membership in the nuclear weapons club or to interfere with Iran’s efforts to subvert its neighbor Iraq. Israel and its Arab neighbors have reason to be nervous. The Obama administration seems keen on stopping Israel from striking Iran yet indifferent to any action that would halt the emergence of a nuclear-armed Iran bent on regional hegemony and destruction of the Jewish state. One wonders why U.S. lawmakers and Jewish groups aren’t more concerned as we sleepwalk into a world with a nuclear-armed revolutionary Islamic state.
Roger Simon blogs on Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei’s partial responsibility for the Iranian nuclear crisis.
…and now – perhaps worst of all – comes the revelation by the UN IAEA that Iran may actually be working on a nuclear warhead.
Why is that bad for the Norwegian Prize Committee, you ask? After all, everybody and his brother knows the Iranians are working on nuclear weapons. Well, everybody but the IAEA’s previous chief. As Bridget Johnson puts it for The Hill:
The report by the new head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, appears to raise greater concerns about Iran’s capabilities than the assessments of his predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei.
“Altogether, this raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile,” said the report.
“These alleged activities consist of a number of projects and sub-projects, covering nuclear and missile related aspects, run by military related organizations.”
Of course it’s Mr. ELBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner for 2005, who missed all this. Did he miss it accidentally? Mr. Amano has only had the job for a couple of months. ElBaradei had it for twelve years. As most kids would say, what’s up with that? … My guess is that ElBaradei either deliberately or semi-deliberately turned away from obvious Iranian nuclear weapons development for the better part of a decade or more. In other words, he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize about as much as A. Q. Khan. In fact, if Khan is the father of the Islamic bomb, ElBaradei is probably its uncle. …
Nile Gardiner has a hopeful post on conservatism being embraced by more people. The Obami may have served the purpose of waking more people up to the reality that government will take their money and their freedoms, but government will not take care of them.
…In contrast, the state of conservatism is extremely healthy – from the striking success of Fox News and talk radio to the rise of grass roots movements that have sprung up all over the country to protest against higher taxes, spiraling budget deficits and socialized health care. There is a new sense of optimism and confidence among conservatives that had been missing for many years, amply displayed at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which kicked off yesterday, attended by a staggering 10,000 or so delegates.
They have come from all corners of the country, a large percentage of them under the age of 30, to listen to veteran politicians such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, as well as rising stars such as newly elected Senator Scott Brown and Scott Rubio, the youthful son of Cuban immigrants, now campaigning for a Senate seat in Florida. At a CPAC dinner I attended as a guest last night, emceed by the wonderfully charismatic Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, there was an extremely buoyant, almost festival-like atmosphere across the 1,000-strong crowd, enough to send shivers down the spine of Rahm Emmanuel.
The American Left can only dream of putting together this kind of impeccably managed and intellectually vibrant three-day event, one that covers practically every policy issue under the sun. There is no liberal equivalent of CPAC, not least because liberalism is increasingly bereft of ideas and short on innovative thinking. The spirit of political revolution is in the air in Washington, and the Left should take note. As a series of Gallup polls have categorically shown over the past few months, the United States is not only a conservative nation, but one that is becoming significantly more conservative in the face of the Obama administration. Conservatism is not the past for America, it is the country’s future.
In Contentions, Max Boot gives kudos to General McChrystal for showing appropriate diplomacy to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Not the least of the innovations that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has introduced is changing how the U.S. interacts with Hamid Karzai. The Obama team came into office bashing the president of Afghanistan without lining up a solid alternative. The predictable result: a key ally has been alienated for no good reason. Now McChrystal is working to shore up Karzai’s authority and especially his credentials as a wartime leader.
This Wall Street Journal article shows how McChrystal was careful to brief Karzai on plans for the offensive into Marjah and to get his sign-off before the launching of operations. As the Journal notes:
For both the Americans and the Afghans, who have been fighting together for more than eight years, it was a novel moment. As Mr. Karzai said after being roused from a nap: “No one has ever asked me to decide before.”
This attempt to bolster Karzai and involve him more in NATO decision-making seems a much more productive way to deal with him than the previous approach of scolding him in public. It is just possible that Karzai can undergo a transformation similar to that of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, who established himself as a strong leader in 2008 by becoming the public face of military operations against Sadrist insurgents.
In the Daily Corner, Jon Ward reports that some Democrats are seeing the destructiveness of government unions.
Longtime Democratic strategist Pat Caddell on Wednesday blasted the Obama White House for creating “a world in which there is no dissent,” following his banishment from Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff’s campaign for Senate….
…“I think the public unions are going to take the country and the Democratic party down the tubes,” Caddell said. “They’re in the business of taking care of — of asking taxpayers, asking ordinary people, to pay for people who make twice as much as they make, with benefit packages they will never see, and they’re told, you may not cut those.” …
…“How are you going to tell a person who makes $40,000 that they must pay money to make sure that people keep jobs who make $80,000, roughly, and who have defined pensions that they will never see?” Caddell said. “You cannot ask ordinary Americans who have no jobs, whose pensions have been ransacked, and whose pay has been stagnant, to keep rewarding people who don’t face the same kind of conditions and risk.”
“The people who pay for it are suffering,” he said. “The taxpayers are going to explode. This is the big coming issue of our time.”
In the Denver Post, Mike Rosen comments on Tea Party Derangement Syndrome.
Over the years, I’ve observed Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne move from respectably liberal to left-liberal to delusional-left. …
…Then came the relapse. As Obama’s popularity declined and his leftist agenda stalled, Dionne has become positively apoplectic. Bush Derangement Syndrome has metastasized into Tea Party Derangement Syndrome, which has become epidemic among lefties.
…most of our founders mistrusted a powerful central government, which is why the Constitution enumerated and restricted federal powers, safeguarded the independence of states, and reserved ultimate power to the people. “Progressive” leftists like Dionne are inherent statists with unbounded faith in the virtue and wisdom of elite bureaucrats who share their ideology to run our government, our economy and our lives. …
John Stossel talks about problems with government-run schools.
…Ask James Tooley about that. Tooley is a professor of education policy who spends most of every year in some of the poorest parts of Africa, India and China. For 10 years, he’s studied how poor kids do in “free” government schools and — hold on — private schools. That’s right. In the worst slums, private for-profit schools educate kids better than the government’s schools do.
Tooley finds as many as six private schools in small villages. “The majority of (poor) schoolchildren are in private school, and these schools outperform government schools at a fraction of the teacher cost,” he says.
Why do parents with meager resources pass up “free” government schools and sacrifice to send their children to private schools? Because, as one parent told the BBC, the private owner will do something that’s virtually impossible in America’s government schools: replace teachers who do not teach.
… Tooley tested kids in both kinds of schools, and the private-school students score better. …