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Thomas Sowell reminds us about the failures of the brilliant.
Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time– and with the same disastrous results.
One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.
In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, “general well-being ought to have been the consequence,” but “instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood.”
The same could be said of the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions of the 20th century.
The idea that the wise and knowledgeable few need to take control of the less wise and less knowledgeable many has taken milder forms– and repeatedly with bad results as well. …
David Warren heard from readers after he minimized the Journolist scandal.
…I wrote about that JournoList scandal on Saturday, and would like to share the gist of mail that came back to me after that article was linked through the States. I expected to hear from a lot of good, right-wing, Tea Party types, congratulating me for even mentioning the issue in the “mainstream media,” but instead about half the notes from these people were unfavourable.
They thought my dismissal of the affair — I wrote that while it certainly looked like a conspiracy to twist the news, in fact liberal journalists would have twisted it the same way even without methodically consulting each other — was inadequate and cowardly. Nor did they accept my view that the “crime” was not journalistic bias, but instead the journalists’ condescending pose of “objectivity” when delivering news and analysis that is steeply slanted. …
…Not for the first time, I got a taste of just how angry a large and growing part of America has become, at the “liberal establishment” in the media, courts, Congress, White House, and the nearest public school. At the root of this, it seems to me, is the sense that decent, reasonable, tolerant people, who work for their livings, are losing control over their own lives to something like a “governing class”; are abused, insulted, being taxed to destruction. And, in the final aggravating clinch, the leaders who speak most articulately for them are smeared as “racists” and “rednecks.” …
In Forbes, Joel Kotkin has an interesting article about some of the divisions we are seeing between states and between the states and the federal government.
Nearly a century and half since the United States last divided, a new “irrepressible conflict” is brewing between the states. It revolves around the expansion of federal power at the expense of state and local prerogatives. It also reflects a growing economic divide, arguably more important than the much discussed ideological one, between very different regional economies.
This conflict could grow in the coming years, particularly as the Obama administration seeks to impose a singular federal will against a generally more conservative set of state governments. The likely election of a more center-right Congress will exacerbate the problem. We may enter a golden age of critical court decisions over the true extent of federal or executive power. …
…These may be just the opening salvos. If the Republicans and conservative Democrats gain effective control of Congress, the White House may choose to push its agenda through the ever expanding federal apparat. This would transform a policy dispute into something resembling a constitutional crisis. …
Peter Wehner takes a liberal to task for not taking other liberals to task.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. argues in his most recent column that it’s time to stand up to the right wing. Here’s a thought: how about, E.J., standing up, even just once, to the left wing? …
Tony Blankley adds a few more brushstrokes to the MSM portrayal of the Shirley Sherrod incident.
…Then some more of her speech-after the reconciliation of the races section-is made available and includes the following sentences: ” I haven’t seen such a mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. (Murmurs of agreement.) Some of the racism we thought was buried — (someone in the audience says, “It surfaced!”) Didn’t it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn’t do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. (Applause) ” (Text courtesy of National Review).
In other words, she is accusing up to 70 million Americans (registered Republican voters) of opposing Obamacare because the President is black-rather than because we disagree with the policy-as we did with Hillarycare in 1994. That is a broad-brush bigoted attitude by Mrs. Sherrod against all of us who opposed the president’s healthcare policy. She implicitly accuses all 70 million of us of being racist. …
The Economist gives us a new way to look at railroads in the U. S.. Usually the bien pensants are bemoaning the lack of train travel because we’re not sitting like proles being moved around by “the authorities.” Instead, the magazine points out our system of rail freight is far superior, and suggests it might suffer if widespread changes were made to accommodate high speed passenger trains.
…Their good run started with deregulation at the end of Jimmy Carter’s administration. Two years after the liberalisation of aviation gave rise to budget carriers and cheap fares, the freeing of rail freight, under the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, started a wave of consolidation and improvement. Staggers gave railways freedom to charge market rates, enter confidential contracts with shippers and run trains as they liked. They could close passenger and branch lines, as long as they preserved access for Amtrak services. They were allowed to sell lossmaking lines to new short-haul railroads. Regulation of freight rates by the Interstate Commerce Commission was removed for most cargoes, provided they could go by road.
Before deregulation America’s railways were going bust. …
…Several factors had combined to bring about this sorry state of affairs. Services and rates were tightly regulated. Companies were obliged to run passenger services that could not make a profit. And road haulage received a huge boost from the building of the interstate highway system, which began in the late 1950s. Although this was supposed to be financed by taxes on petrol and diesel, railmen saw it as a form of subsidy to a new competitor, the nationwide trucking industry. In a neat twist, the poor condition of today’s highways and the lack of public money for repairs have tilted the competitive advantage back to a rejuvenated rail-freight industry.
Giving the railroads the freedom to run their business as they saw fit led to dramatic improvements. The first result was a sharp rise in traffic and productivity and fall in freight costs. Since 1981 productivity has risen by 172%, after years of stagnation. Adjusted for inflation, rates are down by 55% since 1981 (see chart 1). Rail’s share of the freight market, measured in ton-miles, has risen steadily to 43%—about the highest in any rich country. …
… The trouble for the freight railways is that almost all the planned new fast intercity services will run on their tracks. Combining slow freight and fast passenger trains is complicated. With some exceptions on Amtrak’s Acela and North East corridor tracks, level crossings are attuned to limits of 50mph for freight and 80mph for passenger trains. But Mr Obama’s plan boils down to running intercity passenger trains at 110mph on freight tracks. Add the fact that freight trains do not stick to a regular timetable, but run variable services at short notice to meet demand, and the scope for congestion grows.
The freight railroads have learned to live with the limited Amtrak passenger services on their tracks. Occasionally they moan that Amtrak pays only about a fifth of the real cost of this access. Some railmen calculate that this is equivalent to a subsidy of about $240m a year, on top of what Amtrak gets from the government. Freight-rail people regard this glumly as just part of the cost of doing business, but their spirits will hardly lift if the burden grows.
Their main complaint, however, is that one Amtrak passenger train at 110mph will remove the capacity to run six freight trains in any corridor. Nor do they believe claims that PTC, due to be in use by 2015, will increase capacity by allowing trains to run closer together in safety. So it will cost billions to adapt and upgrade the lines to accommodate both a big rise in freight traffic and an unprecedented burgeoning of intercity passenger services. Indeed, some of the money that the White House has earmarked will go on sidings where freight trains can be parked while intercity expresses speed by. …
Get out in the sun! In the NY Times, Jane Brody writes about the widespread deficiency of vitamin D.
…Dr. Michael Holick of Boston University, a leading expert on vitamin D and author of “The Vitamin D Solution” (Penguin Press, 2010), said in an interview, “We want everyone to be above 30 nanograms per milliliter, but currently in the United States, Caucasians average 18 to 22 nanograms and African-Americans average 13 to 15 nanograms.” African-American women are 10 times as likely to have levels at or below 15 nanograms as white women, the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found.
Such low levels could account for the high incidence of several chronic diseases in this country, Dr. Holick maintains. For example, he said, in the Northeast, where sun exposure is reduced and vitamin D levels consequently are lower, cancer rates are higher than in the South. Likewise, rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and prostate cancer are higher among dark-skinned Americans than among whites.
The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said. …