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The Corner starts us off with the photo of the day.
A Manchester Guardian columnist helps us understand the surprise of Sarkozy’s choice for foreign minister. Perhaps some of the sleaze and shame of Chirac will be cleansed.
… French intellectuals are trying to recover their poise. I asked Bernard-Henri Levy what he made of his old friend’s transformation from leader of the 1968 generation to statesman. The usually confident philosopher looked uncharacteristically uncertain. He wasn’t sure how much room for manoeuvre the attention-grabbing Sarkozy would grant his old friend. (‘Sarkozy always likes to be at the centre of the photo,’ as Levy nicely put it.) But he was sure that Kouchner would use what time he had to bring aid to the victims of the near-genocide in Darfur, and may succeed.
The same thought is occurring to others watching the diplomatic revolution in Paris. Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, is delighted that Kouchner’s first official act was to say the world has a duty to stop the crimes against humanity in Darfur. So too was Angela Merkel and the Bush administration, which faces public pressure on Darfur far greater than any European government has to cope with. (The Janjaweed’s slaughter of Africans has become the great international cause of the black churches.) …
IBD’s Jimmy Carter series covers his weakness for any dictator of the left.
… In 1982, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, perfectly summed up the Carter administration:
“While Carter was president there occurred a dramatic Soviet military buildup, matched by the stagnation of American armed forces, and a dramatic extension of Soviet influence in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, southern Africa and the Caribbean, matched by a declining American position in all these areas.”
Had Reagan not beaten Carter in 1980, there’s no telling how far the unraveling of freedom would have gone.
Instead of Reagan going to Berlin to tell Gorbachev to tear down that wall, Carter in his second term might have had to go to Moscow to negotiate our capitulation in the Cold War.
Mark Steyn starts the immigration debate today with his Sun-Times column. He has some amusing items first and then makes us think.
…To embed lawbreaking at the heart of American immigration and to allow it to metastasize through the wider society was perverse and debilitating. Most Americans see this differently from Washington and Wall Street. They’re pro-immigration but they don’t regard it as a mere technicality, a piece of government paper: after all, feeling American is central to their own identity. They rightly revile the cheap contempt the rushed Senate bill demonstrates not just for transparent, honest small-r republican government but for the privilege of being American. Happy Memorial Day.
Michael Barone weighs in too.
… The advocates of this new bill must convince voters that their plan will work better. They have a decent case to make, such as their call for an identification card with biometric information. Technology has made this more feasible than it was 20 years ago, and the phobia against a national identification card has been weaker since 9/11. Advocates must now convince the critics that such a card would make sanctions against employers enforceable. They must also show that border security will improve: that the 700-mile fence mandated by Congress last fall will actually be built; that unmanned aerial vehicles will reduce illegal crossings; that the larger Border Patrol will be effective; and that the apparatus of state will prove strong enough to prevail against market forces.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that voters aren’t dead set against legalizing current illegals. But they must be convinced first that this time, border security is for real.
Power Line has a series of posts on the new Hillary books.
Marty Peretz reacts to NY Times piece on another friend of Bill. Dick Morris wrote about this dude couple of days ago.
George Will notes one of Institute for Justice’s latest clients, a Minneapolis cabbie. You’ll never believe what a group of government’s rent seekers wants here.
… When the incumbent taxi industry inveigled the city government into creating the cartel, this was a textbook example of rent-seeking — getting government to confer advantages on an economic faction in order to disadvantage actual or potential competitors. If the cartel’s argument about a “deregulatory taking” were to prevail, modern government — the regulatory state — would be controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet: Governments could never deregulate, never undo the damage that they enable rent-seekers to do.
By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today’s entitlement mentality would leave.
Post from Samizdata illuminates the criminal behavior behind protectionism.
WSJ editorial on the latest gas price foolishness from congress.
… No one seriously believes this law will lower prices for consumers, but you can bet that brigades of lawyers will earn fat fees sorting out what exactly is meant by “unreasonably,” “gross disparity” and “excessive.” …
Quote of the Week from AdamSmith. The Smithies also post on road pricing in England. Coming to a New York City near you.
The NY Times has an intelligent article on gas prices and the complaints against oil companies.
… But is that price gouging?
Because the demand for gasoline is what economists call inelastic, which means that people cannot quickly reduce their consumption when prices rise sharply, abrupt supply shortages lead to steep price increases without any immediate decline in sales.
The most common reason for such increases in gasoline prices is a steep increase in the price of crude oil. But crude oil prices are set in global markets, and even the biggest American or European oil companies are modest players compared with state-controlled oil companies in the Persian Gulf, Russia and Latin America.
Even the mighty Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which defines itself as a competition-limiting cartel, has only a limited grip on world oil prices. OPEC countries watched helplessly as oil prices plunged in the early 1980s and remained mired below $20 a barrel for most years (excluding the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991) through the mid-1990s.
It seems hard to believe today, but world oil prices briefly drifted below $11 a barrel in 1998. Not surprisingly, few lawmakers in Congress took that opportunity to denounce “unconscionably excessive†price declines. ..
Jim Taranto had a wonderful take on the MIT administrator who lost her job because of résumé fraud.
… Ostensibly Ms. Jones was forced out because she committed fraud, but one can make a strong case that MIT had to get rid of her to avoid acknowledging that there is something fraudulent at the heart of American higher education. “If she had done a miserable job as dean, MIT might have been more forgiving,” the leftist author Barbara Ehrenreich writes in an essay for the Nation, “but her very success has to be threatening to an institution of higher learning: What good are educational credentials anyway?”
Ms. Ehrenreich argues that “there are ways in which the higher education industry is becoming a racket: Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000. . . . In the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A résumé without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications.” …
Joke of the Day from AdamSmith.
Dean Barnett at Hugh’s site has a gracious offer to the creator of the best photo-shop of the month. Don’t miss this.
Nose on Your Face with related photo-shop.