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John Stossel starts us off with a good news piece. He contrasts Barbara Ehrenreich’s downer of a book Nickel and Dimed with Adam Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings which was first reviewed in Pickings April 3, 2008.
… “I read ‘Nickel and Dimed,’” Adam Shepard told me. He was assigned her book in college and decided to test Ehrenreich’s claim.
He picked a city out of a hat, Charleston, S.C., and showed up there with $25. He didn’t tell anyone about his college degree. He soon got an $8/hour job working for a moving company. He kept at it. Within a year, he told me, “I have got $5,500 and a car. I have got a furnished apartment.”
Adam writes about his search for the American Dream in “Scratch Beginnings“. It’s a very different book from “Nickel and Dimed.”
“If you want to fail, go for it, ” he said. …
For some more good news, we go to a Peter Wehner Contentions post on the war in Iraq.
… Iraq ceased to be a popular war long ago. But the American military continued to do its duty, with tremendous valor and skill. So, in fact, did many brave Iraqis. This journey has been longer and harder than we had hoped, and the future of Iraq remains uncertain. But it is light years more hopeful than before. Iraqis now have a peaceful, self-governing nation, if they can keep it. And despite the cost, one can now argue that American interests will have been served in a war that critics once called the worst foreign policy mistake in our history. Thankfully, blessedly, they were as wrong as wrong can be.
More good news comes from a Forbes column by Bjørn Lomborg making the case for free trade. It is good news to have Lomborg’s clear thinking on areas other than the environment.
… Politicians can spend a fortune reducing temperatures ever so slightly within 100 years–or they could spend much less helping the world’s most vulnerable people today. The financial crisis makes it especially imperative that we get our priorities right. Trade reform should be right at the top of our list.
It is hard to ignore the AIG bonus blather. At least we have David Harsanyi making sense of it.
Here’s an idea: If you stop nationalizing banks, there will be no need to engage in phony-baloney indignation over bonus payments anymore.
This cockamamie populism in Washington really hit its stride when Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG execs who earned bonuses should “follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
C’mon. If suicide were a proper penalty for piddling away taxpayer dollars, the National Mall would look just like Jonestown after refreshments. …
Peter Wehner also comments on the piece by Charles Murray we featured yesterday. David Brooks has a column with a similar theme which is up next. Wehner contrasts the two.
… Murray seems to believe we are at a key historical moment, and perhaps a hinge point; Brooks less so. Charles believes government policies can profoundly damage what has made America rare, and even unique, throughout the centuries; David believes the habits we have acquired will snap back, as they have in the past. Both are extremely knowledgeable and well-informed men and clear, gifted writers. My hope is that Brooks is right; my fear is that Murray is; and my hunch is the reality is somewhere between the two. …
Here’s the piece by David Brooks.
Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy. Americans work longer hours than any other people. We switch jobs more frequently, move more often, earn more and consume more.
This energy was first aroused by abundance, by the tantalizing sense that dazzling wealth was available just over the next hill. But it has also been sustained by a popular culture that celebrates commercial ambition. From Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, through Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale, up until Donald Trump and Jim Cramer, popular figures have always emerged to champion the American gospel of success, encouraging middle-class people to strive, risk and make money.
This gospel gets dented during each of the nation’s financial crises, but it always returns with a vengeance. …
And the Economist comments on Obama’s endless campaign.
IN 1980 Sidney Blumenthal published a book entitled “The Permanent Campaign”. One of the main reasons that Barack Obama beat Mr Blumenthal’s favoured candidate, Hillary Clinton, was because he promised a new kind of post-partisan politics, supposedly above all that continual warfare. Now that the election is over, however, he is proving to be just as keen on the “permanent campaign” as anybody else in politics. …
Jennifer Rubin has a few things to say.
David Brooks mentions almost in passing (perhaps it is best this way so as not to bring on another horde of presidential spinners):
Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway. This is an administration that has many lawyers and academics but almost no businesspeople in it, let alone self-made entrepreneurs. The president speaks passionately about education and health care reform, but he is strangely aloof from the banking crisis and displays no passion when speaking about commercial drive and success.
This strikes me as an very apt explanation for why the Obama team is so tone deaf and so ineffective in dealing with their main task: economic revival. Their tone veers from hysterical despondency to giddy optimism. They bash industries, threaten executives and then fail to exercise rudimentary oversight with the firms they have supported. Virtually nothing has been proposed to encourage private economic investment and hiring, but the proposals to burden business (e.g. card check, cap-and-trade, capital gains tax hikes, national health care) keep piling up. The president dismisses the stock market as a poll – and then offers stock advice.
All of this is frankly amateurish and unsteady, and belies an ignorance of, if not contempt for, how markets work and investors and businesses plan. …
Barack’s teleprompter has a blog. Here’s the first post.
… So why am I going public now, when for the past two years I’ve let others do the talking? Well, this is a thankless job, and I sure don’t want to take the fall for communications missteps. But more important, I expect you’ll be seeing a lot more of me over the next few months and years. Barack and I don’t go anywhere without each other; we even complete each other’s sentences … well, more mine than his, but let’s not split hairs. …
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