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The Wall Street Journal eulogizes Norman Borlaug.
On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that “more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.” The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.
Borlaug, who died last Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.
Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters. …
Ronald Bailey in Forbes also has praise for Norman Borlaug.
Norman Borlaug, the man whose work saved more human lives than anyone else in history, died at age 95 this past Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. For spearheading this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007….
…Unfortunately, in recent years, a gaggle of left-wing environmentalist critics have attacked the Green Revolution, arguing that intensive modern agriculture is ecologically damaging. These environmentalist gadflies oddly overlook the huge ecological benefit of saving billions of acres of forests and mountain terrain from being plowed under that tripling crop yields is chiefly responsible for. Had crop yields been frozen at 1961 levels, growing as much food produced today would require more than a doubling cropland, from 3.7 to 8 billion acres. This is an area nearly equal to the size of South America. In other words, the entire Amazon rain forest would now be gone.
Borlaug was a man who understood trade-offs, arguing that the Green Revolution has been “a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia.” Borlaug properly dismissed many of his soi-disant “green” critics as ignorant elitists. “They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger,” he told the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. “They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Borlaug never stopped working. He remained very active up until quite recently, working as a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico and as president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.
Let us pause a moment to mourn the death of a truly great man.
Rick Richman posts in Contentions on the State Department’s latest move to force ousted President Zelaya back on Honduras.
The Associated Press reports that the Honduran government disclosed yesterday the identity of the officials whose visas have been revoked by the United States as part of Washington’s continuing pressure to reinstate former president Manuel Zelaya, namely, the successor president and 17 other officials:
Interim President Roberto Micheletti said losing his diplomatic and tourist visas would not weaken his rejection of the return of Zelaya. . . .
The move “changes nothing because I am not willing to take back what has happened in Honduras,” he said on Radio station HRN.
Washington on Friday revoked the diplomatic and tourist visas for 14 Supreme Court judges, the armed forces chief, the foreign relations secretary and Honduras’ attorney general, presidential spokeswoman Marcia de Villeda said Saturday.
The revocation of the visas for the 14 Supreme Court judges is a nice touch. In the future, even a unanimous Supreme Court faced with a violation of the country’s constitution will think twice before engaging in a “judicial coup.”
On The Corner, Jay Nordlinger posts on the irony of the Honduran response when compared with a statement Obama made during the campaign.
Yesterday, I commented on a statement made by Micheletti. Asked what he would do about Washington’s cut-off of aid, he said, “We will not back down. Dignity does not have a price in our country.”
Fascinatingly, that word “dignity” rang familiar with a reader of ours. He remembered something that Obama and his people said during the presidential campaign. You will find it in The American Prospect, here. They hated Bush’s democracy thrust — hated it. (Probably not so much because they hated democracy as because they hated Bush. If they liked chocolate ice cream, and Bush embraced it, chocolate ice cream would probably taste sour in their mouths.) Here is the relevant bit from The American Prospect:
I [the author of the piece] spoke at length with Obama’s foreign-policy brain trust, the advisers who will craft and implement a new global strategy if he wins the nomination and the general election. They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion” . . .
Dignity, huh? Now think of Micheletti’s statement. Amazing — almost a poetic twist of history.
By the way, what does “the politics of fear” mean, at least in the above context? Warning against terrorism and Islamofascism? Are terrorism and Islamofascism any less of a problem now that our government says “man-caused disaster,” not terrorism, or “overseas contingency operations” instead of War on Terror?
P. S. The above-mentioned reader, who remembered “dignity” is Jeff Dobbs, and he has blogged about this matter here.
Last Friday we had responses from Jonah Goldberg and Kenneth Anderson to Thomas Friedman’s article lamenting the ineffectiveness of democracy. Today Michael Barone, in RealClearPolitics, compares the current global warming hysteria to the overpopulation hysteria of the 1970′s.
…Back in the 1970s, when the elites were convinced that overpopulation would destroy the Earth, the Chinese acted as only a one-party autocracy or totalitarian state could: It limited women to one child. The result was that millions of female fetuses were aborted so that China now has about 120 males to every 100 females — a potentially destabilizing imbalance — and a slow-growing population that means China will get old before most of its people grow rich.
Meanwhile, the population bomb has turned out to be a dud worldwide, as birth rates declined, and the real demographic problem, as Ben Wattenberg and Phillip Longman have pointed out, is population decline. …
…The verdict isn’t in on global warming yet, but some alarmist predictions have proved false. The world has been getting a little colder in the last decade, and climate models have been failing to predict the recent past. Moreover, as global warming believer Bjorn Lomborg points out, it’s economically much more sensible to spend money on pending problems (like lack of safe drinking water) and on mitigating possible future effects of climate change than it is to reduce carbon emissions, which choke off the near-term economic growth needed to address environmental needs.
China’s one-party autocracy can ignore such arguments. Our two-party democracy can’t. Thomas Friedman may lament what Barack Obama on Wednesday night called “bickering.” But in a democracy, citizens don’t always take the advice of their betters …
…The lesson I take from the overpopulation scare is to be wary when media, university and corporate elites warn that we must change our ways or face disaster 50 years hence, and when they insist, as Al Gore does and as Tom Friedman seems to, that the time for argument is over.
In our two-party democracy, it never is. And shouldn’t be.
Jennifer Rubin comments on David Brooks listing several celebrities who have recently demonstrated a lack of humility.
…But oddly, there is one very famous figure missing from that lineup who personifies Brooks’s point: Obama. Obama ran an egomaniacal campaign, complete with creepy iconography, Greek Temple stage setting, and promises to lower oceans and heal the planet. Its central “idea” was him—the leader of a New Politics, a transformational figure. Now as president, he, like the athletes Brooks chastises, is a chest beater (”I won”). He too claims to know all (from racial profiling to red/blue pills to the inner workings of the “Muslim world”) and to know it better than others. Unlike the 1945 movie stars whom Brooks praises, there is nothing about Obama that is “understated, self-abnegating, modest and spare.” (We’re not talking about Obama’s views of the country he leads—which is forever required to apologize and atone for sins—but his views of himself and his relationship to his fellow citizens.) Many have remarked on his hubris in the current health-care debate—he alone will permanently fix the health-care system, and he alone is truth-telling….
David Warren discusses political correctness, and at its core a lack of humility.
…My reader will now guess I am about to raise again the issue of “political correctness.” I have written about it twice in the last eight days, in relation to so-called “human rights” commissions, and to the larger process of indoctrination and censorship by which the contemporary Left advances an essentially totalitarian agenda.
The purpose of political correction is to delegitimate opposition; to make the most basic facts of life undiscussable, and thereby eliminate debate. It is a device for seizing power. …
…The Left are human — it is perhaps the worst thing that can be said against them. They want what they want for themselves, but they also want praise and “validation.” The Al Gore phenomenon — in which a man lives in a house that burns enough electricity to power an African town, but also wants to be the poster boy for green — is hardly beyond fellow-human comprehension. The phenomenon becomes more complex, however, and harder for us to follow, as more elaborate ideological poses become the cover for lives more elaborately selfish. …
…It was the wisdom of our ancestors to realize that sanctity excludes posing as a saint. In the Christian West we once realized that the real battle was not between political forces, or ideological agendas, but between Christ and Satan. Note well: both of them outside ourselves, both appealing for our allegiance. The argument of Satan was presented in its simplest form, from the opening of our foundational document (i.e. the Bible). It was the message of the serpent with the apple: “eat thereof, and you shall be as gods.”
The argument of Christ was, conversely, “Give up all you have and follow me.”
To my mind, behind all questions of political correctness, is the same old background issue: the temptation to think that we can be as gods, that we can write the rules, and force the universe to obey us. To my mind, it begins with the denial of God, and ends in the inversion of every moral law, and the replacement of reasonable politics with murderous tyranny.
In The New York Times, Tyler Cowen, advocates less government and more market forces in business.
For years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.
Well before the financial crisis erupted, policy makers treated homeowners as a protected political class and gave mortgage-backed securities privileged regulatory treatment. Furthermore, they allowed and encouraged high leverage and the expectation of bailouts for creditors, which had been practiced numerous times, including the precedent of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Without these mistakes, the economy would not have been so invested in leverage and real estate and the financial crisis would have been much milder.
But we are now injecting politics ever more deeply into the American economy, whether it be in finance or in sectors like health care. Not only have we failed to learn from our mistakes, but also we’re repeating them on an ever-larger scale.
Lately the surviving major banks have reported brisk profits, yet in large part this reflects astute politicking and lobbying rather than commercial skill. Much of the competition was cleaned out by bank failures and consolidation, so giants like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan had an easier time getting back to profits. The Federal Reserve has been lending to banks at near-zero interest rates while paying higher interest on the reserves the banks hold at the Fed. “Too big to fail” policies mean that the large banks can raise money more cheaply because everyone knows they are safe counterparties. …
In The Wall Street Journal, Scott Harrington examines some of the President’s assertions in his address to Congress.
In his speech to Congress last week, President Barack Obama attempted to sell a reform agenda by demonizing the private health-insurance industry, which many people love to hate. He opened the attack by asserting: “More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.” …
…To highlight abusive practices, Mr. Obama referred to an Illinois man who “lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about.” The president continued: “They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.”
Although the president has used this example previously, his conclusion is contradicted by the transcript of a June 16 hearing on industry practices before the Subcommittee of Oversight and Investigation of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The deceased’s sister testified that the insurer reinstated her brother’s coverage following intervention by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She testified that her brother received a prescribed stem-cell transplant within the desired three- to four-week “window of opportunity” from “one of the most renowned doctors in the whole world on the specific routine,” that the procedure “was extremely successful,” and that “it extended his life nearly three and a half years.” …
…Responsible reform requires careful analysis of the underlying causes of problems in health insurance and informed debate over the benefits and costs of targeted remedies. The president’s continued demonization of private health insurance in pursuit of his broad agenda of government expansion is inconsistent with that objective.
Robert Samuelson tells us that with Obamacare there is no free lunch.
…Americans generally want three things from their health-care system. First, they think that everyone has a moral right to needed care; that suggests universal insurance. Second, they want choice; they want to select their doctors — and want doctors to determine treatment. Finally, people want costs controlled; health care shouldn’t consume all private compensation or taxes.
Appealing to these expectations, Obama told Americans what they want to hear. People with insurance won’t be required to change plans or doctors; they’ll enjoy more security because insurance companies won’t be permitted to deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions” or cancel policies when people get sick. All Americans will be required to have insurance, but those who can’t afford it will get subsidies.
As for costs, not to worry. “Reducing the waste and inefficiency in Medicare and Medicaid will pay for most of this plan,” Obama said. He pledged to “not sign a plan that adds one dime to our [budget] deficits — either now or in the future.” If you believe Obama, what’s not to like? Universal insurance. Continued choice. Lower costs.
The problem is that you can’t entirely believe Obama. If he were candid — if we were candid — we’d all acknowledge that the goals of our ideal health-care system collide. Perhaps we can have any two, but not all three. …
In Forbes, Shikha Dalmia comments on the President’s determination to give us more government.
For several months now, the American people–as if exhorted by the ghost of William F. Buckley (no particular hero of mine)–have been standing athwart the Democratic agenda of socialized medicine, yelling, “Stop!” But President Barack Obama showed them the policy equivalent of the middle finger Wednesday night. …
…In other words, Obama would encourage unlimited health care consumption by patients while eliminating the last vestige of price consciousness. But the reason America is facing unsustainable health care cost increases is precisely because its third-party system of insurance doesn’t encourage prudent consumption by patients. Indeed, if Obama really can tame health care costs by making patients even less cost-conscious, I have an even better idea for him: Simply pass a law banning anyone from falling sick and mandate good health for all. If he can suspend the laws of economics, perhaps he can also transcend the laws of physiology. …
…The one Republican idea that Obama did endorse–caps on medical malpractice awards or tort reform–will actually hurt rather than help patient choice. Big medicine has long blamed the unnecessary tests and procedures these awards encourage for rising health care costs. But several studies have shown that this so-called practice of defensive medicine is a smaller driver of costs than excess physician salaries. By capping these awards, Obama will leave patients even less recourse against physician negligence–hardly the American way.
Obama lambasted the critics who claim his reform plan amounts to a government takeover of the health care system. But the plan he laid out Wednesday night will control every aspect of the medical transaction. It will tell patients when, what and how much coverage they must buy; it will tell sellers when, what and how much coverage they must sell. This is not a government takeover of health care? Then Tony Soprano is just a decent, hard-working businessman.