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Pickings today is devoted to the Spirit of Enterprise; the internal tug inside so many that created the economy of the world, and perhaps made us human.

We’ll be back after the holidays

WIRED interviews the author of a new book on the informal economy. One the “slumdog economist” suggests is over $10 trillion in size.

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth: There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. …

The Wired piece was just published. Two months ago Robert Neuwirth wrote an article for Foreign Policy.

With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa’s most populous country.

It wasn’t a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country’s electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle’s brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David’s deal, struck four years ago, was not massive — but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.

You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” Or, sweetened for street use, “Systeme D.” This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.

I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.

It used to be that System D was small — a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world — close to 1.8 billion people — were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

Kids selling lemonade from the sidewalk in front of their houses are part of System D. So are many of the vendors at stoop sales, flea markets, and swap meets. So are the workers who look for employment in the parking lots of Home Depot and Lowe’s throughout the United States. And it’s not only cash-in-hand labor. As with David Obi’s deal to bring generators from China to Nigeria, System D is multinational, moving all sorts of products — machinery, mobile phones, computers, and more — around the globe and creating international industries that help billions of people find jobs and services.

In many countries — particularly in the developing world — System D is growing faster than any other part of the economy, and it is an increasing force in world trade. …

… Joanne Saltzberg, who heads Women Entrepreneurs of Baltimore — a business development group — told me, we need to change our attitude and to salute the achievements of those who are engaged in this alternate economy. “We only revere success,” she said. “I don’t think we honor the struggle. People who have no access to business development resources. People who have to work two and three jobs just to survive. When you are struggling in this economy and still you commit yourself to having a better life, that’s really something to honor.”

At the end of this article there is a link to sixteen pictures of traders throughout the world. Welcome to Bazaaristan.

All of the above reminded Pickerhead of ”Years Off My Life” - the autobiography of a Soviet General – Aleksandr Gorbatov. It is an unvarnished tale that describes his time in the GULAG before he was rehabilitated on the eve of The Great Patriotic War. Gorbatov ended the war as the Soviet Commandant of Berlin and retired with four stars.

It is his youth that interests us today. Harrison Salisbury reviewed his book for the NY Times in 1965.

… But the finest quality of Gorbatov’s book is its sheer humanity. As he describes his life as a youngster – superstitious, religious, strong-willed, ambitious, clever – he sounds again and again like young Gorky. Russia was a hard school at the turn of the century, whether you were a youngster in Nizhni-Novgorod like Gorky, a miner’s apprentice in the Donbas like Khrushchev or a peasant’s son in the Palekh country. If you survived it you could survive almost anything …

At the age of eleven, after finishing his schooling, the young Gorbatov started a small trading business to help his family. It is that story you’ll see below.

An immigrant to our country from Russia asks who creates prosperity, governments or free people?

… The USSR lasted from 1917 to 1987. Despite the Russian population being very well-educated and everyone paying whatever government found to be “fair share” of their salaries, by 1987 the centrally managed economy was collapsing.

So what is it that drove American progress if, in the words of Obama, the free market “doesn’t work. It’s never worked”? Was America’s standard of living achieved due to individuals using their own capacities, in their own pursuits for happiness or success, unhindered by government control? Or was it thanks to government bureaucrats drawing up plans and managing the economy?

American progressives remind me of the top echelon of Soviet Communists: so confident in their condescension to people outside their circle, so in love with their rhetoric about fairness and the welfare of the masses, and so indifferent to the real fate of individual human beings.

Another Russian, Vasily Grossman, defines freedom in his book Forever Flowing.

“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” 

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Thomas Friedman tries to walk back his slurs against Israel and its supporters. Jonathan Tobin calls BS on him.

Last week, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman let his anger with Israel and its American supporters, including some Republican presidential candidates, get the better of him. In the course of a diatribe in which Friedman falsely claimed increasing numbers of American Jews were turning on Israel, he asserted that the ovations Congress gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” This invocation of the Walt-Mearsheimer canard about a Jewish conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy earned him the rebukes of even liberal Jewish groups who normally laud his every utterance. That has caused Friedman to backtrack on his slur, though only just a bit. In an interview with the New York Jewish Week’s Gary Rosenblatt, he said the following:

“In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby — a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to,” Friedman said. “It would have helped people focus on my argument, which I stand by 100 percent.”

But this weasel-worded attempt at walking back his brief foray into anti-Semitism shouldn’t convince anyone. There is no real difference between “engineered” and “bought and paid for.” Both terms seek to describe the across-the-board bi-partisan support for Israel that the ovations Netanyahu received as the result of Jewish manipulation, not a genuine and accurate reflection of American public opinion. …

Elliot Abrams writes on the subject in the Weekly Standard.

If you were an anti-Semite dedicated to spreading your hatred of Jews, what charges exactly would you make in 21st century America?

You would avoid the blood libel—too medieval to write of sacrificing Christian children to make Passover matzo.  That kind of stuff circulates in Arab lands or Pakistan, but won’t sell in suburban America.  And the “Christ-killer” material is also dated, what with Vatican II, Evangelical support for Israel, and the like.

There are two charges you would make. First, the rich Jews control our government. Second, those Jews are trying to push America into war so your sons will have to fight for Israel.

In the last week that is exactly what we have seen. First came the Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Perhaps it was jealousy from seeing Walt and Mearsheimer sell all those books with this line, but Friedman here tips right into the swamps.

And now we have Joe Klein, in Time magazine, in a section accurately entitled “Swampland”: …

Robert Samuelson suggests time has run our for the theories of John Maynard Keynes.

The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest. Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns — spend more and tax less — presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. If markets refuse, Keynesian policies won’t work.

Countries then lose control over their economies. They default on maturing debts or must be rescued with loans from friendly countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), government central banks (the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank) or someone. There are other reasons why Keynesian policies might fail or be weakened. But they pale by comparison with the potential veto now posed by bond markets. Ironically, the past overuse of deficits compromises their present utility to fight high unemployment.

There is no automatic tipping point beyond which a country’s debt — the sum of past annual deficits — causes bond markets to shut down. But Greece, Portugal and Ireland have already reached that point, with gross debt in 2011 equal to 166 percent, 106 percent and 109 percent of their national incomes (gross domestic product), according to IMF figures. Heavily indebted Italy and Spain could lose access to bond markets.

Thankfully, the United States is not now in this position. Interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds hover around 2 percent; investors seem willing to lend against massive U.S. deficits. Just why is unclear. It’s not that U.S. budget discipline is noticeably superior. Economists Pedro Amaral and Margaret Jacobson of the Cleveland Federal Reserve recently compared U.S. budget performance against that of the weak European nations. …

James Pethokoukis marks the end of the year with the five worst economic ideas of the year. Then he suggests twelve policies that would help next year.

The longer the Great Stagnation/Long Recession/New Normal continues, the greater the risk that some profoundly terrible ideas — spawned by economic desperation and political opportunism – will pop up, gain a foothold and start to spread. Indeed, the past twelve months evidence the risk of a devastating policy error by Washington is escalating.

Here are the worst economic ideas of 2011, in reverse order: …

… 1. The Occupy movement. An obsession over income inequality runs through this entire list. And Occupy Wherever – so praised and embraced by Elizabeth Warren and Obama and the MSM — is a big reason why. But what would the rabble — a  mix of communists, union pros, the mentally deranged, and a few truly heartbreaking stories — have us do? Time travel so as to prevent the microchip revolution and reinstate command-and-control economies in Asia? Sadly — and tellingly — the protesters haven’t uttered a peep about teachers unions or Hollywood. Just the banks.

Please. What we should be focusing on is a) the level of income mobility in society and b) the absolute income gains of the broad middle. Income inequality zoomed in the late 1990s but since incomes were rising broadly, no one much cared if the rich got richer even faster. Everybody was winning. There was no Occupy Silicon Valley back then, despite the fantastic northern California weather.

Occupy and its fellow travelers have no apparent interest in advocating policies that would boost innovation and growth and incomes. But I do. So here are 12 ideas for 2012, some of which I gleaned from two of this year’s best economic policy books, Race Against the Machines and Launching the Innovation Renaissance:

1. Pay teachers more but get rid of tenure so the bottom five percent of teachers can be replaced by even average ones.

Nile Gardiner has fun with Joe Biden’s embarrassing prescriptions for Europe.

Joe Biden has caused a bit of a stir this week with his bizarre suggestion that “the Taliban per se is not our enemy”, just a decade on from the 9/11 attacks, carried out by al-Qaeda, and aided and abetted in Afghanistan by none other than the Taliban. The comments formed part of a wider interview on foreign policy given by Biden to Leslie Gelb of Newsweek. The stupidity of the vice president’s remarks on the war in Afghanistan were matched only by his reckless, almost surreal advice on the European financial crisis, which is so out of touch with reality that I doubt even the delusional Herman Van Rompuy would agree with him. Joe Biden’s solution for the EU’s massive debt crisis? A mammoth Obama-style bailout across the Atlantic, but this time in euros not dollars: …

… Fortunately, as I’ve noted previously, the views of the Obama administration, with its history of economic failure, have become an irrelevance on the EU crisis. After all, the US administration’s $787 billion taxpayer-funded “stimulus” was a failure, notable largely for its contribution to fueling the biggest budget deficit since World War Two. With their track record, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are probably the last two leaders on earth to be giving advice on a debt crisis issue, and the message coming from Washington is clearly the wrong one. The best thing that European leaders can do is to study the economic policies of the Obama presidency and do exactly the opposite, by cutting spending, ending excessive borrowing, slashing the size of the public sector, lowering taxes, freeing businesses from red tape, and taking a huge axe to big government.

WSJ Editors closely examined the EPA’s complaints about Wyoming drinking water and natural gas fracking.

… the EPA’s credibility is also open to review. The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels.

Natural gas carries a smaller carbon footprint than coal or oil, and greens once endorsed it as an alternative to coal and nuclear power. But as the shale gas revolution has advanced, greens are worried that plentiful natural gas will price wind and solar even further out of the market. This could mean many more of the White House’s subsidized investments will go belly up like Solyndra.

The other big issue is regulatory control. Hydraulic fracturing isn’t regulated by the EPA, and in 2005 Congress reaffirmed that it did not want the EPA to do so under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The states regulate gas drilling, and by and large they have done the job well. Texas and Florida adopted rules last week that followed other states in requiring companies to disclose their fracking chemicals.

But the EPA wants to muscle in, and its Wyoming study will help in that campaign. The agency is already preparing to promulgate new rules regulating fracking next year. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says that new EPA rules restricting fracking “would have a huge economic impact on our state’s energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states.” Some 3,000 wells in the vast Bakken shale in North Dakota use fracking.

By all means take threats to drinking water seriously. But we also need to be sure that regulators aren’t spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda.

Michael Barone posts on the pipeline blunder.

How misguided was Barack Obama’s decision to refuse to approve the Keystone XL pipeline?

How misguided was Custer’s decision to ride into Little Big Horn?

Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that Americans favor building the Keystone XL pipeline by a 60%-24% margin. The fact that only 16% are unsure represents a very high level of knowledge about a project that was largely unknown except to readers of the oil and gas trade press a few months ago. And why shouldn’t Americans favor a pipeline that allows us to import oil from friendly nearby Canada rather than from unfriendly Venezuela or distant and dicey Saudi Arabia? …

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Caroline Glick writes on Tom Friedman.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel.

His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel.

Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer’s and Stephen Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress’s overwhelming support for Israel.

As he put it, “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

It would be nice if Friedman is forced to pay some sort of price for finally coming out of the closet as a dyed-in-the-wool Israel hater. But he probably won’t. As he made clear in his column, he isn’t writing for the general public, but for a very small, select group of elitist leftists. These are the only people who matter to Friedman. And they matter to him because they share his opinions and his goal of indoctrinating young people to adopt his pathologically hostile views about Israel and his contempt for the American public that supports it.

It doesn’t matter to Friedman that overwhelming survey evidence, amassed over decades, show that the vast majority of the American public and the American Jewish community support Israel. It doesn’t matter to him that the support shown to Netanyahu in Congress last May was a reflection of that support.

As he put it, “The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away.”

Embedded in this statement are two key points. First, Friedman assesses that the prevailing view on US college campuses are his own radical views. And he is convinced that college students share his views. …

… On December 7 Politico’s Ben Smith published a detailed report about how two of the Democratic Party’s core institutions, the Center for American Progress and Media Matters are waging a concerted, continuous campaign to diminish left wing Democratic support for Israel. Media Matters official M.J. Rosenberg acknowledged that given the depth of popular support for Israel in the US, chances are remote that their efforts will pay off in Congress today. He explained that his goal is to shift the Democratic Party’s position on Israel through its younger generation.

As he put it, “We’re playing the long game here.”

Happily, to date, they are losing the long game as well as the short game both in Israel and the US. While it is important to remain on guard against radicals like Friedman and Rosenberg and their fellow travelers on campuses, it is also important to recognize that despite their powerful positions, they remain marginal voices in both Israel and the US.

Six and a half years ago George Bush spoke the truth about North Korea. Christopher Hitchens paid tribute to him in a May 2005 column for Slate.

How extraordinary it is, when you give it a moment’s thought, that it was only last week that an American president officially spoke the obvious truth about North Korea. In point of fact, Mr. Bush rather understated matters when he said that Kim Jong-il’s government runs “concentration camps.” It would be truer to say that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, as it calls itself, is a concentration camp. It would be even more accurate to say, in American idiom, that North Korea is a slave state.

This way of phrasing it would not have the legal implication that the use of the word “genocide” has. To call a set of actions “genocidal,” as in the case of Darfur, is to invoke legal consequences that are entailed by the U.N.’s genocide convention, to which we are signatories. However, to call a country a slave state is to set another process in motion: that strange business that we might call the working of the American conscience.

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the “slavery” of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves “captive.” The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. …

James Pethokoukis wonders what a Korean unification might cost.

The death of Kim Jong-il, the monstrous, madman dictator of hostage nation North Korea, creates tremendous uncertainty and risk for the region. Yet one scenario, however optimistic, would be that somehow this event puts North and South on the road to reunification. What might that cost? Well, Germany has paid some $2 trillion over two decades to reunify East and West. But keep in mind that East Germany was only a fourth the size of North Korea. And much richer, relatively. In 1989, East German per capita income was a third of the West’s. The situation in Korea is much different, as this analysis from the Atlantic Council sums up: …

Nile Gardiner writes on the president’s $4,000,000 Christmas vacation.

Around $4 million (£2.6 million) – the expected total cost to the US taxpayer of the Obama Christmas family vacation to Hawaii according to the Hawaii Reporter (hat tip: Rob Bluey at The Foundry). This is an astonishing amount of public money to be spending in an age of austerity – when the president is supposed to be leading efforts to cut the US budget deficit, the largest since World War Two, and a towering $15 trillion national debt:

Hawaii Reporter research shows the total cost for the President’s visit for taxpayers far exceeded $1.5 million in 2010 – but is even more costly this year because he extended his vacation by three days and the cost for Air Force One travel has jumped since last assessed in 2000. In addition, Hawaii Reporter was able to obtain more specifics about the executive expenditures.

The total cost (based on what is known) for the 17-day vacation roundtrip vacation to Hawaii for the President, his family and staff has climbed to more than $4 million.

This $4 million figure is nearly 100 times the average annual salary of an American worker, which currently stands at $41,673. The Hawaii Reporter calculates that travel costs alone for the president and his entourage via Air Force One (plus a separate trip for Michelle Obama who has traveled in advance), in addition to a United States Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft to transport “the presidential limos, helicopters and other support equipment”, amounts to a whopping $3,629,622. Housing for security staff costs an estimated $151,200, and luxurious hotel rooms for the president’s 24-strong staff a further $72,216. Based on these figures the total cost to the federal US taxpayer (and the additional burden on the national debt) is a staggering $3,853,038. If you add in local taxpayer costs of $260,000 (including police overtime and city ambulances), the total public expense is $4,113,038. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Conan: Newt Gingrich has issued a statement promising that he will not cheat on his wife. Even better, he said he wouldn’t cheat on his next wife either.

Leno: Obama says he didn’t know how bad the economy was when he took office. If it doesn’t improve soon, the next president will be saying the same thing.

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Charles Krauthammer answers the president’s bin Laden bragging by showing his appeasement of Russia and Iran.

… Barack Obama didn’t appease Osama bin Laden. He killed him. And for ordering the raid and taking the risk, Obama deserves credit. Credit for decisiveness and political courage.

However, the bin Laden case was no test of policy. No serious person of either party ever suggested negotiation or concession. Obama demonstrated decisiveness, but forgoing a non-option says nothing about the soundness of one’s foreign policy. That comes into play when there are choices to be made.

And here the story is different. Take Obama’s two major foreign policy initiatives — toward Russia and Iran.

The administration came into office determined to warm relations with Russia. It was called “reset,” an antidote to the “dangerous drift” (Vice President Biden’s phrase) in relations during the Bush years.

In fact, Bush’s increasing coolness toward Russia was grounded in certain unpleasant realities: growing Kremlin authoritarianism that was systematically dismantling a fledgling democracy; naked aggression against a small, vulnerable, pro-American state (Georgia); the drive to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence in the near-abroad and; support, from Syria to Venezuela, of the world’s more ostentatiously anti-American regimes.

Unmoored from such inconvenient realities, Obama went about his reset. The signature decision was the abrupt cancellation of a Polish- and Czech-based U.S. missile defense system bitterly opposed by Moscow.

The cancellation deeply undercut two very pro-American allies who had aligned themselves with Washington in the face of both Russian threats and popular unease. Obama not only left them twisting in the wind, he showed the world that the Central Europeans’ hard-won independence was only partial and tentative. With American acquiescence, their ostensibly sovereign decisions were subject to a Russian veto. …

In honor of our bug-out we have three posts by Max Boot on events in Iraq. Here’s most of one. 

Those were some pretty astonishing statements that President Obama made after his meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq: He said that “what we have now achieved is an Iraq that is self-governing, that is inclusive and that has enormous potential.”

Only the last part of that sentence is true: Iraq does have “enormous potential”–both good and bad. It could become another opulent petrostate–or it could revert to a hellish state of civil war. Either is possible at this point because Iraq is only barely “self-governing” and its government is acting in ways that are less “inclusive” all the time–witness Maliki’s arrest of more than 600 people on vague charges of “Baathism.”

Obama’s happy talk is seriously at odds with reality–and I’m sure Obama knows it. He is only attempting to put his abandonment of Iraq in the best possible light.

In the process he is taking an enormous gamble, not only with the security of Iraq, the United States, and the entire Middle East but also with his own historical reputation. True, the pullout from Iraq is popular today. It won’t be so popular a year or two from now if the result of the U.S. pullout is greater instability or tyranny. Obama will then shoulder the bulk of the blame for messing up the end game of a war that he never supported. …

Bart Hinkle found some hypocrites in Fairfax County.

You can’t get a whole lot more Democratic than Fairfax County, just outside of D.C. Barack Obama carried Fairfax 60-38 against John McCain in 2008. That’s 6 percentage points higher than Obama’s statewide margin, which Fairfax helped inflate because it is the commonwealth’s largest locality: 13.5 percent of Virginians live there. Four years before, George W. Bush carried Virginia with 54 percent of the vote — but not Fairfax, where John Kerry got 53 percent.

The county board of supervisors reflects the split as well. Seven of the 10 members are Democrats. That makes its recent stance on state government rather amusing.

Each year localities around Virginia draw up their wish lists for the General Assembly session that convenes in January. Virginia is a Dillon Rule state, which means that localities are under the thumb of state government and must go hat in hand to the legislature to get permission to do many things. Fairfax recently completed its wish list for the 2012 session.

And what do the supervisors want from Richmond? “I think the simple message is, ‘Please try to leave us alone,’ ” says Supervisor Jeff McKay.

How very tea party of them. Perhaps Fairfax should replace its county seal with the Gadsden flag — that yellow banner, popular at tea party rallies, with the coiled snake and the legend, “Don’t Tread on Me.” …

… In the eyes of contemporary liberalism everyday Americans need the firm guidance of their liberal betters lest they make poor choices or, through their choices, produce results liberals dislike, such as unbridled commerce or economic disparity.

Americans, say liberals, cannot be left to their own devices. So it is entertaining to watch a locality where such an ideology defines the political center – Fairfax is a bedroom community for federal bureaucrats – chafe under the very sort of paternalism it otherwise endorses.

There’s a lesson in that. Even people who benefit from big government love it less when they have to live under it.

Now that we are heading to energy independence, the liberal left is attacking natural gas; the fuel they used to love. Their real goal is for our country to be weak. American.com has the story.  

Just a few years ago, the liberal Pew Center of Global Climate Change, among many environmental groups, was heralding natural gas as a “bridge fuel to a more climate friendly energy supply”—an interim step on the transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar. Now, “progressive” environmental groups demonize natural gas, and shale gas in particular, as a “bridge to nowhere.” What’s the real story behind the flip-flop?

An investigative piece in Ethical Corporation magazine, “Who Blew Up the ‘Bridge to the Future,’” examines the troubling truth behind the turnaround. …

… The most intriguing question lying ahead is whether politics—the ideological forces lining up against unconventional sources of natural gas—will trump the science. Anti-shale gas advocacy groups are forging bizarre alliances, including with the Russians and the Iranians who thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades.

That won’t change the facts in the ground. Natural gas is no longer the bridge to the future. It IS the future—unless “progressives” kill it.

Indulging in some over-the-top hyperbole, Richard Salsman points out that “takers” like Gingrich and Obama are attacking the “maker” Romney.

Despite decades of economic experience and personal familiarity with the logic of market exchange, many people today still sympathize with the myth that free markets left to their own devices are prone to periodic “failures,” breakdowns, or crises, while government intervention, money-printing, and wealth redistribution allegedly “stimulate” an economy or “smooth” the business cycle. Few myths are more harmful, since the precise opposite is true: markets left free (while operating under the rule of law) work very well and create vast wealth, while state spending, taxing, regulating, borrowing and inflating only usurp economic vitality.

A simple and memorable way to keep straight the crucial distinction between “economic power” (the power to produce) and “political power” (the power to coerce) is by a terminological duality – “makers” versus takers” – as incorporated in Edmund Contoski’s 1997 book. Despite persistent Marxist claims dating as far back as 1848, these two powers (the economic and political) are in no way synonymous. Indeed, they’re antonymous.

Economic power is creative, productive, and voluntary; it offers incentives, gains, rewards. Political power is destructive and involuntary; you must obey it, for it imposes punishments, losses, and penalties. This is no brief for anarchy, as many libertarians insist; it’s a case for government limited constitutionally to undertaking its only valid purpose – the protection of individual rights (including property rights) against the initiation of force or fraud (whether from home or abroad) – and whose power is limited to penalizing, incarcerating or destroying real criminals (those who rape, rob, pillage, kill, or defraud), not market makers. …

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Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard with a nice send off for Christopher Hitchens.

No secrets are being divulged when I report that Christopher Hitchens liked a drink every now and then. Preferably now. He wasn’t sloppy about it. In fact, he always seemed in perfect control. (I once saw him steer a beach bike through the streets of Key West without spilling his Scotch.) He just liked to keep the machine well-oiled so he could get on to more important things, like liberating oppressed peoples of the world, knocking out his 1,000 words a day, or starting fights with God, assuming there is one, which he didn’t. In some ways, his affection for drink brought us together, setting in motion my most vivid memories of him.

As the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, I was holed up in the Kuwait City Hilton—home to unembedded reporters looking to make their way in. While I’d only briefly met Hitchens once before, word had spread through mutual friends that my hotel room was the last cantina in town. Since the border being sealed meant the black market hooch supply had dried up, we smuggled our amber past customs officials in Listerine bottles. So when Hitchens showed up at my door early one morning kitted for battle with nothing more than his black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a half-smoked pack of Rothman’s (he refused to bring Kevlar, saying it made him feel  “like a counterfeit”), I offered him a welcome-to-the-war shot of “Listerine,” just to be hospitable.

“I don’t usually start this early,” he said, his glass already gratefully extended, “but holding yourself to a drinking schedule is always the first sign of alcoholism.”  …

We start an extended section on Obama’s re-elect chances with an article in the National Journal by Ron Brownstein. To be fair we start with a center left publication.

There’s an ominous trend for President Obama in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll: not only is his overall approval rating lagging, but he’s lost as much (or even more) ground among groups that favored him in 2008 as among those who resisted him last time.

The chart at left compares Obama’s vote among key groups in 2008, according to exit polls, and his job approval rating among them in the latest Heartland Monitor released Thursday morning. (The survey, conducted by FTI Strategic Communications, polled 1200 adults by landline telephone and cell phone from November 30 to December 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.)

Overall, Obama has slipped from 52.8 percent of the vote in 2008 to 44 percent approval in the new survey with 49 percent disapproving. As the chart shows, Obama has declined not only in the groups that were always dubious of him, but also with several that enthusiastically joined his winning 2008 majority.

In 2008, Obama assembled what I called a “coalition of the ascendant” – by which I meant he did best among groups that were themselves growing rapidly in society, particularly minorities, the vast Millennial Generation, and the growing ranks of college-educated whites, especially women. Several of those groups have noticeably cooled on him. Obama’s approval rating is now 12 percentage points lower than his 2008 share of the vote among young adults (aged 18-29); 11 points lower among African-Americans; and 10 points lower among college-educated white women. …

Chris Stirewalt of Fox News reports on polls that attend to states, not groups.

In the dozen swing states where voters will decide the 2012 presidential election, a new Gallup/USA Today poll shows President Obama losing to the current Republican frontrunners by significant margins.

Obama trailed Mitt Romney by 5 points, 43 percent to 48 percent and trailed Newt Gingrich by 3 points, 45 percent to 48 percent, in the survey of these 12 battleground states

It’s a pretty big deal.

While Obama continues to tie or lead national polls, his performance in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin matters more. And there, things are not so good for the incumbent.

Part of the gap with the national numbers can be explained by the fractious, boom-and-bust Republican nominating process. While the overwhelming number of Democrats in deep-blue states already know who their nominee will be next year, Republicans are still squabbling amongst themselves in bright-red states like Georgia and Texas. That will change after there is a nominee and the national number for the GOP standard bearer will even out.

But the biggest problem for Obama is that he is underperforming his national number by so much in the swing states. Compared to his national number, his score falls by 4 points against Gingrich and 5 points against Romney. While Obama believes he can drive down the support for whoever the Republican nominee may be, it seems unlikely that he can get his own numbers up very much. …

James Pethokoukis graphically illustrates Obama’s troubles.

And Reuters notes a Harvard poll showing re-elect problems.

… Harvard surveyed voters age 18 to 29, a group known as Millennials because many were born just before the turn of the millennium in 2000.

They supported Obama over a generic Republican candidate by 6 percentage points. His margin widened to about 11 percentage points if he faces Romney in a general election and to 16 percentage points if his opponent is Gingrich or Texas Governor Rick Perry, the survey said.

But 18 to 29-year-olds have become disillusioned with his job performance, the survey showed. Some 36 percent predict Obama will lose reelection, 30 percent said he will win and 32 percent are unsure.

Less than half of those polled approve of the job Obama is doing and their view of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress is slipping as well, according to the survey.

Only 12 percent of young Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction and less than one-third of those polled approve of the way Obama is managing the economy, results showed.

The web-based survey of 2,028 U.S. citizens age 18 to 29 was conducted between November 23 and December 3. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. …

Switching subjects, Pethokoukis quotes a FT article on problems in our economy.

1. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, 450,000-550,000 new businesses with at least one employee were created in the US each year. In 2009, the latest year for which records are available, there were just 400,000.

2. More recent numbers suggest that the climate has not improved: the number of incorporated self-employed people, a measure of the health of small businesses, was 5.06m in November, down from 5.37m in November 2009, official figures say.

3. As the rate of new company formation has been slowing, the number of jobs created by each start-up has been falling too – again a trend that began well before the start of the recession. The result is that the total number of jobs created by start-ups, which had been running at 3m-3.5m per year, dropped to just 2.3m in 2009.

4.  For most of the 1990s, job creation ran at about 8 percent of employment, with job destruction a little lower at about 7.5 per cent, as the total number of people in work rose. Starting in about 2000, both job creation and destruction began to drift downwards, and carried on falling even as employment recovered after the 2000-01 recession. Job destruction has fallen and is now well below its rate in the 1990s, when the economy was much stronger. Job creation, however, also remains very weak, at only about 6.5 percent of employment. That statistic is the immediate cause of America’s persistently high unemployment.

Spengler catches Tom Friedman looking particularly stupid. We quote from this extensively since it hits the nail on the head when it comes to American universities.

That Thomas Friedman would spout stupidity and anti-Semitism surprises me no more than the appearance of a gumball after I put a quarter into the machine and turn the knob. But one line in the New York Times’ calumnist’s (sic) Dec. 13 tantrum against Israel was worth a double-take:

“I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused.”

Why on earth is the “real test” at the University of Wisconsin? For liberals, the only people who count are the smart people, because it is an article of faith that  social engineering can fix all the world’s problems, and a logical conclusion that only smart people qualify as social engineers. It doesn’t matter what the dumb people think. They are the ones who need to be socially engineered. To Friedman, it is irrelevant whether Americans at large support Israel by a 4:1 margin or better, and that support for Israel is growing steadily, as the Gallup Poll consistently shows:

That poll includes dumb people, so it doesn’t count. To Friedman, what matters is what university audiences might think. …

… The American university system exists for the most part to produce the social engineers who will fix all the world’s problems. During the 1960s, those of us who had the misfortune to attend the better colleges were taught that our mission was to make the world perfect, through the Great Society, arms control, internationalism, disarmament, and so forth. When the Vietnam War and the urban riots of the 1960s showed that the liberalism of our elders had not fixed the world’s problems, we abominated them, and pursued even more radical versions of social engineering. The radicalization of the universities produced a generation of clever people unsuited to productive activity in the real world but skilled at bloviating, and they became the tenured faculty of today. And their salaries, privileges, and perks continued to grow to the point that $50,000 in annual tuition barely covers them. Overall CPI is up 70% since 1990, but tuition and fees have risen by 300%. …

… Rather than produce smart people, the university system has dumbed America down. After two generations of academic wheel-spinning, the transformation of universities into Maoist re-education camps with beer kegs has ruined their practical value. The giant sucking sound you hear is the air going out of the higher education bubble. As the New York Times reported in a Nov. 23 feature, “One of the greatest changes is that a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from non-elite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability.”

Student loans, with a default rate of 8.8%, are the new subprime debt.

The only good news here is that liberal mainstream culture can’t afford to brainwash as many American kids as it used to. Prof. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University likes to say that the big question in American politics is whether the red states can produce kids faster than professors from the blue states can corrupt them. …

… long before demographics catch up with liberal culture and extinguish it, like the post-Alexandrine Greeks or the 5th-century Romans, the economic destruction wrought by liberal education will have impoverished most of a generation of American young people.

Instapundit notes a change at the NY Times;

DOINGS AMONG THE ONE PERCENT:

The New York Times Company today abruptly announced that its 61-year-old chief executive officer, Janet Robinson, will leave at the end of the year, with no permanent successor lined up.

An SEC filing says Ms. Robinson will get $4.5 million plus health insurance for a 12-month retirement and consulting agreement, including “two-year non-competition, non-solicitation and non-disparagement covenants, a three-year cooperation covenant and an indefinite confidentiality covenant.”

The Times itself reported that Ms. Robinson’s pay in 2009 was $4.9 million, so she’ll earn almost as much as a retired consultant as as a full-time CEO.

The handy investment calculator on the Times corporate Web site shows that $10,000 invested in NYT stock the day Ms. Robinson took over as CEO, on December 27, 2004, would be worth $1,855.14 today, a decline of 81.45%. The price of the stock went from $40.59 when she took over to $7.53 today, and though some dividends were paid out early in her tenure as CEO, the dividend has since been suspended.

Consequences for failure are for the little people.

Mad Magazine has a cover that catches the spirit of the Obama administration.

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We have more on the Kansas speech. This time from Richard Epstein.

… No amount of data can slow down this president. His deep protectionist instincts are revealed when he stokes the jingoist fires by saying: “If you’re somebody whose job can be done cheaper by a computer or someone in another country, you don’t have a lot of leverage with your employer when it comes to asking for better wages or better benefits, especially since fewer Americans today are part of a union.” At no point does he bother to note the tension between protectionism and his general proposition that Americans are entitled to have better quality goods at better, i.e. lower, prices. Instead, he thinks he can square the circle by forcing wages up while keeping prices down. He takes a regressive stand against automation, outsourcing, and the rationalization of business facilities when he writes:

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100—or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet.

To anyone schooled in economics, these statements reveal a breathtaking ignorance about the sources of national prosperity.  It is a good thing when plants can achieve the same output with less labor. Do we really want an America in which thousands of people work in dangerous occupations to turn molten lava into steel bars? Far better it is that fewer workers are doing those jobs. The jobs lost in that industry will be in part replaced by newer jobs created in the firms that build the equipment that make it possible to run steel mills at a lower cost and far lower risk of personal injury. The former workers can seek jobs in newer industries that will only expand by competing for labor.

And what about those ATM machines? Does the president really want people to have to queue up in banks to make deposits or withdraw cash in order to make a boom market for human tellers? Perhaps we should return to the days before automation, when phone calls were all connected by human operators. And why blast the Internet, which has created far more useful jobs than it has ever destroyed?

The painful ignorance that is revealed in these remarks augurs ill for the long-term recovery of America. With the president firmly determined to set himself against the tides of progress, innovation will be harder to come by. The levels of unemployment will continue to be high as the president works overtime to impose additional restrictions on the labor markets and more taxes at the top of the income distribution—both backhanded ways to reward innovation and growth.

The problem, therefore, with the president’s speech is not that it is demagogic in tone. The problem is that it is intellectually incoherent. As a matter of high principle, the president announces his fealty to markets. As a matter of practical politics, he denigrates and undermines them at every step. It is a frightening prospect to have a president who lives in a time warp that lets him believe that the failed policies of 1935 can lead this nation back from the brink. His chosen constituency, the middle class, should tremble at the prospect that his agenda might well set the course for the United States for the next four years.

As is his want, Newt really stepped in it a few days ago when he trashed Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. David Harsanyi has it.

This week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney called on newly minted front-runner and noted historian Newt Gingrich to return the estimated $1.6 million he made providing “strategic advice” to Freddie Mac, the quasi-governmental agency that has done the hard work of making “toxic home mortgages” a forever feature of our national portfolio.

To this, Newt, the great American theorist, unsheathed his trademark intellect and offered a completely irrelevant yet vaguely smart-sounding retort: “If Gov. Romney would give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over the years at Bain, then I would be glad to listen to him. But I bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won’t take the offer.”

Nice, Newt. When the former House speaker wins the nomination, he and the president can discuss how the rich are “bankrupting companies,” engaging in profit-mongering and risky behavior, and generally messing up the world for kicks. And throwing in Romney’s recent debate gaffe (or what I’m told is a gaffe) was a nice touch, as well. You may not have heard: Romney laid down a bet with fellow candidate Rick Perry for a cool $10,000 (or what Newt probably spends on lunch every week) during a recent debate. Doesn’t Mitt know that candidates, no matter how successful they may be, must always act as if they mow their lawns and eat curly fries at diners on Friday nights. If not, the electorate will be deeply insulted.

This kind of rhetoric is nothing new for Republicans. During the 2008 primaries, Mike Huckabee noted that “Mitt Romney looks like the guy that fires you.” This assessment was backed up by then-candidate John McCain, who, we soon found out, understood as much about the economy as Meghan McCain. …

Nice piece by Reason’s Matt Welch illustrates a DC BS generator.

The Aspen Institute, an international public policy nonprofit founded in 1950, describes itself as a “convener.” Rather than push for a specific ideological agenda, the organization brings together elite politicians and journalists in a “neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.” What happens in Aspen (and Washington, D.C., and other cities where the institute facilitates debates) does not stay in Aspen; the whole point is to influence policy wherever it is discussed and manufactured.

So it was with keen interest that I received an invitation to attend an October 27 Aspen Institute confab in D.C. on “The Role of Government in the Economy.” Libertarians, after all, tend to hold the view that the greater the role of government, the worse the economy. Of even keener interest was the lineup: on the left, recently departed chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden Jared Bernstein; on the right, former Bush administration Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation executive director Bradley Belt, and moderating between them the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau chief and former economics columnist David Leonhardt. Surely there would be some wide-ranging disagreement on the federal government’s role in precipitating and exacerbating the economic malaise of the past four years.

No such luck. In his introductory remarks, moderator Leonhardt laid out as a factual starting point the government’s “extraordinary and largely successful moves to spare us from another Great Depression.” Bernstein went on to decry the “irrational fear of budget deficits at a time when the budget deficit really should be very large.” And Belt repeatedly declined to enumerate a specific appropriate size and scope of government. So much for the debate.

Even more interesting than the soft consensus in favor of government intervention was a strong undercurrent that those who disagreed with it were guilty of denying basic truths. …

Speaking of BS, Charles Gasparino shows how crony capitalism might have greased the skids for Corzine’s MF Global fraud.

… Corzine is to appear before the House Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations tomorrow, and informed sources tell me the panel is keenly interested in how Corzine (who’d been out of the brokerage business for over a decade) managed to take this firm from nothing to something almost overnight — that is, before its spectacular demise last month.

Keep in mind that being a primary dealer — with the rare privilege to underwrite US government debt sold at auction and then resell those bonds to investors — is no small-fry position. The coveted assignment is usually reserved for the biggest firms that are also considered the market’s safest bets.

The New York Fed selects the best and most financially solid firms for this task for obvious reasons: When markets become volatile, it wants to make sure the firm buying government bonds can withstand the volatility. In other words, the government wants to make sure its primary dealers can take a punch and won’t implode at the slightest turn of the markets.

Yet MF Global was anything but one of the market’s soundest outfits. Not only did a simple disclosure of its of its European debt exposure cause a severe cash-crunch, but the very fact that it lost more than $1 billion in customer funds during its final hours shows that (at minimum) MF Global lacked basic and routine controls.

So how did all of this manage to evade regulators, despite all the new rules promulgated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis?

Well, William Dudley, who runs the New York Fed (which, again, selected MF Global as a primary dealer), is just one of Corzine’s old Goldman cronies to be found in the MF Global mess. …

Washington Examiner has an example of DC BS. The Navy is paying $15 for a gallon of fuel and patting itself on the back.

With President Obama delaying the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would facilitate access to the estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil in North America, the United States Navy is reportedly slated to spend $12 million at a rate of $15 per gallon on a biofuel-gasoline blend — a purchase justified by the proposition that dependence on oil is a national security threat.

“We are doing this for one simple reason: It makes us better fighters,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said, according to a National Journal report last week. “Our use of fossil fuels is a very real threat to our national security and to the U.S. Navy ability to protect America and project power overseas.” …

Hot Air explains the expensive fuel. Turns out, there is an intersection of BS and Obama’s transition team. Can you say crony capitalism?

This is going to help the Defense Department weather looming budget cuts, for sure.  Teaming up with the Department of Agriculture (which has a cheery Rotary Club ring to it), the Navy has purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for about $16 a gallon, or about 4 times the price of its standard marine fuel, JP-5, which has been going for under $4 a gallon.

You won’t be surprised to learn that a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a “strategic advisor” at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy.  Glauthier worked – shock, shock – on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.

The Navy sale isn’t Solazyme’s first trip to the public trough, of course.  The company got a $21.8 million grant from the 2009 stimulus package. …

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David Mamet wants to know why the liberal left has abandoned Israel.

Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.

The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.

But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of “The Corporation” is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block. …

Peter Schiff gets his turn at the Kansas speech.

For most of his time as a national political figure, Barack Obama has been careful to cloak his core socialist leanings behind a veil of pro-capitalist rhetoric. This makes strategic sense, as Americans still largely identify as pro-capitalist. However, based on his recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the President appears to have reassessed the political landscape in advance of the 2012 elections. Based on the growth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the recent defeat of Republicans in special elections, he has perhaps sensed a surge of left-leaning sentiment; and, as a result, he finally dropped the pretense.

According to our President’s new view of history, capitalism is a theory that has “never worked.” He argues that its appeal can’t be justified by results, but its popularity is based on Americans’ preference for an economic ideology that “fits well on a bumper sticker.” He feels that capitalism speaks to the flaws in the American DNA, those deeply rooted creation myths that elevate the achievements of individuals and cast unwarranted skepticism on the benefits of government. He argues that this pre-disposition has been exploited by the rich to popularize policies that benefit themselves at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But Obama’s knowledge of history is limited to what is written on his teleprompter. And his selection of the same location that Teddy Roosevelt used to chart an abrupt departure into populist politics is deeply symbolic in the opposite way to that which he intended. It is not by some genetic fluke that Americans distrust government. It is an integral and essential part of our heritage. The United States was founded by people who distrusted government intensely and was subsequently settled, over successive generations, by people fleeing the ravages of government oppression. These Americans relied on capitalism to quickly build the greatest economic power the world had ever seen – from nothing. …

Joel Kotkin says you can blame Obama’s left leanings for his economic failures, but we should also look at his Chicago background.

… If the Chicago system had proven an economic success, perhaps we could excuse Obama for bringing it to the rest of us. Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth.

But the bare demographic and economic facts for both Chicago and Illinois reveal a stunning legacy of failure. Over the past decade, Illinois suffered the third highest loss of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math-related) jobs in the nation, barely beating out Delaware and Michigan. The rest of the job picture is also dismal: Over the past ten years, Illinois suffered the third largest loss of jobs of any state, losing over six percent of its employment.

The state’s demographic picture also is dismal. In the last decade, Illinois lost population not only to sunbelt states such as Texas and Florida but actually managed to have negative migration even with places like California and New York, net losers to virtually everywhere else. In fact, Illinois had a positive net migration with only one major state, Michigan.

Chicago and its Daley dictatorship has been much celebrated in the media – particularly after Obama’s election in everything from the liberal New Yorker to Fast Company, which named Chicago “city of the year”  in 2008. The following year, the Windy City was deemed the best city for men by Askmen.com, for offering what it claimed was “the perfect balance between cosmopolitan and comfortable, combining all of the culture, entertainment and sophistication of an internationally renowned destination with an affordable lifestyle and down-to-earth work hard/play hard character.”

Well, you can make that case,  unless you happen to be searching for a job.  Over the past decade, “the Chicago way” has proven more adept at getting good coverage than creating employment for its residents. In Forbes’ last cities rankings greater Chicago ranked 41st out of the 51 largest metropolitan areas. Between 2001 and 2011 it actually lost jobs. Since 2007  the region has lost more jobs than Detroit, and more than twice as many as New York. It has lost about as many jobs – 250,000 – as up and comer Houston has gained.  In Forbes recent survey of high-tech performance, the Chicago region stood at a dismal 47th among the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas. …

Turning to more pleasant pastimes, it is long past time for Pickings to note Tim Tebow’s unorthodox success. First up is Jeff Neuman.

I have accepted Tim Tebow as my personal quarterback and savior.

If faith is belief in things unseen, with or without evidence, then I have faith in Tim Tebow’s ability as a passer, a leader and a winner.

I have faith that he can, as Jimmy Johnson said on the Fox postgame show, “raise his teammates better than anyone I have ever seen.”

With their 13-10 victory over the Chicago Bears on Sunday, the Broncos are 7-1 since Tebow became their starting quarterback. I know of no explanation for this that excludes the supernatural.

He apparently has the power to cloud men’s minds.

How else can you explain Lovie Smith’s (Chicago Bears Coach) fourth-quarter play-calling? For three quarters, the Bears ran the ball 25 times and threw 18 (including sacks). In the fourth, Smith let Caleb Hanie drop back once in 12 offensive plays, content to rack up the three-and-outs while sitting on a 10-0 lead. His refusal to mix it up even after recovering a Tebow fumble proved costly. …

Woody Paige has more from the Denver Post.

Unbelievabow and Timplausible.

He did it one more time.

They did for the seventh time in eight games and the third time in overtime this season.

“It’s not Tebow Time. It’s Broncos time,” Tim Tebow, the Broncos’ wunderkind quarterback, said Sunday evening.

“Let every man be the master of his time,” William Shakespeare said in another time.

This time the Broncos began their comeback with 4:34 remaining in the fourth quarter and finished their flourish 6:26 into the extra period.

Duh, Bears.

When he was a kid dreaming of playing quarterback in the NFL, “I never read anything or saw anything quite like this,” Tebow told me in the hallway outside the locker room. “It’s pretty special.

. . . I think God has a plan for me.”

Good Lord!

Broncos coach John Fox entered the interview room after his team’s latest miraculous victory and said, “First, want to thank the good Lord.”

He also thanked the players. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Fallon: Turns out that website that rents toys is really preparing kids for life. You get Barbie’s Dream House. and then a month later they foreclose.

Leno: Newt Gingrich meets with Donald Trump. Great combo—two guys, six wives, zero chance of either ever becoming president.

Leno: Charlie Sheen’s ex-wife was arrested for cocaine possession in Colorado after a bar fight. Wow, who’d have thought Charlie was the quiet stable one?

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Mark Steyn takes us back to the speech. 

The President of the United States came to Osawatomie, Kansas, last week to deliver a speech of such fascinating awfulness that archeologists of the future, sifting through the rubble of our civilization, will surely doubt whether it could really have been delivered by the chief executive of the global superpower in the year 2011.

“This isn’t about class warfare,” declared President Obama. Really? As his fellow Democrat Dale Bumpers testified at the Clinton impeachment trial, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex,’ it’s about sex.” The president understands that “Wall Street,” “banks,” “fat cats,” etc., remain the most inviting target, and he figures that he can ride the twin steeds of Resentment and Envy to re-election and four more years of even bigger Big Government. His opponents, he told us, “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. … And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. … It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” He blamed our present fix on “this brand of ‘you’re on your own’ economics.”

This is a deliciously perverse analysis of the situation confronting America and a fin de civilisation West. In what area of life are Americans now “on their own”? By 2008, Fannie and Freddie had a piece of over half the mortgages in this country; the “subprime” mortgage was an invention of government. America’s collective trillion dollars of college debt has been ramped up by government distortion of the student loan market. Likewise, health care, where Americans labor under the misapprehension that they have a “private” system rather than one whose inflationary pressures and byzantine bureaucracy are both driven largely by remorseless incremental government annexation. Americans are ever less “on their own” in housing, education, health, and most other areas of life – and the present moribund slough is the direct consequence.

It would be truer to say that the present situation reflects the total failure of “you’re not on your own” economics – the delusion of statists that government can insulate millions of people from the vicissitudes of life. …

More of this from Michael Barone.

Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums, and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama’s December 6 speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows him to be something like the opposite.

Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a shockingly shoddy piece of work. …

… What we have here, it seems a president who has no serious interest in public policy. He has spent nearly half his 15 years in public office running for other public office. The only difference now is that, having run out of higher offices to run for, he is just running for reelection instead. Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of smart people should be embarrassed.

Ed Morrissey revisits LightSquared.

The saga of LightSquared added a new chapter last night, as Bloomberg reported on the preliminary result of tests of the satellite Internet provider’s service in relation to GPS devices.  The Obama administration has pushed LightSquared as a provider for its ambitious broadband expansion over the objections of the military, which warned that LightSquared’s operations would interfere with the satellite-based navigational system.  The draft summary of the November testing shows that the military was right to be concerned: …

 …Why is this important?  Philip Falcone is a big donor to the Democratic Party, and he has billions of dollars at stake in LightSquared’s approval.  Also, Obama himself was an investor in LightSquared at one point, as were or are a number of his associates.  The resounding failure in this test makes it look like the White House pressured witnesses to back off of exposing LightSquared’s product as exactly the kind of dangerous problem that critics had maintained all along — with the intent to mislead Congress into moving forward with LightSquared’s government contracts. …

Andrew Ferguson tracks down the nutty origins of the nutty ideas of the administration’s nuttiest.

Is it possible that the people who run the Obama administration aren’t as smart as we’ve been led to believe?

Stay with me here, seriously. I’m thinking now of the administration’s much-publicized devotion to behavioral economics. Not long after his election, Time magazine noted that Barack Obama had surrounded himself with a “dream team” of behavioral economists, outside-the-box envelope-pushers like Peter Orszag, who became the administration’s first head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Cass Sunstein, whom the president appointed as his “regulatory czar.”

Behavioral economics is très chic. All the coolest economists are into it. It partakes of the obsession with social science that has lately gripped the  country’s smart people, who exhibit a grinding need to quantify human behavior so that it will become more predictable, describable, and controllable. To meet demand, a steady flow of “studies” in human behavior passes through the sluice gates of university departments of accounting, psychology, marketing, sociology, business, and of course economics. From these the behavioral economists build vast edifices of theory and now, thanks to President Obama, public policy too.

The most salient of these policies was the Making Work Pay tax credit of 2009 and 2010. It was an essential element of the president’s famous $250 billion “middle-class tax cut,” which was slapped like a defibrillator onto the limp and supine figure of the American economy a couple years ago. The MWP was carefully designed according to the principles of behavioral economics, and now it seems not to have worked the way it was supposed to. 

Behavioral economics is based on the belief that we human beings behave irrationally in measurable and predictable ways, and quite often we don’t have the slightest idea why we do what we do, though social scientists can do experiments that will tell us. This point of view contrasts with the working premise of more traditional economics, which assumes that people will pursue their economic self-interest, rationally defined. 

When the Bush administration decided on a temporary tax cut to stimulate the economy, in 2001 and again in 2008, they merely sent everybody a lump-sum check, assuming that we’d all spend it and send a good jolt through the ol’ defibrillator. 

The Bush administration, as we all know, was not très chic. It was full of fuddy-duddies. They didn’t understand the up-to-date social science experiments with which behavioral economists keep current. The Obama administration, by contrast, decided it would be scientific. Its economists designed what a headline in the New Yorker called “A Smarter Stimulus.”  …

… In predicting they would do otherwise, the très chic economists thought they had science on their side. In fact, they didn’t have science on their side?—?they had a flimsy record of fewer than 150 undergraduates who told a handful of graduate students in a Texas classroom in early 2007 how they thought they might behave in a fanciful situation. 

Who knew that 141 students in Corpus Christi would wield so vast an influence over U.S. economic policy? Who knew that the government would be run by intellectuals silly enough to let them wield it?

Andrew Malcolm lets Speaker Boehner tout the Keystone bill.

… Another bipartisan provision in this bill supports the job-creating Keystone energy project.

As you may know, the Keystone energy project would create tens of thousands of American jobs and reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East. This jobs project has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. It’s backed by a broad-based coalition, from small businesses to organized labor. 

You’ve heard President Obama say the American people ‘can’t wait’ to take action on jobs. Well, the Keystone project is the very definition of an idea the American people can’t wait for Washington to take action on. 

As a matter of fact, Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, has warned that if the United States doesn’t approve this project, Canada will be forced to move forward with other customers, potentially China. We can’t stand by and allow that to happen. Those jobs are too important.

Unfortunately, the president wants to put off a decision on the Keystone project until after next year’s election. Not only that — he now says he will reject the House’s jobs bill if it includes support for the project. 

This is no time for the same-old my-way-or-the-highway theatrics. …

Editors at Investor’s.com on Keystone.

The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree.

You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global’s Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

In the president’s view, extending the payroll tax cuts is more important than adding more people to the payrolls, unless they are making electric cars that catch fire or work for solar-panel makers that go bankrupt. …

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Russ Roberts contemplates apocalypse.

On my exercise bike at the gym the other day, I caught a snippet of the Stuart Varney Show. Three guests were discussing the European crisis. John Stossel argued for letting market forces work–if I remember correctly, he wanted those banks that had lent money to Greece and Italy and Spain to bear costs, possibly severe costs like losing their money. One of the guests (I don’t know who it was) strongly disagreed. His argument was that Stossel’s solution would lead to the apocalypse. That was his argument. We risked the end of civilization–banks could go broke leading to a depression and then we’d all be worse off. Varney agreed. Stossel’s idea of market discipline was simply too dangerous.

Stossel gave a good answer. He said but what if we get the apocalypse anyway? Maybe all we’re doing is kicking the can down the road and making the reckoning even worse than it otherwise would be. His answer is made more powerful by recent history. In 2008, we rescued the creditors relentlessly that helped pave the way for this crisis. What will the next one look like?

I have a different problem with the apocalypse argument. How do you know if it’s true? Where’s the evidence that letting banks lose some, or most or even all of the money they unwisely lent or invested in bonds is going to lead to a disaster? Where are the data that make this claim credible other than a bald assertion?

But I have an even bigger problem with the apocalypse argument. If the threat of banks taking a haircut risks the apocalypse then we may as well admit the game is over. Just give the banks our wallets and checkbooks and go home. It’s the end of capitalism and the end of democracy. I’d prefer an apocalypse.

Writing in Commentary, Kevin Williamson profiles Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell? is that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken. This characteristic, a by-product of both his innate temperament and the intellectual courage for which nature does not deserve the credit, surely has been bad for his career. (Intellectual courage tends to impede the career path of an intellectual.) If he were the obfuscating sort, he might have made Harvard don; if he were the cheaply poetical sort, he might have made U.S. president. His plain speaking also makes him dangerous, and that danger is intensified by the fact that Sowell is black. And not just black, but unassailably black: He’s Southern-born, Harlem-raised, brought up poor, and the first of his family to be educated beyond the sixth grade.

If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell, whose input is data and whose output is socioeconomic criticism in several grades, ranging from bemused observation to thorough debunking to high-test scorn—all of which are represented in The Thomas Sowell Reader (Basic Books, 404 pages).

Now 81 years old, Sowell is known as a libertarian-leaning conservative, which he is, and he has a thriving sideline in debunking racial platitudes. But he is first an economist, which means he is first an observer and reporter of facts, and if those facts take him to uncomfortable places, so be it. No, the prevalence of black men in the NBA doesn’t mean that the NBA is racist, it means that reality is racist. Yes, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats really do practice the same kind of ethnic politics that resulted in the Rwandan genocide and the Sri Lankan civil war, even if they do not practice them to the same extent. Yes, affirmative action is naked racism. No, rent-control laws don’t control rent. No, gun-control laws don’t control guns. No, standardized exams are not culturally biased—but, yes, life is culturally biased.

Because he is black, his opinions about race are controversial. If he were white, they probably would be unpublishable. This is a rare case in which we are all beneficiaries of American racial hypocrisy. That he works in the special bubble of permissiveness extended by the liberal establishment to some conservatives who are black (in exchange for their being regarded as inauthentic, self-loathing, soulless race traitors) must be maddening to Sowell, even more so than it is for other notable black conservatives. It is plain that the core of his identity, his heart of hearts, is not that of a man who is black. It is that of a man who knows a whole lot more about things than you do and is intent on setting you straight, at length if necessary, if you’d only listen. Take a look at those glasses, that awkward grin, those sweater-vests, and consider his deep interest in Albert Einstein and other geniuses: Thomas Sowell is less an African American than a Nerd American.

One of the great and brilliant things about Thomas Sowell is that he, like most nerds, appears to be simply immune to certain social conventions. This is a critical thing about him—because the social conventions of modern intellectual life demand that certain things go studiously unnoticed, that certain subjects not be breached, or breached only in narrow ways approved by the proper authorities. Sowell does not seem to me to be so much a man who intentionally violates intellectual social conventions as a man who does not notice them, because he cannot be bothered to notice them, because he is in hot pursuit of data about one of the many subjects that fascinate his remarkable brain.

Sowell is a writer with many interests: international development, child development, language, law, restitution, rednecks, Marx, manners, markets, Marines, mascots, the process of growing old, and, because he is an American conservative, baseball. That comes under the heading of “Social Issues” in the Reader, and the essay is “‘Dead Ball’ Versus ‘Lively Ball’.” Baseballologists will be familiar with the debate: Relatively few home runs were hit before 1920, after which the number grew very quickly. Legend has it that the Powers That Be in MLB introduced a so-called lively ball in 1920, hoping to produce a crop of exciting new home-run hitters to distract the public from the recent scandal of the Chicago “Black Sox,” who had fixed the 1919 World Series. “Denials by baseball officials that the ball had been changed have been dismissed out of hand,” Sowell writes, “in view of the dramatic and apparently otherwise inexplicable changes in the number of home runs hit in the 1920s and thereafter.”

Sowell, as is his habit, does not accept the orthodoxy, in baseball or in politics. …

… Even his gratitude is unsentimental. Consider his account of the happy coincidences that contributed to his success and how they have shaped his views:

“I happened to come along right after the worst of the old discrimination was no longer there to impede me and just before racial quotas made the achievements of blacks look suspect. That kind of luck cannot be planned.

Crucial pieces of good fortune like these would have made it ridiculous for me to have offered other blacks the kind of advice which the media so often accused me of offering—to follow in my footsteps and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The addiction of the intelligentsia to catchwords like “bootstraps” has made it all but impossible to have even a rational discussion of many issues. As for following in my footsteps, many of the paths I took had since been destroyed by misguided social policy, so that the same quality of education was no longer available to most ghetto youngsters, though there was never a time in history when education was more important.” …

Speaking of education, Neal McCluskey writes about the failed policies of the administration.

Want to do exactly the wrong things to fix US higher education? You can’t do much better than the recent offerings from Education Secretary Arne Duncan. To a system blackout-drunk on taxpayer money, the Obama administration would deliver even more booze while only whispering about tough love.

Speaking at a Nov. 29 Las Vegas gathering of financial-aid administrators, Duncan addressed exploding college costs, a problem highlighted by Occupy Wall Street protesters angry over rising student debt. He lauded loan forgiveness and repayment reduction, and exhorted colleges to do, well, something to become more efficient.

While trumpeting the bogus claim that the average college graduate will earn $1 million more over his lifetime than someone with just a high-school diploma, he didn’t even hint that taxpayer-funded student aid (including easily forgiven loans) enables schools to blithely raise their prices.

In short, Duncan said all the wrong things. …

Virginia Postrel has more on mistaken education policies. 

The public is in a foul mood over increasing college costs and student debt burdens. Talk of a “higher education bubble” is common on the contrarian right, while the Occupy Wall Street crowd is calling for a strike in which in which ex-students refuse to pay off their loans.

This week, President Barack Obama held a summit with a dozen higher-education leaders “to discuss rising college costs and strategies to reduce these costs while improving quality.” The administration plans to introduce some policy proposals in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

Any serious policy reform has to start by considering a heretical idea: Federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable may have encouraged rapidly rising tuitions.

It’s not as crazy as it might sound.

As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: “There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.”

It’s a phenomenon familiar to economists. If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. The classic example is farm subsidies, which increase the price of farmland. …

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Charles Krauthammer starts our look at the Kansas speech.

… In Kansas, Obama lamented that millions “are now forced to take their children to food banks.” You have to admire the audacity. That’s the kind of damning observation the opposition brings up when you’ve been in office three years. Yet Obama summoned it to make the case for his reelection!

Why? Because, you see, he bears no responsibility for the current economic distress. It’s the rich. And, like Horatius at the bridge, Obama stands with the American masses against the soulless plutocrats.

This is populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chavez. But with high unemployment, economic stagnation and unprecedented deficits, what else can Obama say?

He can’t run on stewardship. He can’t run on policy. His signature initiatives — the stimulus, Obamacare and the failed cap-and-trade — will go unmentioned in his campaign ads. Indeed, they will be the stuff of Republican ads.

What’s left? Class resentment. Got a better idea?

Debra Saunders is next.

… Fair share? In the Kansas speech, Obama extolled Minnesota manufacturer Marvin Windows and Doors for laying off workers only once in 100 years. During tough times, Obama noted, Marvin’s unnamed owners shared the pain of reduced compensation with their workers.

So who is Obama’s jobs czar? Not the suckers at Marvin. General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt, whose compensation doubled last year as GE was seeking concessions from workers, is Obama’s go-to guy on jobs. The New York Times reported that General Electric didn’t pay a dime in federal taxes in 2010 – even though the multinational corporation earned $5.1 billion in U.S. profits.

Obama’s other model rich guy is investor Warren Buffett, who frequently complains that his taxes should be higher. Now Buffett doesn’t pay what he says he should pay, but he says he wants to do so, and that’s enough. Thus, Buffett is a member in good-standing in Obamaland’s fellow big-shot club.

Besides, Obama told the audience gathered in the Osawatomie High School, under his plan the rich would only have to “contribute a little more.” This administration is dedicated to never telling voters that they have to pay for his agenda. Only the top 1 percent – who already pay 38 percent of federal income taxes – have to pay for big government, and then just a skooch more.

Same rules? Please. The Obama way is to talk up fairness while your cronies hire a stable of lawyers and lobbyists to grease the path for favorable tax loopholes. This is where high tax rates come in handy – they create an incentive to cozy up to the administration to win tax incentives for pet training and technology.

That’s the problem with Obama’s prescription for the middle class: Sure, he wants to create more jobs, as long as all jobs go through Washington.

James Pethokoukis says the president would take us back to the stagnation of the “70′s.”

1. Obama clearly thinks the “last few decades” have been a disaster for the U.S. economy, that America’s 30-year economic experiment in enhanced economic freedom—lower tax rates, less regulation, freer trade—has been a failure. Indeed, Obama says that although the “theory fits well on a bumper sticker … it has never worked.” Reagan and Clinton blew it. (Tax cutting JFK, too, apparently.) Time for a different formula. Time to raise taxes and create more rules for business with a goal of “shared prosperity and shared responsibility.”

2. But what Obama is really saying is this: “Let’s go back to the 1970s.” It was a Golden Age of Equality, with the top 1 percent’s share of national income at its lowest level of the 20th century. And the nostalgia surely doesn’t stop there. It was also a time of strong unions, expensive oil, regulated industry, and high tax rates. This is exactly the Obamacrat agenda. Of course, the 1970s were also a time of economic chaos and stagflation that led voters in 1980 to reject Jimmy Carter by a crushing landslide. Yet Obama wants give that formula another shot.

3. Back during the success-punishing 1970s, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent. And guess what? Liberal economists such as Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, and Peter Diamond—whose nomination by Obama to the Federal Reserve thankfully failed in the Senate—think the top tax rate should zoom back there again. More evidence that Clintonomics is dead in today’s Democratic Party. Then again, Obama, like many Democrats, never thought the Reagan tax cuts made much sense. As Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope: “The high marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest … but they did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters.” So the only downside was excessive tax planning?

4. Here is the real record of cutting taxes and regulation: The U.S. economy grew at an average pace of 3.3 percent from 1983-2007, inflation—the scourge of the 1970s—was slayed, and the stock market rose by 1,400 percent. Median middle-class incomes rose by roughly 50 percent. (These numbers are even more impressive when you recall that heading into the 1980s, experts were predicting a dystopian, Solyent Greenesque, Age of Limits future for America.) Obama would be lucky to fail like this.

Believe it or not, the ignorant one is still ranting against ATM’s. Peter Ferrara has the story.

… He explained the roots of the problem as,

“Over the last few decades, huge advances in technology have allowed businesses to do more with less, and made it easier for them to set up shop and hire workers anywhere in the world….Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100, so that layoffs were too often permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle….If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs or the Internet.”

This Luddite analysis fundamentally misconceives the role of technology in a modern economy.  Such advancing technology increases worker productivity, and hence wages and standards of living.  Technological progress over the decades is why the average American worker in 2000 enjoyed 7 times the standard of living of the average American worker in 1900.

He identifies the solution in the speech as increased government spending as the foundation for rising prosperity.  He says,

“Today, manufacturers and other companies are setting up shop in places with the best infrastructure to ship their products, move their workers, and communicate with the rest of the world.  That’s why the over one million construction workers who lost their jobs when the housing market collapsed shouldn’t be sitting at home with nothing to do.  They should be rebuilding our roads and bridges; laying down faster railroads and broadband; modernizing our schools – all the things other countries are doing to attract good jobs and businesses to their shores.”

Before Barack Obama as President, the rest of the world looked to America as the example for the economic model that works to achieve prosperity.  But today Obama tells America “It doesn’t work.  It’s never worked.  It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression.  It’s not what led to the incredible postwar boom of the 50s and 60s.  And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade.”

Instead he tells us to look at the basic infrastructure spending of other countries as the model that works.  But American economic growth is not suffering because of a lack of basic infrastructure like a third world country.  It is suffering because Obama is so doggedly pursuing the opposite of every policy that would free the economy to produce and boom.  Under such Obamanomics, soon enough America will be suffering from the lack of a reliable energy grid like a third world country. …

Daniel Henninger writes about the “Godfather” speech.

… About two-thirds through Mr. Obama’s Kansas speech, I started to think of “The Godfather.” After slapping around the “wealthy” for about a half hour, Mr. Obama said, “This isn’t about class warfare.” Maybe that’s true. In “The Godfather,” when awful things are about to be done to people, Michael Corleone or Tom Hagen reassure those about to get hit, “It’s not personal; it’s strictly business.”

But I could be wrong about that. There is that defining moment when Michael Corleone says to Fredo, his brother, “You’re nothing to me now.” When even as party leader, a president of the United States gives a major speech in which people get singled out repeatedly as basically enemies of “the middle class,” one has to wonder if they are nothing to him.

You then have to wonder about the tenor of another Obama term in office. If in fact there are categories of Americans he simply doesn’t like, a second Obama term, like the last half of “Godfather II,” could be a clinical exercise in hammering the people he singled out in this speech. Metaphorically speaking.

The Kansas speech was built around one concrete policy idea: that the rich and millionaires (officially still defined as families with before-tax income above $250,000) should send him more money so he can “invest” it. This single policy, if we heard correctly, will end high unemployment, raise middle-class incomes, put children through college, make America fair and defeat countries that pollute.

But will it? …

Next to last on the speech today from Peter Wehner.

… The shame is that there is a genuinely interesting and important debate of ideas to be had over the size, reach, and role of the federal government in our lives. Honorable people have very different views on this matter; some, like Obama, are drawn to a European-like model of social democracy, one that wants to centralize more and more power with the federal government as a means to eliminate income inequality and ensure greater fairness. Others believe the federal government has dramatically exceeded its constitutional authority, that it is leading us down a path to fiscal ruin, and in the process it is undermining civic character.

The great divide between conservatives and liberals today is over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Those are serious intellectual differences to discuss, but Obama apparently wants no part of it. He would rather turn his opponents into brutish, cartoon characters. …

William Voegeli writing for the Ashbrook Center provides interesting back story to the president’s ode to Marvin Windows.

Near the conclusion of his big speech in Kansas this week, President Obama praised business leaders who understand “their obligations don’t just end with their shareholders.” The president singled out Marvin Windows and Doors, based in Warroad, Minnesota, for not laying off a single employee during the recession, and choosing instead to cut the pay and perks of both workers and management.

This section of the speech is apparently based on a recent New York Times article about the company, one which complicates some of Obama’s arguments, however, and highlights other things he declined to address:

1. Marvin Windows and Doors has the latitude to consider obligations beyond those to its shareholders because it doesn’t have shareholders. The 107-year-old company is privately held: the president is the founder’s granddaughter and her brother is the chief executive. The firm’s work force of 4,300 included 16 members of the Marvin family.

2. Marvin also doesn’t have, apparently, any obligations to unions; its workers don’t seem to belong to any. When housing starts – and orders for new windows and doors – plummeted, management cut salaries by 5 percent, put hourly workers on 32-hour weeks, stopped paying tuition reimbursement, stopped allowing employees to cash in unused vacation days, and encouraged them to take unpaid leaves. Through attrition, the workforce is 14 percent smaller than at its housing-boom peak. The only things the company hasn’t cut are jobs and health insurance benefits. There’s not a hint in the Times article of any of these changes being voted on or negotiated with anyone – all appear to have been the owners’ unilateral decisions. …

Good post from Roger Simon showing how the LA Times covers for the prez.

Trust the Los Angeles (“Khalidi Tapes”) Times to take every opportunity to protect the “unsullied” reputation of St. Barack Obama. Latest: today’s article on the Mormonism of Mitt Romney includes this gem:

“George W. Bush is a born-again Christian; President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades; Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school. But no previous president or serious candidate can rival Romney for the time and energy spent in running a religious organization and ministering to its members.”

“President Obama has been a regular church-goer for decades”? Say what? Let’s leave aside the eye roller that with “regular” church-going Obama was still somehow able to miss the multiple racist and anti-American excrescences of his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright (or so the then candidate assured us) and cut straight to the chase – the life of our president since he has been in the White House.

From Time Magazine (Dec. 23, 2009) – No Church-Going Christmas for the First Family:

“But there’s one common Christmas practice not on the First Family’s schedule: a visit to Christmas Eve church services.

Church, in fact, has been a surprisingly tough issue for the Obamas. …”