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Although it’s not billed as a book review, Malcolm Gladwell was in The New Yorker writing about Walter Issacson’s book on Steve Jobs.

… Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” Powell (Jobs’ wife) tells Isaacson. “You shouldn’t whitewash it.” Isaacson, to his credit, does not. He talks to everyone in Jobs’s career, meticulously recording conversations and encounters dating back twenty and thirty years. Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase. . . . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. He then charts the even greater triumphs at Pixar and at a resurgent Apple, when Jobs returns, in the late nineteen-nineties, and our natural expectation is that Jobs will emerge wiser and gentler from his tumultuous journey. He never does. In the hospital at the end of his life, he runs through sixty-seven nurses before he finds three he likes. …

… In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.” Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because, Isaacson writes, “he had noticed something odd about the cell phones on the market: They all stank, just like portable music players used to.” The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was married to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs to his fiftieth-birthday party. …

… The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone. He decided to sue. As he tells Isaacson:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products—Android, Google Docs—are shit.

In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”

Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” …

John Stossel says unions are bad for kids, but really good for bad teachers.

A just-retired public school principal writes me after my special:

“You nailed the problems and issues in today’s public education… with the current teacher unions, textbook companies, and especially teacher TENURE… teacher “tenure” is all but stopping 21st Century educational reform all over the United States.”

Tenure is bad. Some teachers are more effective than others – yet the union frowns on giving the best teachers extra pay for excellence. They even frown on paying lousy teachers less. They snarl at the idea of ever firing a teacher. Public school teachers typically get tenure once they’ve taught for about 3 years. After that, the union and civil service protection make it just about impossible to fire them. They basically have a job for life.

In Patterson, NJ, it’s ex-police detective Jim Smith’s job to investigate claims against bad teachers and to try to go through the union-created, insane process of trying to fire REALLY bad ones. He says it’s so hard to fire anyone that it took years to fire a teacher who hit kids. “It took me four years and $283,000. $127,000 in legal fees plus what it cost to have a substitute fill in, all the while he’s sitting home having popcorn,” said Smith.

This is not how it works in real life: the private sector. Remember when GE was a phenomenal growth company, rather than the bloated “partner” with Big Government it is now? Its CEO at the time, Jack Welch, said what was crucial was “identifying the bottom 10 percent of employees, giving them a year to improve, and then firing them if they didn’t get better.” …

Canada has the same occupiers. Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail takes a look.

Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She believes the capitalist system has robbed her of her future. At 28, she’s studying for a master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She’s also the single mother of two children. “I’m here because I don’t know what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she said.

Ms. O’Gorman is in a fix. But I can’t help wondering whether she, and not the greedy Wall Street bankers, is the author of her own misfortune. Just what kind of jobs did she imagine are on offer for freshly minted sociology graduates? Did she bother to ask? Did it occur to her that it might be a good idea to figure out how to support her children before she had them?

She’s typical in her bitter disappointment. Here’s Boston resident Sarvenaz Asasy, 33, who has a master’s degree in international human rights, along with $60,000 in student loans. She dreamed of doing work to help the poor get food and education. But now she can’t find a job in her field. She blames the government. “They’re cutting all the grants, and they’re bailing out the banks. I don’t get it.”

Then there’s John, who’s pursuing a degree in environmental law. He wants to work at a non-profit. After he graduated from university, he struggled to find work. “I had to go a full year between college and law school without a job. I lived at home with my parents to make ends meet.” He thinks a law degree will help, but these days, I’m not so sure.

These people make up the Occupier generation. …

John Tamny says we need to stop worrying about the loss of manufacturing jobs.

… To put it simply, we’re manufacturing more than ever, albeit with a great deal less in the way of human input. This is what they call progress.

Indeed, as a recent USA Today editorial noted, “American companies are making lots of stuff”, and in fact they’re producing “about 80% more than in 1979 with nearly 8 million fewer workers.” Some would like to blame China for this development, but in truth they should be cheering the very innovations that attract job creating investment by virtue of companies doing more with less.

For one, the happy destruction of jobs was always thus, and it’s a signal of an advancing society. Considering agriculture, from 1900-1920 in the U.S. agriculture and mining accounted for 30-40% of total employment. Today that number is a fraction, but far from pushing Americans to the breadlines, economic evolution pushed them into better, higher valued work. Would anyone in their right mind really like to return to the days in which the U.S. economy was largely farm based? The same applies to manufacturing.

Considering manufacturing, if we date its decline as an employer to the 1970s, it should be said that the drop in actual workers has coincided with a rise in higher-paying work away from the factory floor. Specifically since the ‘70s, managerial and professional employment has been the fastest growing job category.

The definition of productivity is reducing costs without reducing output, and American manufacturers have done just that. But as evidenced by the rise of better paying managerial and professional work, Americans have hardly suffered this increase in productivity. …

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Fred Singer past UVA prof writes on why he is a global warming skeptic.

Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released the findings of its extensive study on global land temperatures over the past century. Physics professor Richard Muller, who led the study, heralded the findings with a number of controversial statements in the press, including an op-ed in this newspaper titled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism.” And yet Mr. Muller remains a true skeptic—a searcher for scientific truth. I congratulate Mr. Muller and his Berkeley Earth team for undertaking this difficult task in the realm of climate.

The Berkeley study reported a warming trend of about 1º Celsius since 1950, even greater than the warming reported by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I disagree with this result, which perhaps makes me a little more of a skeptic than Mr. Muller.

Mr. Muller has been brutally frank about the poor quality of the weather-station data, noting that 70% of U.S. stations involve uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius. One could interpret the Berkeley study’s results as confirmation of earlier studies and of the IPCC’s conclusions, despite the poor quality of the stations used. But perhaps the issue is that the Berkeley study and the ones that came before suffer from common errors. I suspect that the temperature records still are affected by the urban heat-island effect—a term given to any local warming, whatever its cause—despite efforts to correct for this. The urban heat-island effect could include heat produced not only in urban areas, but also due to changes in land use or poor station siting. Therefore, I suggest additional tests: …

Prices keep going up for a product that is worse and worse. It’s great to be in the college business according to Jack Kelly.

The biggest consumer ripoff in America today — and the next economic bubble to burst — is higher education.

Tuition and fees at colleges and universities rose 439 percent between 1982 and 2007. Median family income rose just 147 percent during that period.

Median household income has fallen 6.7 percent since June 2009. The cost of attending the average public university rose 5.4 percent this year.

Student loan debt recently passed $1 trillion. It’s now more than credit card debt. The average graduate of a four-year college owes $27,000.

College students don’t get much for their money. Nearly half learn next to nothing in their first two years; a third learn almost nothing in four, according to a report authored principally by Prof. Richard Arum of New York University.

“Students who say that college has not prepared them for the real world are largely right,” said Ann Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “The fundamental problem here is not debt, but a broken educational system that no longer insists on excellence.”

Or even adequacy. “A college degree nowadays doesn’t necessarily signal that its holder has any useful work skills,” said Charlotte Allen of the Manhattan Institute. …

WSJ OpEd on students who decide not to waste the money on an Ivy League diploma.

Daniel Schwartz could have attended an Ivy League school if he wanted to. He just doesn’t see the value.

Mr. Schwartz, 18 years old, was accepted at Cornell University but enrolled instead at City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College, which is free.

Mr. Schwartz says his family could have afforded Cornell’s tuition, with help from scholarships and loans. But he wants to be a doctor and thinks medical school, which could easily cost upward of $45,000 a year for a private institution, is a more important investment. It wasn’t “worth it to spend $50,000-plus a year for a bachelor’s degree,” he says.

As student-loan default rates climb and college graduates fail to land jobs, an increasing number of students are betting they can get just as far with a degree from a less-expensive school as they can with a diploma from an elite school—without having to take on debt.

More students are choosing lower-cost public colleges or commuting to schools from home to save on housing expenses. Twenty-two percent of students from families with annual household incomes above $100,000 attended public, two-year schools in the 2010-2011 academic year, up from 12% the previous year, according to a report from student-loan company Sallie Mae. …

The GOP looks to be backing into a nomination of Mitt Romney. John Tamny lists the negatives. Pickerhead is ready to settle for Romney. We just have to be sure to hold his feet to the fire. Kinda like in October 2005 when W nominated Harriet Miers to the Court. It took 24 days of a shitstorm and he withdrew her name. That’s what the internet does for us.

Presumed Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney is well known for his tendency to flip flop on issues, but as those are already well documented, it should simply be said that we should be more concerned when people’s views don’t change. If so, it suggests they’re not learning anything such that their views aren’t evolving.

Arguably the bigger problem with Romney is what he believes now, or at least what he claims to believe. It’s his existing views that are dangerous, so if Republican voters hand him the nomination and worse, he’s elected, further destruction of a limping GOP brand appears a near certainty.

To begin, rather than be realistic about what can be achieved even assuming a sympathetic House and Senate, Romney has devised a 160 page, 59-point plan to boost the U.S. economy. He fails there alone.

If we ignore for a moment what’s in his plan, economies aren’t living, breathing blobs that need to be tweaked by philosopher kings of the Romney variety. Instead, economies are nothing more than a collection of individuals producing in order to consume, delaying consumption in order to grow wealth through the provision of capital to others, and generally looking to offer the most value to others with an eye on getting the most value.

That being the case, Romney’s economic plan, if credible, would require all of one quarter of one page. …

WSJ OpEd has fun with the president’s campaigning for Jon Corzine.

Never mind Mr. Corzine’s 1% pedigree as a former Goldman Sachs chairman. Never mind how Mr. Corzine essentially bought himself a U.S. Senate seat, spending his personal Goldman Sachs loot in one of the most expensive senatorial races ever. Never mind the dough Mr. Corzine stuffed in Mr. Obama’s pocket.

Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey:

• “You’ve had an honorable man, a decent man, an honest man, at the helm of this state. … He’s fought for what matters to ordinary folks.”

• “People…say, ‘You know, I was saving up all my life. …. Suddenly, because of this financial crisis, I may have to go back to work.’ ”

• “Jon knows these are challenging times. This is why he got into public service. He didn’t do it for the paycheck.”

• “This crisis…came about because of the same theories, the same lax regulation, the same trickle-down economics that the other guy’s party has been peddling for years.”

• “Jon’s got the mop and he’s cleaning up after somebody else’s mess.” …

Andrew Malcolm with late-night.

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Mark Steyn follows the Occupy Oakland group.

Way back in 1968, after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mayor Daley declared that his forces were there to “preserve disorder.” I believe that was one of Hizzoner’s famous malapropisms. Forty-three years later, Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland City Council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k”, etc. And how did the Oakland City Council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”

That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied France sense: the city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support”, they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported:

“A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.”

There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.

“The experience was surreal, the man said. ‘They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.’”

No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy. …

Debra Saunders lives down the road from Oakland.

… Oakland’s former Mayor (and now governor) Jerry Brown devoted his tenure to enticing 10,000 new residents to live downtown. Mayor Jean Quan has undone that good work: Who wants to buy a condo in the land of broken windows?

Oakland has thriving, top-rated restaurants. Who wants to dine out in a town littered with too much graffiti and too little police protection?

These demonstrations threaten to starve the goose that pays for precious city services.

Once people start believing that they’re part of an oppressed 99 percent, you never know where they’ll see the 1 percent. One parent told the Oakland Tribune that members of Oakland’s politically correct school board should consider themselves “on notice that they will be evicted from office in the next election for doing the dirty work of the 1 percent.”

Quan started last week with the apparent belief that if she could assure activists that she was as liberal as they are, Occupy Oaklanders might behave. Thus, as the general strike dawned, Quan issued assurances that the city would “maintain a minimal police presence.”  …

Neal Boortz reminds us Obama owns the Occupy creeps. 

I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of this, but just on the off chance that some Democrat libs or progs might stumble onto Nealz Nuze, let’s remind everyone that this whole increasingly absurd and violent “occupy” movement belongs lock, stock and barrel to Barack Obama.  

 Barack Obama has spend years excoriating corporations.  Remember when he changed the standard term “business jet” to “corporate jet?”  Just part of his effort to demonize corporate America and to assign to evil corporations the blame for our current fiscal situation.  Now we have the occupiers bragging about their “anti-corporation” credentials.

Again, for years, Obama spoke of the evil of the 1% and the taxes they were paying (or not paying).   In the beginning Obama would simply say that the top 1% “needed” to pay “their fair share” of taxes.  Then, this year, he started flat-out stating that the top 1% “were not paying their fair share” of taxes.  Now we have the occupiers with their “we are the 99%” signs and chants.  

The more you listen the more you see that these useful idiots are merely repeating the very same things that Obama has been saying for much of his adult life.   They are Barry’s Kids … Obama’s Children.  He cannot escape them.

Toby Harnden opens a section here on Herman Cain.

… While decrying race-based politics, Cain has been happy to compare himself to Haagen Dazs black walnut ice cream, joke that he’s a “dark horse” or quip that his Secret Service codename should be “Cornbread”  . By Friday, a Cain Super PAC had cut a television ad entitled: “High-tech lynching”.

Just as Barack Obama’s race was a key part of his appeal in 2008, Cain is a more attractive candidate for Republicans because he is black. Obama’s supporters responded with fury and lobbed accusations of racism when their candidate came under legitimate attack from the Clintons. Cain backers have been similarly vehement.

Sexual allegations against a black man are rightly treated with great suspicion by many Americans because they play on the kind of fears and taboos examined in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. With the case against him thin and the accusation so incendiary, Cain’s predicament is prompting more sympathy than opprobrium.

Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.

Norm Ornstein at AEI takes a negative view of Cain and the people around him.

The frenzy over allegations of sexual harassment against Herman Cain has obscured another scandal involving the candidate, what appears to be a blatantly illegal use of a non-profit organization to fund the initial stage of his campaign. Set up as a 501(c)3, the same kind of non-profit as charities, universities, and think tanks, Prosperity USA spent tens of thousands of dollars on campaign-related activities for Cain, according to investigative reporting by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Much of the money for Prosperity USA came from Americans for Prosperity, the activist conservative organization funded by the Koch Brothers. Prosperity USA was apparently the brainchild of Cain campaign impresario Mark Block, who had served as Wisconsin director of Americans for Prosperity. …

Ross Douthat has a thought about the reasons for the rise of someone like Herman Cain.

… In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin put it in these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”)

Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for the payoff.

What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better instincts. …

Andrew Malcolm shares a story from his childhood.

In the days of my childhood, just before television, my father and I waited in a very long line on a very cold autumn Friday night outside an observatory in Cleveland. I grew up in the countryside, so black night skies full of countless twinkling pins of light were as much a part of life as trees and a family dog.

We had pilgrimaged into the city to shuffle slowly ahead in that line for a special occasion. The facility was opening its giant telescope to the public because one of the other planets called Saturn was unusually “close” to Earth.

It was a long shuffle though – my feet were very bored — down two sides of the block, along the sidewalk, up the steps, through the lobby, up more steps, around the giant telescope base and, one by one, up a few more metal steps to squit into the eyepiece.

Oh my God Almighty, there it was. …

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Charles Krauthammer asks and answers, “Who Lost Iraq?”

Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq war from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with U.S. backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.

Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.

He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the U.S. military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.

And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. …

More of this from Fred and Kim Kagan. 

Iran has just defeated the United States in Iraq.

The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis nor for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.

President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the objectives of American policy in Iraq as being ”an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.”  He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working ”to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe-haven to terrorists.”

Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions.  Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory.  Its stability is fragile and perhaps ephemeral, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved.  And it is not in any way self-reliant.  The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace, or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.

While President Obama has clearly failed to achieve the goals for Iraq that he set five weeks after taking office, Iran, in contrast, is well on its way to achieving its strategic objectives. …

Meanwhile Andy Malcolm found our leader in Europe.

How dumb do they think we are back there in D.C.?

We have a Democratic president, who isn’t really in Washington (he’s over advising Europe on its debt crisis, if you can believe that). He’s been doing little else but fly around this country on Air Force One to the tune of $181,000 an hour.

By night, Obama typically holds fundraisers. By day, Obama gives another speech (“Thank you. Thank you. Please be seated”) allegedly to pressure Congress to pass that infamous jobs bill that was so urgent back in August that he went on vacation and didn’t deliver the address until a month later. …

Spengler writes on political polarization in our country.

Has America become irrational? Not since the 1930s have politics been so polarized, from the Tea Party movement on one side of the spectrum to the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the other. Why does the right object so vehemently to government spending? And why does the left attack private capital with parallel passion? The answer lies not in the American psyche, but in the statistics.

America is engaged in class war, but not of the sort one reads about in the mainstream press. The truly indigent – young African-American men, for example, most of whom are now unemployed – have little to do in this war. Large corporations for the most part are bystanders as well; they will make their peace with the victor. This is a war of survival between the productive middle class on one hand, and the dependents of the state on the other. …

… households that considered themselves comfortably middle class, and looked forward to a comfortable and secure retirement, find themselves on the edge of calamity. During the bubble years of 1998-2007, when America imported $6 trillion of overseas capital, the ride was easy.

When the whole world brought its savings to the United States, people of mediocre skills and slack work habits could afford big houses, expensive vacations, and (at taxpayer expense) generous pensions. Why Americans expected to live well indefinitely on the largesse of foreign investors is a question for the psychiatrists, not the economists.

The crisis has called into being a political movement of the exasperated middle class, namely the Tea Party. It has erased the image of the government unions as champions of progressive causes, and exposed them as an “aristocracy of labor” (in Marx’s phrase) parasitizing the public revenue.

The outcome inherently favors the Republicans. Debt – the catchall name for the crushing tax burden – has become a hot button issue even for many Democrats. But this election will be fought more desperately, and nastily, than any other that comes to mind during the past century. This is an existential struggle, a political war of survival for the American middle class. If the government unions go down in the fight, the Democratic Party of Barack Obama will cease to exist in its present form – and that would be a beneficial outcome for the United States.

Thomas Sowell has a go at Occupy WS.

In various cities across the country, mobs of mostly young, mostly incoherent, often noisy and sometimes violent demonstrators are making themselves a major nuisance.

Meanwhile, many in the media are practically gushing over these “protesters,” and giving them the free publicity they crave for themselves and their cause — whatever that is, beyond venting their emotions on television.

Members of the mobs apparently believe that other people, who are working while they are out trashing the streets, should be forced to subsidize their college education — and apparently the President of the United States thinks so too.

But if these loud mouths’ inability to put together a coherent line of thought is any indication of their education, the taxpayers should demand their money back for having that money wasted on them for years in the public schools.

Sloppy words and sloppy thinking often go together, both in the mobs and in the media that are covering them. …

Joel Kotkin says we need more babies.

The world’s population recently passed the 7 billion mark, and, of course, the news was greeted with hysteria and consternation in the media. “It’s not hard to be alarmed,” intoned National Geographic. “We should all be afraid, very afraid,” warned the Guardian.

To be sure, continued population increases, particularly in very poor countries, do threaten the world economy and environment — not to mention these countries’ own people. But overall the biggest demographic problem stems not from too many people but from too few babies.

This is no longer just a phenomenon in advanced countries. The global “birth dearth” has spread to developing nations as well. Nearly one-third of the 59 countries with “sub-replacement” fertility rates — those under 2.1 per woman — come from the ranks of developing countries. Several large and important emerging countries, including Iran, Brazil and China, have birthrates lower than the U.S.

In the short run this is good news. It gives these countries an opportunity to leverage their large, youthful workforce and declining percentage of children to drive economic growth. But over the next two or three decades — by 2030 in China’s case  – these economies will be forced to care for growing numbers of elderly and shrinking workforces. For the next generation of Chinese leaders, Deng Xiaoping’s rightful concern about overpopulation at the end of the Mao era will shift into a future of eldercare costs, shrinking domestic markets and labor shortages. …

More of this from Nicholas Eberstadt who speaking of Europe says;

… No plausible amount of self-imposed budget austerity, furthermore, is likely to save these existing arrangements for the future, for Europe’s welfare states are being fatally undone by her public in another arena: the crèche. “Sustainability” is the term of the decade among Europe’s cognoscenti: and European birth trends have made the continent’s magnificent edifices of entitlement arithmetically unsustainable.

Half a century ago, the 17 countries that currently comprise the Euro zone were bearing about 5 million children each year. In a pay-as-you-go welfare state, those babies are now men and women in the prime of their working lives, supporting the health and pension benefits of older (and smaller) cohorts that preceded them. (Today there are about 2.2 Western Europeans in their late 40s for each in his or her late 70s.)

Over the intervening decades, though, Europe’s birth totals have plunged—and although the Euro zone’s population is much larger now than it was in 1960, the region today registers 30 percent fewer births. Over that period, Europe’s childbearing patterns shifted into sustained sub-replacement fertility, and by 2009, the Euro zone was on a trajectory which, if continued, would portend a shrinking of each subsequent generation by about a quarter (absent compensatory immigration). …

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The Yid with Lid blog posts on what Bush understood about the Middle East that his successor does not.

It was just about three years ago that America elected a president who was going to repair our relationship that was that he was going to “repair” our relationship with the world (especially the Muslim world) after eight years of that “cowboy” George “W” Bush. But three years into the Obama Presidency, our “relationship repairer-in-chief” has increased the divide between  the US and the Muslim Middle East, while opening up a divide with Israel, a nation who continues to provide this country counter-terrorism, intelligence and technology useful in urban warfare.
After three years of a very slow learning curve there are still things about the Middle East that George Bush understood and Barack Obama doesn’t get.

King Abdullah of Jordan, a long-time ally of the US told the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth that Obama has a lot to learn about being an ally, and seemed to indicate that the United States is no longer trusted in the Muslim Middle East:

Weymouth: It is astounding that Tantawi [head of Egypt’s military ruling council] did not take President Obama’s call for hours the night the Israelis were trapped in their embassy in Egypt.

Abdullah:The feeling I got from the Egyptian leadership is that if they stick [their] necks out, they will just get lambasted like [former president Hosni] Mubarak did. So I think they are playing safe by just keeping their heads down, which I think .?.?. sometimes allows things to get out of control. .?.?. Tantawi thinks there is too much pressure on him. …

… Unlike Bush, Obama does not seem to understand the strategic value of our most solid ally in the Middle East. Even worse, he gives no support to Israel and instead sides with a Palestinian Government who does anything it can to avoid making peace. He bashes Israel but when the PA was not responding to Israel’s ten-month-long freeze on building within existing settlements he was silent; in October 2009, when the PA rejected Obama’s plea for intense talks to be held in Washington he was silent, and even last week when Mahmoud Abbas said I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I will never recognize the Jewishness of the state, or a ‘Jewish state,” Obama  is silent

It has been three years since Barack Obama was elected the president who was going to “repair” our relationship with the world, instead he has hurt our relationship with our strongest allies in the Muslim Middle East while attacking Israel, a strategic partner who has helped us with insights and technology to fight the war on terror.

Michael Rubin says the Kurds in Iraq have figured us out.

The Iraqi Kurds have prided themselves on being America’s allies throughout the Iraq war and its aftermath. Repeatedly, regional leader Masud Barzani? told visiting American generals and dignitaries that the Kurdish region was the most pro-American in Iraq.

The Kurdish authorities, however, have never made ideological alliances, but are the ultimate realists: Barzani forms partnerships with whomever he believes can most fulfill his own interests. With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, it is clear that anyone with an ounce of self-preservation is rushing to cut deals with the Iran. After all, the most common Iranian influence theme, Iraqi politicians say, is that “You may like the Americans better, but we will always be your neighbors.” Hence, on October 29, Barzani traveled to Iran where, on Sunday, he warmly embraced both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. According to press reports, Barzani declared, “We will not forget the assistance of the Iranian people and government during the hard times passed by Iraq. To preserve our victory we need Iranian assistance and guidance….”

Everyone in the region knows that the way Iraqis negotiate is to state extreme positions as a deadline approaches, and then go behind closed doors in a smoke-filled room to hash out agreements. The Iranians often quip that they play chess while the Americans play checkers. No one expected Obama to forfeit before the game actually began. But, alas, now that he has done so, he will discover just how deeply he has lost Iraq and Iraqis.

David Harsanyi says if you want more equality, you need more capitalism.

… You will notice that the Occupy Wall Street crowds — and the progressives who support them — focus on bringing the wealthy down to earth rather than lifting the 99 percent. They have a nearly religious belief that too much wealth is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy for society. The economic systems they cheer on would coerce downward mobility for the sake of equality but ignore prosperity for the people they claim to represent.

If progressive were interested in mitigating inequality, they would support the dynamism of free markets to allow the merit of ideas, products and services to win the day rather than stifle companies and pick winners in the name of imagined “progress.” Yes, “too big to fail” means banks, but it also means union-backed bureaucracies, political parties, car companies and green energy — and more.

If they were interested in spreading wealth, they would support lifting barriers that inhibit markets and make life difficult for entrepreneurs and businesses rather than spreading the destructive notion that life can only be “fair” if we rely on dependency and entitlement and tear down those who have more.

A week ago, a great piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal with more background on the credsis. We continue to believe it is important to understand the origins of this crisis. Here we learn how middle management at Freddie Mac was pushing back against the lowering of standards.  

Occupy Wall Street is denouncing banks and Wall Street for “selling toxic mortgages” while “screwing investors and homeowners.” And the federal government recently announced it will be suing mortgage originators whose low-quality underwriting standards produced ballooning losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Have they fingered the right culprits?

There is no doubt that reductions in mortgage-underwriting standards were at the heart of the subprime crisis, and Fannie and Freddie’s losses reflect those declining standards. Yet the decline in underwriting standards was largely a response to mandates, beginning in the Clinton administration, that required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to steadily increase their mortgages or mortgage-backed securities that targeted low-income or minority borrowers and “underserved” locations.

The turning point was the spring and summer of 2004. Fannie and Freddie had kept their exposures low to loans made with little or no documentation (no-doc and low-doc loans), owing to their internal risk-management guidelines that limited such lending. In early 2004, however, senior management realized that the only way to meet the political mandates was to massively cut underwriting standards.

The risk managers complained, especially at Freddie Mac, as their emails to senior management show. They refused to endorse the move to no-docs and battled unsuccessfully against the reduced underwriting standards from April to September 2004. Here are some highlights: …

Streetwise Professor on Jon Corzine’s fall.

FCM, investment bank, primary dealer, and wanna be Goldman MF Global declared bankruptcy today.  As is typical with financial firms, the end came quickly.  The firm’s problems metastasized quickly last week.  Another quarterly loss, a ratings downgrade, and worries about losses on trades in European government bonds led to the typical downward spiral of lost funding and lost customers.  These firms are very fragile.  When they fall, they usually don’t get up.

Ironically, MF’s FCM operation was acquired from  . . . REFCO, which cratered almost exactly 6 years ago, in October, 2005.  Will anyone dare to take on this cursed franchise?

Piecing things together, I surmise that the firm bought about $6 billion in Italian and other southern Euro bonds and repo’d them out.  Due to the decline in the prices of these bonds, and the firm’s deteriorating financial condition, the repo counterparties demanded higher haircuts.  The firm couldn’t come up with the cash, and in desperation maxed out its credit lines.  But that couldn’t stop the hemorrhaging.

The most likely explanation for all this is that the firm was already foundering, and CEO John Corzine tried to gamble on resurrection by ramping up the risk.  As is so often the case, this more often results in a more rapid descent to financial hell than resurrection.

One major irony is that MF Global was pushing hard for low capital requirements for members of OTC derivative CCPs.  How’s that idea looking now, GiGi?

Especially since suspicions are rife that MF has misused segregated customer funds, presumably to keep the resurrection gamble going.  Reports state that the firm is stonewalling regulators on turning over records, and that about $300 million in customer funds are missing.  This is one of the most egregious things a brokerage firm can do.

This is already a major fall for former Goldman CEO, US senator, and NJ governor Corzine.  He is also a major Obama fundraiser, who is presumably now a Nonperson.  If the suspicions about misuse of customer funds prove true, major fall won’t even come close to describing what lies in store for Mr. Corzine.  He will long to be merely a Nonperson.

On the news Jon Corzine’s firm mixed customer and firm accounts, Contentions’ Seth Mandel says;

… Stanford business professor Darrell Duffie told Bloomberg: “It’s kind of considered the third rail of the brokerage industry that when you’re holding your customers’ funds in their names, you don’t touch them — even in an emergency situation when you’re running short of cash.”

It’s not only the third rail, it’s common sense. But an executive who has already bet many millions of his firm’s dollars on the prospect that President Obama was going to toss him a cushy federal appointment is probably not being too careful about other people’s money.

Corzine is one of the Obama re-election campaign’s major “bundlers,” and he hosted a fundraiser to shower the Obama campaign with Wall Street cash several months ago. One expects his federal appointment to be abandoned rather quickly now, and Corzine’s political future is probably over as well. Residents of New Jersey now have yet another reason to be happy they voted Corzine out of office in favor of Chris Christie in 2009. Corzine’s political career was devastating for the state. …

Michael Barone calls attention to an important vote on taxes in Colorado.

While Washington was transfixed by the evolving responses of Herman Cain to the unfolding sexual harassment story and the financial press was transfixed by the sudden decisions of the Greek government to hold a referendum on the current (evolving?) bailout settlement and to fire the heads of all the military services, Coloradans went to the polls and voted on Proposition 103, championed by Boulder state Senator Rollie Heath, which would have raised the state income tax from 4.63% to 5% and which was marketed as a way to aid teachers and kids. Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper, elected with 51% in 2010 against split opposition, stayed neutral. Voters weren’t: they voted 64%-36% against 103.

The county by county returns provide an interesting insight on which Democratic constituencies backed the tax increase. …

…Relevance for 2012? Well, Obama strategists have pointed to Colorado as the model for a state they hope to carry again–relatively high income, high education–and it voted 54%-45% for Obama in 2008. The results for the university towns and the skitopias bode well for him. The results from the rest of the state don’t.

In the above piece, Barone refers to a post by Megan McCardle that linked to a fascinating blog post on the two tiers of new elites in the country. That post was by Kenneth Anderson in Volokh Conspiracy. This wanders, but has the germs of interesting thoughts about the people involved in Occupy Wall Street.

Even more frightening is the young woman who graduated from UC Berkeley, wanting to work in “sustainable conservation.”  She is now raising chickens at home, dying wool and knitting knick-knacks to sell at craft fairs.  Her husband has been studying criminal justice and EMT — i.e., preparing to work for government in some of California’s hitherto most lucrative positions — but as those work possibilities have dried up, he is hedging with a (sensible) apprenticeship as an electrician.  These young people are looking at serious downward mobility, in income as well as status.  The prospects of the lower tier New Class semi-professionals are dissolving at an alarming rate.  Student loan debt is a large part of its problems, but that’s essentially a cost question accompanying a loss of demand for these professionals’ services.

The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class.  It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money.  It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine.  The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well.  It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.

The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status.  The Cal graduate started out wanting to do “sustainable conservation.”  She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.

Saturday night comes the biggest college football game of the year. Undefeated (#1) LSU travels to undefeated Alabama (#2). One month ago, the WSJ ran an article explaining how LSU had worked for a year to slim down their defense to prepare for Oregon who they defeated. While explaining the complexity of the Division One college game, the article closed with this caveat;

… When the Ducks (Oregon) met LSU, they faced a fitter, faster and, in some instances, smaller defense than they’d seen on tape. It was, in some ways, a perfect doppelganger of their offense. After taking down the Ducks 40-27, LSU has since run its record to 5-0 (Now 8-0) and ranks No. 5 in the country in total defense in terms of yards allowed per play (3.8), while playing four ranked opponents. Those whippet-strong linemen—Mingo, Montgomery and Logan—lead the team with 4.5 tackles for loss and two sacks apiece. And 5-foot-9 cornerback Tyrann Mathieu leads the team with four forced fumbles and 25 solo tackles. (It’s worth noting that Oregon has averaged 60.3 points in three wins since playing LSU.)

If there’s likely to be a reckoning for the skinnied-up Tigers defense, it might come on Nov. 5 when they head to Tuscaloosa to play Alabama. The Crimson Tide runs a conventional, pro-style offense from behind a jumbo-size line that averages 6 feet 4, 313 pounds. Those blockers, paired with 224-pound running back Trent Richardson, can make any defense look small.

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Today’s Pickings has just several items, two from the November issue of Commentary. They are a debate about what might be the future of our country. Mark Steyn starts with The Case for Pessimism.

In September 2009, Barack Obama and Muammar Qaddafi both addressed the United Nations. It is a pitiful reflection upon the Republic in twilight that, when it comes to the transnational mush drooled by the leader of the free world or the conspiracist ramblings of a pseudo-Bedouin terrorist drag queen presiding over a one-man psycho-cult basket case, it’s more or less a toss-up as to which of them was the more unreal.

Qaddafi spoke for 90 minutes, and in the midst of his torrent of words, his translator actually broke down and cried out, “I can’t take it anymore.” The colonel gravely informed the world body that the swine flu was a virus that had been created in a government laboratory, and he called for a UN inquiry into the Kennedy assassination on the grounds that Jack Ruby was an Israeli who killed Lee Harvey Oswald to stop the truth coming out about Kennedy being killed to prevent an investigation into the Zionist nuclear facility at Dimona.

On the other hand:

“I have been in office for just nine months, though some days it seems a lot longer,” President Obama mused. “I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world. These expectations are not about me. Rather, they are rooted, I believe, in a discontent with the status quo that has allowed us to be increasingly defined by our differences.”

Now, forget the first part, which was just Obama’s usual narcissistic “but enough about me; let’s talk about what the world thinks about me” shtick. It was the second part of Obama’s remarks that reveals the danger we find ourselves in, two years later, even with Qaddafi toppled and in hiding and Jack Ruby’s Israeli roots still unexplored.

The thing is, for better or worse, we are defined by our differences, and if Barack Obama didn’t understand that when he was at a podium addressing a room filled with representatives of Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Venezuela, and the whole gang of evil, the rest of the world certainly did as soon as Qaddafi appeared. Obama and Qaddafi may both have been the heads of state of sovereign nations, but if you’re on an Indian Ocean island when the next tsunami hits, try calling Libya instead of the United States for help and see where it gets you.

The global reach that enables America and a handful of other nations to get to a devastated backwater on the other side of the planet and save lives and restore the water supply in a matter of days isn’t a happy accident or a quirk of fate. It is something that derives explicitly from our political system, our economic liberty, our traditions of scientific and cultural innovation, and a general understanding that societies advance when their citizens are able to fulfill their potential in freedom.

In other words, America and Libya are defined by nothing but their differences, even though the very thought of “differences” seemed to pain the president on that day. “No nation,” he announced to the assembled warmongers and genociders, both actual and would-be, “can or should try to dominate another nation.”

As far as I’m aware, neither Obama’s translator nor anyone else screamed “I can’t take this anymore” and fled the room. But someone should have. Whether or not any nation should try to dominate another, they certainly can. And they have. Nations have sought to dominate others and have succeeded at it with ease all over the planet and throughout human history.

So who’s next? According to the International Monetary Fund, China will become the planet’s leading economy in the year 2016.

If the IMF is right, in five years’ time, the preeminent economic power on the planet will be a one-party state with a Communist Politburo and a largely peasant population, no genuine market, no human rights, no property rights, no rule of law, no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of association. It will mark the end of a two-century Anglophone dominance, and—even more civilizationally startling—for the first time in a half millennium the leading economic power will be a country that doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet.

Whether or not this preeminent China should dominate other nations, it certainly can. And it certainly will.

If you think like President Obama and believe nations are not defined by their differences, then China’s great leap forward is not that big a deal. But if you think, like someone who has given it a moment’s thought, that nations are defined by their differences, it is a very big deal. Most immediately, it means that the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s leading economy. This should be a source of shame to every American. It is not. Not yet. Instead, we battle over trivialities. …

… In 1975, Milton Friedman said this: “I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”

Just so. Every time Barack Obama stands at his teleprompter and is forced to pretend that he’s interested in deficit reduction, we have taken a step toward that Milton Friedman reality. You have to create the conditions, as the Tea Party and the town hall meetings did, whereby the wrong people are forced to do the right things.

One cannot wait for the great leader to descend from the heavens to do the work for us. Every glamour boy, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney to Rick Perry, proves to have feet of clay. It’s more important that tens of millions of ordinary citizens move the meter on public discourse and force the wrong people to do the right things.

But we don’t have much time to force them. If we don’t turn this thing around by mid-decade, if we let China become the dominant economic power in a world where the Iranians are nuclearizing and where Russia is making whatever mischief it can, we will see something new in world history. Something terrifying. This will not be like the transition from Britain to America, from a crucible of liberty to its greatest exponent. This will be the greatest step backwards for the civilization that built the modern world and spread its blessings across the map. There will be no new world order. There will be no world order.

The only way to prevent it is to act, and act quickly. Otherwise, it’s over. In 1969, in a poem about the end of the British empire called “Homage to a Government,” Philip Larkin? wrote: “Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home/For lack of money…/We want the money for ourselves at home/Instead of working.” The narrator keeps saying that “this is all right,” but he concludes with this: “The statues will be standing in the same/Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same./Our children will not know it’s a different country./All we can hope to leave them now is money.”

We Americans can’t even hope that. And our children will know their reduced America was not the America that should have been theirs by right.

John Podhoretz makes the case for optimism.

… If the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight wonderfully concentrates the mind, as Dr. Johnson said, the fortnight is about to begin. And for the first time, in 2011, politicians have begun to address the crisis seriously. House Republicans passed Rep. Paul Ryan’s revolutionary budget outline, which eliminates the Medicare entitlement in favor of a voucher system. And even Barack Obama is using the term “tax reform,” though he surely doesn’t mean by it what it really means—a radical simplification of the tax code that largely reverses the long trend toward using it as a means of designing a social order in keeping with the wants and interests of politicians.

The American people are already witness to one possible future now playing itself out in the implosion of Europe. That ongoing nightmare is providing hard evidence to anyone with eyes to see that the United States must take a different path in relation to government spending and conduct before it is too late. That is true not only of the entitlements but also the incentives that dominate the tax code, including the home-mortgage deduction; right and left are finding surprising common ground in the notion that these incentives are dangerous distortions, little more than corporate welfare that supports banks and energy producers and home builders as well. Reducing or eliminating them is the work of the next decade—complicated and grueling work that will require a complete restructuring of the tax code and an alteration in the very notion of a government “benefit,” how it is received, and how it is paid out.

The battles over all this will, to some extent, dominate our politics henceforward. We got a glimpse of the nature of the fight over the debt ceiling in July, and the 2012 election will pivot on it. I say “to some extent” because unexpected events, probably in the realm of foreign policy, will surely come along to complicate the picture. But when it comes to matters of their own fiscal health and the country’s, we can be confident in this: the American people have made rational choices in the past, and there is no reason to believe they will cease making rational choices in the future. And you don’t have to be all that much of an optimist to see that the choice between national suicide and national salvation isn’t really all that difficult.

Andrew Malcolm has late-night humor.

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Just how much tyranny is abroad in our land? That question is asked by Myron Magnet in the current issue of City Journal. He uses the Kelo decision and its enumerated precedents to show how aghast the founders might be if they could see what has been wrought in their names.

… When we ask how our current political state of affairs measures up to the Founders’ standard, we usually find ourselves discussing whether a given law or program is constitutional, and soon enough get tangled in precedents and lawyerly rigmarole. But let’s frame the question a little differently: How far does present-day America meet the Founders’ ideal of free government, protecting individual liberty while avoiding what they considered tyranny? A few specific examples will serve as a gauge.

The Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision is notorious enough, but it bears recalling in this connection, for the whole episode is objectionable in so many monitory ways. In the year 2000, the frayed Connecticut city had conceived a grandiose project to redevelop 90 waterfront acres, in conjunction with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s plan to build an adjoining $300 million research center. A conference hotel—that inevitable (and almost inevitably uneconomic) nostrum of urban economic-development authorities—would rise, surrounded by upscale housing, shopping, and restaurants, all adorned with a marina and a promenade along the Thames River. Promising to create more than 3,000 new jobs and add $1.2 million in revenues to the city’s declining tax rolls, the redevelopment authority set about buying up the private houses, mostly old and modest, on the site.

Several homeowners refused to sell, however. They loved their houses and their water views. In response, the determined city seized their property under its power of eminent domain. One resident, Susette Kelo, wasn’t giving up her little pink house without a fight, though, and she, along with a few neighbors (including one who’d lived in her house since 1918), sued the city in the state courts, claiming that its action violated the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The trial court agreed with Kelo’s reasonable assertion of the government’s fundamental duty to protect rather than invade private property, but the state appeals court disagreed, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the city’s seizure, 5–4.

The Supreme Court’s opinions, on both sides, lay out a dreary history of how a fundamental liberty shriveled. The justices cite a 1954 precedent that imperiously expanded the rationale for eminent domain from the Fifth Amendment’s public use to public purpose to justify urban-renewal projects that tore down vast swathes of supposedly blighted property in order to turn the land over to private developers of better housing. Even if you grant the constitutionality of the new rationale, argued the petitioner in this case—who owned a prospering, unblighted department store within the redevelopment area—creating a “better balanced, more attractive community” was not a valid public purpose. Wrong, said the Supremes, in Justice William O. Douglas’s trademark fatuously whimsical language: the legislature, invoking values that are “spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary,” has the power “to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” Nor need officials, evidently empowered to define public purposes beyond the Constitution’s limited and enumerated scope, deal with property owners on an individual basis in imposing their aesthetic vision on already existing property, so the department-store owner’s liberty and property rights merit no protection from the redevelopment juggernaut.

The Kelo Court also cited a precedent, appropriately from 1984, that is hard to distinguish from a Latin American Communist-imposed land-reform scheme. Because the government owned 49 percent of Hawaii’s land and 72 private landlords owned another 47 percent of it, the state legislature passed a law forcing the private property owners to sell their land to their lessees, for just compensation. The public purpose of this social-engineering megaproject: “eliminating the ‘social and economic evils of a land oligopoly.’ ” Trying to explain his notion of “the tyranny of the majority,” the great democratic danger that he’d designed the Constitution to prevent, Madison began by observing that “those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society.” As the propertyless will always outnumber the propertied, the essence of democratic tyranny is for the poorer many to expropriate the richer few by such “improper or wicked” schemes as voting “an equal division of property,” the furthest-out extreme of tyranny that the Father of the Constitution could imagine. What would he have said about the Hawaii legislature’s property-redistribution edict and the U.S. Supreme Court that ratified it on such a rationale?

Kelo, as the dissenting justices pointed out, makes almost limitless the government’s eminent-domain power. …

David Warren says Europe is beyond rescue. 

Europe’s latest summit rescue plan appeared to score with the markets, last week, on both sides of the Atlantic, and yet this appearance is deceptive. Many investors were covering short positions.

They had bet the summiteers could agree on nothing at all; and they were wrong. This alone was probably enough to propel everything back upwards for a day or two. Now we watch for the hangover.

The first telltale sign of reality sinking back in, was the bond pressure accumulating on Italy. The “theory” behind the European politicians’ “final” and “groundbreaking” agreement (their third so far this year) seems to be, to create a rescue fund so large it never has to be used; for its mere existence assures everyone of stability. But in the present environment, one trillion euros is chump change. Any one of the several Mediterranean powers could swallow that, and be burping for more.

There were minor accomplishments, such as getting the private banks to write down Greek debt by 50 per cent. This was as close to a no-brainer as financial overseers could get. The banks have themselves to blame, but not only themselves, for having taken in more sovereign debt than they could ever handle. Given experiences with Brazil and other countries in previous decades, everyone should have learned by now that sovereign debt itself requires as much security as private: if not more, given the worthlessness of politicians’ promises. …

The NY Times with the memoir of Steve Jobs’ sister.

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.

When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.

We took a long walk — something, it happened, that we both liked to do. I don’t remember much of what we said that first day, only that he felt like someone I’d pick to be a friend. He explained that he worked in computers.

I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter.

I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco.

Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful. …

… He told me, when he was saying goodbye and telling me he was sorry, so sorry we wouldn’t be able to be old together as we’d always planned, that he was going to a better place.

Dr. Fischer gave him a 50/50 chance of making it through the night.

He made it through the night, Laurene next to him on the bed sometimes jerked up when there was a longer pause between his breaths. She and I looked at each other, then he would heave a deep breath and begin again.

This had to be done. Even now, he had a stern, still handsome profile, the profile of an absolutist, a romantic. His breath indicated an arduous journey, some steep path, altitude.

He seemed to be climbing.

But with that will, that work ethic, that strength, there was also sweet Steve’s capacity for wonderment, the artist’s belief in the ideal, the still more beautiful later.

Steve’s final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times.

Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

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Nile Gardiner calls attention to a disturbing poll.

This week, The Hill newspaper published a poll that is dispiriting to anyone concerned about the future of America as the world’s leading power. It was one of the most damning yet, illustrating just how far most Americans believe their country has fallen in recent years. According to The Hill:

“More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.

A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is “in decline,” the survey found, while 57 percent predict today’s kids won’t live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they’re either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they’re “very worried.”

The results suggest that Americans don’t view the country’s current economic and political troubles as temporary, but instead see them continuing for many years. …”

Peggy Noonan compares the constant campaigner to Paul Ryan.

… Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don’t think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them. Conservatives naturally like him—they agree with him—but liberals and journalists inclined to disagree with him take him seriously and treat him with respect.

This week he spoke on “The American Idea” at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. He scored the president as too small for the moment, as “petty” in his arguments and avoidant of the decisions entailed in leadership. At times like this, he said, “the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns.” Politicians divide in order to “evade responsibility for their failures” and to advance their interests.

The president, he said, has made a shift in his appeal to the electorate. “Instead of appealing to the hope and optimism that were hallmarks of his first campaign, he has launched his second campaign by preying on the emotions of fear, envy and resentment.”

But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn’t be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis. Here Mr. Ryan slammed “corporate welfare and crony capitalism.”

“Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?” Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? “Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?”

Rather than raise taxes on individuals, we should “lower the amount of government spending the wealthy now receive.” The “true sources of inequity in this country,” he continued, are “corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless.” The real class warfare that threatens us is “a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.”

If more Republicans thought—and spoke—like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn’t be seeing his numbers go up.

Christopher Caldwell writes on the Greek bailout for the Weekly Standard.

As they do every few weeks, the leaders of the European Union met in Brussels on Wednesday, October 26, to solve their finance problems once and for all. As the sun rose on Thursday they emerged with a document that resembled an Obama budget—crystal-clear about its aims and aspirations, opaque about how it intends to achieve them. There is a reason for that. It is that these aims and aspirations are growing less and less realistic.

Back in 2010, when the crisis seemed confined to the Greek government’s inability to repay its lenders, the Europeans thought they could fix things by having its various neighbor countries chip in 45 billion euros ($65 billion) to throw at the problem. Eighteen months later, the crisis is as complicated as a Rube Goldberg machine and more dangerous. The particular corner of it they dealt with last week has three intertwined aspects, and to solve one of them is to exacerbate the other two: …

Debra Saunders and student debt. 

One of the great things about America, President Obama told students at the University of Colorado, is that no matter how humble your roots, you still have a shot at a great education. He also told students that his goal is to “make college more affordable.” Alas, the president’s prescription for making higher education affordable seems likely to yield the same results as his plan for curbing health care costs – that is, it is likely to drive prices higher than inflation.

The nation’s next fiscal nightmare may well be a higher-education bubble.

Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards. As USA Today reported, America’s student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion this year. Rising costs have left many graduates in a deep hole. Many of last year’s graduates walked away with a diploma and, on average, $24,000 in student loans. The default rate on student loans rose to 8.8 percent in 2009. …

Continuing on the theme of impossible debt, Steven Malanga writes for the Journal on Harrisburg, PA. 

During an April 2009 debate among candidates vying to be mayor of Harrisburg, Pa., one aspirant suggested that the financially troubled city should sell some of its valuable historical artifacts and use the proceeds to finance a “Harrisburg Museum of Bad Ideas.” One compelling exhibit would be the city’s recent decision to file for bankruptcy protection.

Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, is drowning in debt. City officials have known for more than four years that they’d have to deal with the fiscal mess, but they punted. The state has engineered a bailout plan, but the city council rejected it. Instead it has asked creditors to forgo as much as $100 million of the debt. Essentially, the city council is engaged in a giant game of brinksmanship with the state and creditors, daring them to come up with something that’s less onerous than the current state plan, which involves asset sales and renegotiating union contracts. …

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Fisker Karma. That’s the $80,000 car financed by federal loans, but built in Finland. Our idiot government has tagged this luxury vehicle as a “sub-compact.” We get the story from Green Auto Blog.

… See, the EPA has a strange methodology that bases vehicle classes on interior size, and the Karma isn’t exactly spacious inside (the upcoming Fisker Surf has more luggage space). As AutoObserver notes, since the Karma has less than 100 cubic-feet of space, it fits nicely into the subcompacts class. Go figure. …

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Robert Samuelson says default is what happened to Greece.

There’s an Orwellian quality to Europe’s latest financial rescue. Words lose their ordinary meaning. Greece, for example, has clearly defaulted, but no one says so. In July, private lenders agreed “voluntarily” to accept an estimated 21 percent reduction in their loans to Greece. Now that’s been pushed to 50 percent, and private lenders’ consent is still described as “voluntary.” Well, it’s about as “voluntary as when one hands over one’s wallet in response to the choice of, ‘Your money or your life,’?” notes Douglas Elliott of the Brookings Institution.

What constitutes a default? Here is Standard & Poor’s definition: “We generally define a sovereign default as the failure to meet [the] interest or principal payments .?.?. contained in the original terms of the rated obligation.” Not much doubt there: A 50 percent “haircut” wasn’t part of the original bonds. But for political and legal reasons, it’s inconvenient to declare a default. Instead, the Europeans call the write-down “private-sector involvement,” or PSI. How reassuring.

Europe’s problem is to prevent Greece’s fate from befalling any of the other 16 countries using the euro — most obviously, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, but also Belgium and France. If investors believe that default (or PSI) is unavoidable, they will desert the debts of these countries. A financial implosion could become unavoidable. …

Mark Steyn calls our attention to the need for the government to provide diapers.

Last Thursday was officially “Diaper Need Awareness Day” in the state of Connecticut. Were you aware of it? There are so many awareness-raising days, it’s hard to keep track. Maybe we could have an Awareness-Raising Day Awareness Day. At any rate, the first annual Diaper Need Awareness Day was proclaimed by Dan Malloy, governor of the Nutmeg State, and they had a big old awareness-raising get-together in New Haven. It’s not clear yet whether they’ve got an official ribbon. We’re running a bit low on ribbon colors these days: It’s not just pink ribbons for breast cancer, but also teal for agoraphobia, periwinkle for acid reflux, pink and blue ribbons for amniotic fluid embolisms, and pinstripe ribbons for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. We could use a Ribbon-Hue Awareness Day to raise awareness about how we’re falling behind in the race for more ribbon colors.

If you’re wondering what sentient being isn’t aware of diapers, you’re missing the point: Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro is raising awareness of the need for diapers in order to, as Politico reported, “push the Federal Government to provide free diapers to poor families.” Congresswoman DeLauro has introduced the “DIAPER” Act – that’s to say, the Diaper Investment and Aid to Promote Economic Recovery Act Act. So don’t worry, it’s not welfare, it’s “stimulus.” As Fox News put it, “A U.S. congresswoman in Connecticut wants to boost the economy by offering free diapers to low-income families.” And, given that sinking bazillions of dollars into green-jobs schemes to build eco-cars in Finland and a federal program to buy guns for Mexican drug cartels and all the other fascinating innovations of the Obama administration haven’t worked, who’s to say borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo and sticking it in your kid’s diaper isn’t the kind of outside-the-box thinking that won’t do the trick?

Bart Hinkle compares Obama to Hoover. 

Last week the White House picked a Virginia fire station as the venue for the president’s principal campaign stop—er, legislative sales pitch. The choice was apt. At roughly the same time the president was lamenting how “cities and states like Michigan and New Jersey . . . have had to lay off big chunks of their forces,” Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”

Oh. Guess you can go home now, Wall Street occupiers! All those unemployment reports? False alarms.

To be fair to Reid—which may be more than he deserves—he was defending the part of the American Jobs Act that would appropriate $35 billion for state and local government hiring. That might help offset the savage cuts of the past year, except for one thing: The cuts have not been that savage. From September of last year to this past month, state and local payrolls have shrunk by 260,000 positions out of more than 20 million. That comes to roughly 1 percent of the work force.

The situation looks much worse for the private sector. It has added jobs at an anemic rate in the past few months, but it still has far to go before it claws its way back to the employment peak of November 2007. At that time total non-government employment stood at 124 million. It’s now 109 million. …

The constant campaigning gets comment from Karl Rove.

According to Mark Knoller, CBS Radio News White House Correspondent, President Obama has attended 60 campaign fund-raisers this year. That’s one every four days since he kicked off his re-election on April 4. By comparison at this point in 2003, President George W. Bush had appeared at only 28 fund-raisers.

Mr. Obama has done more than lap Mr. Bush in raising campaign cash. He’s also already eagerly barnstorming critical battleground states via Air Force One or Bus One. His goal is another term, though his ostensible reason for the trips is to push for passage of Stimulus II.

His renewed enthusiasm shows that nothing rejuvenates this president more than leaving Oval Office duties behind to reprise his role as stump speaker. We’re even seeing snappy new slogans: the latest is “We can’t wait,” a clever way to hide Mr. Obama’s discomfort with the business of convincing Congress to pass his bills.

This slogan unintentionally showcases an essential truth about the Obama presidency: comfortable on the political hustings, he’s uncomfortable doing the job. Energetic at campaigning, he’s lethargic at governing. From the start of his administration, he has left the policy details and heavy lifting to others. …

According to Charlie Gasparino, the Occupy Wall Street thugs have friends in the executive suite.

… the elite media has constantly vilified the peaceful Tea Party as right-wing rabble for prodding politicians to do nothing more than reduce the bloat of government.

Meanwhile, politicians, the press — and now CEOs — have generally celebrated Occupy Wall Street as the second coming of the civil-rights movement — no matter how many times its followers have clashed with police in the name of Mao and Che Guevara.

And the worst part about these unfair depictions of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street?

There’s no end in sight.

I can’t remember a single instance in which the chief executive of a major bank or conglomerate has said something nice about the Tea Party’s goals of limited government, lower taxes and free markets — the very things upon which this country was founded.

But such business leaders as GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt and Blackrock chief Larry Fink have been falling all over themselves trying to say nice things about the OWS protesters, their grievances and rants against capitalism — even while the unwashed mob is nearly rioting not far from their corporate headquarters. …

Journal article has new revelations about dogs and humans. 

Chauvet Cave in southern France houses the oldest representational paintings ever discovered. Created some 32,000 years ago, the 400-plus images of large grazing animals and the predators who hunted them form a multi-chambered Paleolithic bestiary. Many scholars believe that these paintings mark the emergence of a recognizably modern human consciousness. We feel that we know their creators, even though they are from a time and place as alien as another planet.

What most intrigues many people about the cave, however, is not the artwork but a set of markings at once more human and more mysterious: the bare footprints of an 8- to 10-year-old torch-bearing boy left in the mud of a back chamber some 26,000 years ago—and, alongside one of them, the paw print of his traveling companion, variously identified as a wolf or a large dog.

Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other. …

Cool map of the scary things in the United States from Pleated Jeans.

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David Warren wishes to point out some problems with the end in Libya. 

One marvels, in retrospect, at the order the U.S. military brought to Iraq, wherein Saddam Hussein was brought to his trial alive and intact. For, while one may not care very much whether murderous tyrants receive all the gracious attentions of correct legal procedure, it is nevertheless impressive when the task is attempted, and even more when it succeeds.

I think the first thing to notice about the end of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, is that America has changed. Vice-President Joe Biden was quickly boasting that Gadhafi had been brought to a conclusion for just $2 billion (an unlikely estimate), and without the loss of a single American life. By extension, he mocked the Bush administration for the trouble and expense of bringing down Saddam.

The affair in Libya, we are told by liberal experts, offers a new model for “regime change,” and in his Rose Garden remarks, President Barack Obama was quick to warn (without naming) Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that he could be next. The media have been generally gloating with him, at what they interpret as a foreign-policy success.

But what is the message of Gadhafi’s demise to other monstrous tyrants? If we think for a moment, we will realize that it is unambiguous: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The important thing, for them, is now not to relinquish power; and the faster and more decisively they apply brutal measures against their own domestic opponents, the better their chances of avoiding Gadhafi’s fate. …

Christopher Hitchens also has reservations.

… At the close of an obscene regime, especially one that has shown it would rather destroy society and the state than surrender power, it is natural for people to hope for something like an exorcism. It is satisfying to see the cadaver of the monster and be sure that he can’t come back. It is also reassuring to know that there is no hateful figurehead on whom some kind of “werewolf” resistance could converge in order to prolong the misery and atrocity. But Qaddafi at the time of his death was wounded and out of action and at the head of a small group of terrified riff-raff. He was unable to offer any further resistance. And all the positive results that I cited above could have been achieved by the simple expedient of taking him first to a hospital, then to a jail, and thence to the airport. Indeed, a spell in the dock would probably hugely enhance the positive impact, since those poor lost souls who still put their trust in the man could scarcely have their illusions survive the exposure to even a few hours of the madman’s gibberings in court.

And so the new Libya begins, but it begins with a squalid lynching. News correspondents have been quite warm and vocal lately, about the general forbearance shown by the rebels to the persons and property of the Qaddafi loyalists. That makes it even more regrettable that the principle could not be honored in its main instance. At the time of writing, Seif-al-Islam Qaddafi, one of Muammar’s sons, is said to be still at large. It will be quite a disgrace if he is also killed out of hand, or if at the very least the NTC and the international community do not remind their fighters that he needs to be taken into lawful custody. …

Just how hateful have the Turks become? Jonathan Tobin has the answer.

How determined is Turkey to repudiate its decades-long alliance with Israel? Today’s decision by the Turks to reportedly refuse assistance from Israel is a stunning indication of how far the Islamist government in Ankara is willing to go to make a point.

More than 1,000 persons are feared dead in the aftermath of a quake that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. With workers battling to save those trapped in collapsed buildings in towns and cities near the Iranian border, it’s more than likely that Israel’s experienced rescue teams — which participated in previous earthquake relief efforts in Turkey — would be of value to the effort. But according to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has told the Israelis they are not wanted. Erdo?an would apparently prefer to see his compatriots die rather than to allow Jews to help them. …

Telegraph, UK’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with an upbeat look at our country’s prospects. 

The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.

Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline – so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue – will seem wildly off the mark by then.

Telegraph readers already know about the “shale gas revolution” that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia.

Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing – breaking rocks with jets of water – will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply, mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and other reserves across the Mid-West.

“The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day (b/d),” said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.

Total US shale output is “set to expand dramatically” as fresh sources come on stream, possibly reaching 5.5m b/d by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise since 2009.

The US already meets 72pc of its own oil needs, up from around 50pc a decade ago. …

David Harsanyi thinks the Dems have some silly ideas.

… For example, Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. recently claimed that the iPad was “responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs,” you know, just like the modern-day automated loom. What, he wonders, will happen to “all the jobs associated with paper?” Surely, a remark as deeply juvenile as that one matches anything offered by those wild-eyed skeptics.

Or take President Barack Obama, who earlier this year — and not for the first time — claimed that “structural issues with our economy” have nothing to do with politicians. The problem, in his opinion, is that “a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient,” making the workforce smaller. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”

Those aren’t structural issues; they are productivity issues. And rather than kill jobs, efficiency drives output and growth and improves performance and the quality of goods and services — along with our lives. Perhaps if this administration weren’t busy trying to create morally pleasing but temporary and unsustainable jobs through bailouts, subsidies and “stimulus,” we could all hit that ATM more often. …

Bjorn Lomberg thinks it is wrong for the government to try to pick green energy winners.

… Make no mistake, the long road to ending reliance on fossil fuels will be littered with many technologies that fail to live up to early promise. But the danger is when politicians and bureaucrats attempt to predict which technologies will be winners and back them to build an industry.

The idea of capturing the sun’s power through solar cylinders might have been a great idea, but the government should instead have spent half a million dollars on funding researchers to investigate such technology. If the research had proved the technology successful, private companies would have jumped in and sold cheap solar power to the world. And spending one-thousandth of the amount on research means we could have studied many potentially promising technologies — because Solyndra is hardly a unique case. …

William McGurn says each new child born in the world is a blessing. 

Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby.

That’s especially true when that baby is born to a mother somewhere in Africa or Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, some time this coming Monday, probably in India, the world will welcome its seven billionth person. Well, maybe welcome isn’t exactly the right word.

At Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN “the consequences for humanity could be grim.” Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared “the earth is full,” suggesting that a growing population means “we are eating into our future.” And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a “human swarm” that is “overbreeding” in a way that “prosperous, well-educated families” from the developed world do not.

The smarter ones acknowledge that Malthus’s ominous warnings about a growing population outstripping the food supply were not borne out in his day. The track record for these scares in our own day is not much better. Perhaps the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “The Population Bomb,” which opened with these sunny sentences: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of “triage” that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when “The Population Bomb” appeared. …