Download Word - Pickerhead

January 30, 2008
Pickings today is a Clinton free zone. We will return to beating them up tomorrow.
Imprimis from Hillsdale College is first today with Mark Steyn. He writes comparing
the Canadian economy to ours.
I WAS A bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?” I wondered.
“Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the
Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the
President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk
on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the
jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.
Unlike America, Canada is a resource economy: The U.S. imports resources, whereas Canada
exports them. It has the second largest oil reserves in the world. People don’t think of Canada like
that. The Premier of Alberta has never been photographed in Crawford, Texas, holding hands with
the President and strolling through the rose bower as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was. But Canada
is nonetheless an oil economy—a resource economy. Traditionally, in America, when the price of oil
goes up, Wall Street goes down. But in Canada, when the price of oil goes up, the Toronto stock
exchange goes up, too. So we are relatively compatible neighbors whose interests diverge on one of
the key global indicators.
As we know from 9/11, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia use their oil wealth to spread their destructive
ideology to every corner of the world. And so do the Canadians. Consider that in the last 40 years,
fundamental American ideas have made no headway whatsoever in Canada, whereas fundamental
Canadian ideas have made huge advances in America and the rest of the Western world. To take two
big examples, multiculturalism and socialized health care—both pioneered in Canada—have made
huge strides down here in the U.S., whereas American concepts—such as non-confiscatory
taxation—remain as foreign as ever. ...
What do our favorite economists think of the stimulus package? Thomas Sowell first.
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus
package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.
That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because
things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.
A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown
together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.
The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government
could do to make things better in the economy.
Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to
do. ...
Walter Williams.
Some Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls are preaching economic doom and gloom,
disappearing middle class, and failing health care industry. What's their solution? The short answer is
give them more control over our lives. Baltimore's political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken, explained
this strategy, saying, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence
clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary."
The imaginary hobgoblin this time is the threat of an oncoming recession, even though it is by no
means clear that the U.S. economy is in a recession. To head off a recession, politicians, including
President Bush, are calling for a stimulus package. ...
WSJ with a look at Cambodia's Angkor Wat.
This country's most famous temple may be 900 years old, but the message it sets out to convey is
timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one of hundreds built by kings of the Khmer
Empire to commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to worship their gods. But Angkor
Wat stands out from the rest -- in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.
One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the only religious monument to appear on a
national flag, Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its most powerful -- when it
was the seat of the Khmer Empire, stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The
monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on visitors today as when it was first built.
Angkor Wat has but a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third of a mile long (that's
as long as six football fields end-to-end). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my guide
assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of
the compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres and once supported a town of about
100,000 people. ...
British historian Paul Johnson reviews Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
No political term has been more overused and misused than “fascism.” Since the 1930s it has been a
word of indiscriminate abuse by the Left for anyone a scintilla to the right of them. And from the 1970s
onward many right-wing commentators have used the term “fascist Left” to denote authoritarian
tendencies on the socialist, liberal, or Democratic side of the political equation. I have used it myself
when in a bad temper. Jonah Goldberg has now produced a comprehensive book that summarizes all
the ways in which the liberal Left, principally in America, can legitimately be accused of fascist
policies and states of mind.
The book is meaty with little-known facts, audacious intuitions, and sophisticated persiflage.
Republican activists, whether in the media or on the platform, will find it an indispensable handbook
for rough-and-tumble debate. Here are some of Goldberg’s thrusts, for which he supplies energetic
evidence. Woodrow Wilson was responsible for “the birth of liberal fascism.” FDR’s New Deal was
essentially fascist. So was the street-and-campus agitation of the 1960s. JFK’s myth and LBJ’s
dream were both hallmarked by the fascist “cult of the state.” The liberal stress on race politics
reflected “the eugenic ghost in the fascist machine.” Liberal economic theory and practice have
fascist characteristics. So has Hillary Clinton’s “New Village.” ...
The Freakonomics dudes on unintended consequences.
... well-meaning laws surely don’t end up harming animals as well, do they?
Consider the Endangered Species Act (E.S.A.) of 1973, which protects flora and fauna as well as
their physical habitats. The economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael wanted to gauge the E.S.A.’s
effect on the red-cockaded woodpecker, a protected bird that nests in old-growth pine trees in eastern
North Carolina. By examining the timber harvest activity of more than 1,000 privately owned forest
plots, Lueck and Michael found a clear pattern: when a landowner felt that his property was turning
into the sort of habitat that might attract a nesting pair of woodpeckers, he rushed in to cut down the
trees. It didn’t matter if timber prices were low. ...
Hillsdale College - Imprimis
Is Canada's Economy a Model for America
by Mark Steyn
Mark Steyn’s column appears in the New York Sun, the Washington Times, Philadelphia’s Evening
Bulletin, and the Orange County Register. In addition, he writes for The New Criterion, MacLean’s in
Canada, the Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and Hawke’s Bay Today in New Zealand. The author of
National Review’s Happy Warrior column, he also blogs on National Review Online and appears
weekly on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show. He is the author of several books, most recently America
Alone: The End of The World as We Know It, a New York Times bestseller and a number one
bestseller in Canada. A Canadian citizen, Mr. Steyn lives with his family in New Hampshire.
The following is abridged from a lecture delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on September 29,
2007, at the second annual Free Market Forum, sponsored by the College’s Center for the Study of
Monetary Systems and Free Enterprise.
Is Canada’s Economy a Model for America?
I WAS A bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?” I wondered.
“Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the
Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the
President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk
on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the
jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.
Unlike America, Canada is a resource economy: The U.S. imports resources, whereas Canada
exports them. It has the second largest oil reserves in the world. People don’t think of Canada like
that. The Premier of Alberta has never been photographed in Crawford, Texas, holding hands with
the President and strolling through the rose bower as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was. But Canada
is nonetheless an oil economy—a resource economy. Traditionally, in America, when the price of oil
goes up, Wall Street goes down. But in Canada, when the price of oil goes up, the Toronto stock
exchange goes up, too. So we are relatively compatible neighbors whose interests diverge on one of
the key global indicators.
As we know from 9/11, the Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia use their oil wealth to spread their destructive
ideology to every corner of the world. And so do the Canadians. Consider that in the last 40 years,
fundamental American ideas have made no headway whatsoever in Canada, whereas fundamental
Canadian ideas have made huge advances in America and the rest of the Western world. To take two
big examples, multiculturalism and socialized health care—both pioneered in Canada—have made
huge strides down here in the U.S., whereas American concepts—such as non-confiscatory
taxation—remain as foreign as ever.
My colleague at National Review, John O’Sullivan, once observed that post-war Canadian history is
summed up by the old Monty Python song that goes, “I’m a Lumberjack and I’m OK.” If you recall that
song, it begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods. But it ends
with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into a kind of transvestite pickup who likes to wear high
heels and dress in women’s clothing while hanging around in bars. Of course, John O’Sullivan isn’t
saying that Canadian men are literally cross-dressers—certainly no more than 35-40 percent of us —
but rather that a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological makeover. If you go
back to 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the world’s third largest surface fleet, the Royal
Canadian Air Force was one of the world’s most effective air forces, and Canadian troops got the
toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were
transformed into a thoroughly feminized culture that prioritizes all the secondary impulses of society—
welfare entitlements from cradle to grave—over all the primary ones. And in that, Canada is obviously
not alone. If the O’Sullivan thesis is flawed, it’s only because the lumberjack song could stand as the
post-war history of almost the entire developed world.
Today, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in
the rest of the Western world are nearly exclusively about those secondary impulses—government
health care, government day care, government this, government that. And if you have government
health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of
individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into
something closer to that of junkie and pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back.
Americans don’t always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the developed world is. In
Canadian and Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now a place where an ambitious politician
passes through on his way up to important jobs like running the health department. And if you listen
to recent Democratic presidential debates, it is clear that American attitudes toward economic liberty
are being Canadianized.
To some extent, these differences between the two countries were present at their creations.
America’s Founders wrote of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The equivalent phrase at
Canada’s founding was “peace, order and good government” —which words are not only drier and
desiccated and stir the blood less, but they also presume a degree of statist torpor. Ronald Reagan
famously said, “We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around.” In Canada it too
often seems the other way around.
All that being said, if you remove health care from the equation, the differences between our two
economies become relatively marginal. The Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World 2007
Annual Report” ranks the U.S. and Canada together, tied in fifth place along with Britain. And here’s
an interesting point: The top ten most free economies in this report are Hong Kong, Singapore, New
Zealand, Switzerland, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Estonia, Ireland, and Australia. With
the exception of Switzerland and Estonia, these systems are all British-derived. They’re what Jacques
Chirac dismissively calls les anglo-saxon. And he and many other Continentals make it very clear that
they regard free market capitalism as some sort of kinky Anglo-Saxon fetish. On the other hand,
Andrew Roberts, the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, points out that
the two most corrupt jurisdictions in North America are Louisiana and Quebec—both French-derived.
Quebec has a civil service that employs the same number of people as California’s, even though
California has a population nearly five times the size.
In the province of Quebec, it’s taken more or less for granted by all political parties that collective
rights outweigh individual rights. For example, if you own a store in Montreal, the French language
signs inside the store are required by law to be at least twice the size of the English signs. And the
government has a fairly large bureaucratic agency whose job it is to go around measuring signs and
prosecuting offenders. There was even a famous case a few years ago of a pet store owner who was
targeted by the Office De La Langue Française for selling English-speaking parrots. The language
commissar had gone into the store and heard a bird saying, “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” and decided
to take action. I keep trying to find out what happened to the parrot. Presumably it was sent to a reeducation camp and emerged years later with a glassy stare saying in a monotone voice, “Qui est un
joli garcon, hein?”
The point to remember about this is that it is consonant with the broader Canadian disposition. A
couple of years ago it emerged that a few Quebec hospitals in the eastern townships along the
Vermont border were, as a courtesy to their English-speaking patients, putting up handwritten pieces
of paper in the corridor saying “Emergency Room This Way” or “Obstetrics Department Second on
the Left.” But in Quebec, you’re only permitted to offer health care services in English if the English
population in your town reaches a certain percentage. So these signs were deemed illegal and had to
be taken down. I got a lot of mail from Canadians who were upset about this, and I responded that if
you accept that the government has a right to make itself the monopoly provider of health care, it
surely has the right to decide the language in which it’s prepared to provide that care. So my point
isn’t just about Quebec separatism. It’s about a fundamentally different way of looking at the role of
the state.
The Two Economies
So, granted the caveat that the economically freest countries in the world are the English-speaking
democracies, within that family there are some interesting differences, and I would say between
America and Canada there are five main ones.
First, the Canadian economy is more unionized. According to the Fraser Institute report, since the
beginning of this century, the unionized proportion of the U.S. work force has averaged 13.9 percent.
In Canada it has averaged 32 percent. That is a huge difference. The least unionized state in America
is North Carolina, at 3.9 percent, whereas the least unionized province in Canada is Alberta, with 24.2
percent—a higher percentage than any American state except Hawaii, Alaska, and New York. In
Quebec, it’s 40.4 percent. If you regard unionization as a major obstacle to productivity, investment,
and employment growth, this is a critical difference.
I drive a lot between Quebec and New Hampshire, and you don’t really need a border post to tell you
when you’ve crossed from one country into another. On one side the hourly update on the radio news
lets you know that Canada’s postal workers are thinking about their traditional pre-Christmas strike—
the Canadians have gotten used to getting their Christmas cards around Good Friday, and it’s part of
the holiday tradition now—or that employees of the government liquor store are on strike, nurses are
on strike, police are on strike, etc. Whereas you could listen for years to a New Hampshire radio
station and never hear the word “strike” except for baseball play-by-play.
In a news item from last year, an Ottawa panhandler said that he may have to abandon his prime
panhandling real estate on a downtown street corner because he is being shaken down by officials
from the panhandlers union. Think about that. There’s a panhandlers union which exists to protect
workers’ rights or—in this case—non-workers’ rights. If the union-negotiated non-work contracts
aren’t honored, the unionized panhandlers will presumably walk off the job and stand around on the
sidewalk. No, wait...they’ll walk off the sidewalk! Anyway, that’s Canada: Without a Thatcher or a
Reagan, it remains over-unionized and with a bloated public sector.
Not that long ago, I heard a CBC news anchor announce that Canada had “created 56,100 new jobs
in the previous month.” It sounded like good news. But looking at the numbers, I found that of those
56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining
43,000 were on the public payroll. In other words, 77 percent of the new jobs were government jobs
paid for by the poor slobs working away in the remaining 23 percent. So it wasn’t good news, it was
bad news about the remorseless transfer of human resources from the vital dynamic sector to the
state.
The second difference between our economies is that Canada’s is more protected. I was talking once
to a guy from the Bay area who ran a gay bookstore, and he swore to me that he’d had it with
President Bush and that he was going to move to Vancouver and reopen his bookstore there. I told
him that would be illegal in Canada and he got very huffy and said indignantly, “What do you mean
it’s illegal? It’s not illegal for a gay man to own a bookstore in Canada.” I said, “No, but it’s illegal for a
foreigner to own a bookstore in Canada.” He could move to Canada, yes, but he’d have to get a
government job handing out benefit checks. His face dropped, and I thought of pitching one of those
soft-focus TV movie-of-the-week ideas to the Lifestyle Channel, telling the heartwarming story of a
Berkeley gay couple who flee Bush’s regime to live their dream of running a gay bookstore in
Vancouver, only to find that Canada has ways of discriminating against them that the homophobic
fascists in the United States haven’t even begun to consider.
The third difference is that Canada’s economy is more subsidized. Almost every activity amounts to
taking government money in some form or other. I was at the Summit of the Americas held in Canada
in the summer of 2001, with President Bush and the presidents and prime ministers from Latin
America and the Caribbean. And, naturally, it attracted the usual anti-globalization anarchists who
wandered through town lobbing bricks at any McDonald’s or Nike outlet that hadn’t taken the
precaution of boarding up its windows. At one point I was standing inside the perimeter fence sniffing
tear gas and enjoying the mob chanting against the government from the other side of the wire, when
a riot cop suddenly grabbed me and yanked me backwards, and a nanosecond later a chunk of
concrete landed precisely where I had been standing. I bleated the usual “Oh my God, I could have
been killed” for a few minutes and then I went to have a café au lait. And while reading the paper over
my coffee, I learned that not only had Canadian colleges given their students time off to come to the
Summit to riot, but that the Canadian government had given them $300,000 to pay for their travel and
expenses. It was a government-funded anti-government riot! At that point I started bleating “Oh my
God, I could have been killed at taxpayer expense.” Say what you like about the American trust-fund
babies who had swarmed in to demonstrate from Boston and New York, but at least they were there
on their own dime. Canada will and does subsidize anything.
Fourth point: The Canadian economy is significantly more dirigiste (i.e., centrally planned). A couple
of years ago it was revealed that the government had introduced a fast-track immigration program for
exotic dancers (otherwise known as strippers). Now as a general rule, one of the easiest things to
leave for the free market to determine is the number of strippers a society needs. But for some
reason, the government concluded that the market wasn’t generating the supply required and
introduced a special immigration visa. To go back to President Bush’s line, maybe this is one of those
jobs that Canadians won’t do, so we need to get some Ukrainians in to do it. Naturally, the exotic
dancers are unionized, so it’s only a matter of time before the last viable industry in Quebec grinds to
a halt and American tourists in Montreal find themselves stuck in traffic because of huge numbers of
striking strippers. What governmental mind would think of an exotic dancer immigration category?
Fifth and obviously, the Canadian economy is more heavily taxed: Total revenue for every level of
government in the U.S. is approximately 27 percent of GDP, while in Canada it’s 37 percent. And yes,
that 37 percent includes health care—but you would have to be having an awful lot of terminal
illnesses each year to be getting your money’s worth from what you’re giving to the treasury for that.
Canadian Dependence on the U.S.
Yet, having criticized Canada’s economy in various features, let me say something good about it: It
doesn’t have the insanely wasteful federal agricultural subsidies that America has. In fact, if a
Canadian wants to get big-time agriculture subsidies, he’s more likely to get them from the U.S.
government. I’m sure most people here know that very few actual farmers—that’s to say, guys in
denim overalls and plaid shirts and John Deere caps with straws in the stumps of their teeth—get any
benefit from U.S. agricultural subsidies. Almost three-quarters of these subsidies go to 20,000 multimillionaire play farmers and blue chip corporations. Farm subsidies are supposed to help the farm
belt. But there’s a map of where the farm subsidies go that you can find on the Internet. And judging
from the beneficiaries, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue down Wall Street, out to the Hamptons,
and then by yacht over to Martha’s Vineyard, which they really ought to rename Martha’s Barnyard.
Among the farmers piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the
oil company Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller. But what you
may not know is that also among their number is Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who isn’t just any old
billionaire, he’s the patriarch of Montreal’s wealthiest family, owner of Seagram’s Whiskey, which
subsequently bought Universal Pictures. So the U.S. taxpayer, in his boundless generosity, is
subsidizing the small family farms of Canadian billionaires. As a Canadian and a broken-down New
Hampshire tree farmer myself, I wondered whether I could get in on the U.S. farm program, but as I
understand it, it would only pay me for a helicopter pad on top of my barn and a marble bathroom in
my grain silo.
Edgar Bronfman’s dependence on U.S. taxpayers is symbolic of more than just the stupidity of federal
agriculture subsidies. In the end, there’s no such thing as an independent Canadian economy. It
remains a branch plant for the U.S. Over 80 percent of Canadian exports come to America. From
time to time, nationalist politicians pledge to change that and start shipping goods elsewhere. But
they never do because they don’t have to—they’ve got the world’s greatest market right next door. So
when people talk about the Canadian model as something that should be emulated, they forget that it
only works because it’s next to the American model. The guy who invented the Blackberry email
device is Canadian, but it’s not been a gold mine for him because he’s selling a lot of them in
Labrador or Prince Edward Island. It’s been a gold mine because he’s selling a lot of them in New
York and California and in between.
Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care, the most eminent
Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is, public health care in Canada depends on
private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:
A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The four girls were born at
a U.S. hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units.
Autumn, Brook, Calissa, and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls,
Montana. Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but
none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the
Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S., where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.
There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only
30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of
50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on
the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that
socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip
replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health
care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.
In conclusion, I’m not optimistic about Canada for various reasons—from the recent Chinese
enthusiasm for buying up the country’s resources to the ongoing brain drain—but also for a reason
more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent,
psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that
America has a healthy fertility rate and we don’t. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is
enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian
couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10
million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million greatgrandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under
that scenario, and that’s before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire
gated communities and decides he’d rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world
as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population increased by 1.6 million.
400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus
native Canadians—already only amounting to 25 percent of the country’s population growth—will
become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It’s like a company in which you hold an
ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years
ahead, but if it is, it won’t have much—if anything—to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is
Canada’s path not a model for America, it’s not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about
to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it.
Townhall
A "Stimulus Package"?
by Thomas Sowell
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus
package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy.
That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because
things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan.
A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown
together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done.
The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government
could do to make things better in the economy.
Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to
do.
Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things
better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international
trade.
Some people even believe that whenever there is "market failure," the government ought to step in.
Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the
Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?
No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports
than when discussing politics.
The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume
that the government would do better.
There are too many examples of government interventions that made things worse, the Great
Depression of the 1930s being the most tragic.
Those on the left love to believe that the stock market crash of 1929 showed the failure of the free
market and that the New Deal interventions in the 1930s saved the day.
But the stock market crash of 1987 was just as big and Ronald Reagan resisted loud calls for him to
intervene. The result was not another Great Depression but the beginning of a decades-long period of
prosperity.
Before Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt came along, there was no expectation
that the federal government would intervene when the stock market crashed or when there was a
downturn in the economy.
Previous stock market crashes and previous downturns in the economy worked themselves out faster
and less painfully than the Great Depression of the 1930s, just as the 1987 crisis did.
The track record of government intervention is far less impressive than its rhetoric.
One of the biggest problems with government intervention in the economy is that politicians usually
have neither the knowledge nor the incentives to intervene at the right time.
Bruce Bartlett has pointed out that most government intervention in an economic downturn comes too
late. That is, the problem it is trying to solve has already worked itself out and the government
intervention can create new problems.
More fundamentally, markets readjust themselves for a reason. That reason is that people pay a price
for their misjudgments and mistakes.
Government interventions are usually based on trying to stop them from having to pay that price.
People who went way out on a limb to buy a house that they could not afford are now being pictured
as victims of a heartless market or deceptive lenders.
Just a few years ago, people who went out on that limb made money big-time in a skyrocketing
housing market. But now that they have been caught in the ups and downs that markets have gone
through for centuries, the government is supposed to bail them out.
Solving short-run problems, especially in an election year, often means creating long-run problems.
Pumping money into the economy can help many problems. but do not be surprised if it also leads to
inflationary pressures and financial repercussions around the world.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's
Guide to the Economy.
Jewish World Review
Stimulus package nonsense
by Walter Williams
Some Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls are preaching economic doom and gloom,
disappearing middle class, and failing health care industry. What's their solution? The short answer is
give them more control over our lives. Baltimore's political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken, explained
this strategy, saying, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence
clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary."
The imaginary hobgoblin this time is the threat of an oncoming recession, even though it is by no
means clear that the U.S. economy is in a recession. To head off a recession, politicians, including
President Bush, are calling for a stimulus package.
Before we talk about stimulus packages, let's get one question out of the way: Is there any evidence
for the existence of a Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy? Most grown-ups would probably answer no and
ask, "Williams, this is a serious issue. Why are you talking about silly things like Santas and Tooth
Fairies?" The reason is quite simple. Let's look at it.
The White House proposal is to give individuals and households tax rebates ranging from $800 to
$1,600 respectively. Congressional Democrats, in addition to tax rebates, want a stimulus package
that targets the poor through increases in food stamps and greater unemployment benefits. The
details of different stimulus packages aren't as important as where the money is coming from. You
can bet the rent money it won't come from Santa or the Tooth Fairy.
There are three ways government can get the money for a stimulus package. It can tax, borrow or
inflate the currency by printing money. If government taxes to hand out money, one person is
stimulated at the expense of another who pays the tax, who is unstimulated and has less money to
spend. If government borrows the money, it's the same story. This time the unstimulated person is the
lender who has less money to spend. If government prints money, creditors, and then everyone else,
are unstimulated. As my colleague Russell Roberts said in a NPR broadcast, "It's like taking a bucket
of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing — the water in
the shallow end doesn't get any deeper."
If we are headed into a recession, these proposed stimulus packages will make little difference.
Previous experiences have shown that (1) it takes a long time to enact tax law, making it too late to
prevent a recession, and (2) many people save a large portion of any tax rebate. A far more important
measure that Congress can take towards a healthy economy is to insure that the 2003 tax cuts don't
expire in 2010 as scheduled. If not, there are 15 separate taxes scheduled to rise in 2010, costing
Americans $200 billion a year in increased taxes. Adding to the economic effects of that tax increase
are the disincentive effects of the measures that Americans will take between now and then in
anticipation of those tax increases. According to economists Tracy Foertsch and Ralph Rector,
making the 2003 tax cuts permanent will annually add $76 billion to the GDP, create 709,000 jobs
and add $200 billion to personal income.
The call for stimulus packages represents the triumph of political arrogance over common sense. The
U.S. is a massive $14 trillion economy. The size of proposed stimulus packages range from $150 to
$200 billion, which is about 1 to 2 percent of our GDP. Economy-wide, that's a drop in the bucket
likely to have little or no effect. Congress ought to focus on measures that create greater long-term
productive incentives such as reducing corporate taxes, estate taxes and personal income taxes as
well as economic deregulation.
WSJ
Cambodian History Writ Large At Angkor Wat
by Leslie Hook
SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- This country's most famous temple may be 900 years old, but the message
it sets out to convey is timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one of hundreds built by
kings of the Khmer Empire to commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to worship their
gods. But Angkor Wat stands out from the rest -- in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.
One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the only religious monument to appear on a
national flag, Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its most powerful -- when it
was the seat of the Khmer Empire, stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal. The
monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on visitors today as when it was first built.
Angkor Wat has but a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third of a mile long (that's
as long as six football fields end-to-end). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my guide
assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of
the compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres and once supported a town of about
100,000 people.
With one central tower more than 130 feet high surrounded by four shorter towers, the center of the
temple imitates the five peaks of Mount Mehru, the mythical mountain at the center of the Hindu
universe. The temple walls (three concentric rectangles that demarcate the progressively higher
levels of the temple), garden grounds and moat represent the soil and seas of the earth.
Reaching Mount Mehru is no easy chore: The temple's stone steps are dizzyingly steep -- more like a
stone ladder than a staircase -- as a reminder of the effort it takes for humans to get closer to heaven.
And, as if to drive home the point, the inner sanctuaries of the central tower were accessible only to
the king and a select handful of priests.
When Angkor Wat was built, Cambodia was primarily Hindu and Khmer culture drew much of its
inspiration from India. Most of the inscriptions at Angkor are in Sanskrit, and the nymph-like apsaras,
or celestial dancers, that grace the walls derive from Hindu mythology. Later, however, the Khmer
kings became interested in Buddhism, and Angkor Wat was converted into a Buddhist monastery
between the 12th and 15th centuries. The central statue of the innermost sanctuary -- likely a statue
of Vishnu -- was removed and a Buddhist image erected in its place. For several centuries, the Khmer
empire practiced a syncretic faith that combined Buddhism and Hinduism.
In many ways Angkor Wat is so much larger than life that the details of the temple get overlooked
amid the legends that surround it. It's easy to forget that it contains nearly 2,000 feet of the finest
Khmer bas reliefs in the world. Its nearly 2,000 celestial apsaras represent the apogee of Cambodia's
apsara-carving tradition and provide a detailed account of court dress and female fashions during the
period of its creation, the elaborate headdresses, heavy jewelry worn on the arms and neck, and
flowing skirts. Traditional Cambodian dance to this day imitates the apsaras' poses and costumes.
One of the most intricate reliefs decorating the walls of the temple's first gallery depicts the Churning
of the Sea of Milk, a key event in Hindu cosmology in which the world was created by an epic tug-ofwar between gods and demons. Each side pulled on a giant five-headed snake wrapped around
Mount Mehru, and the subsequent twisting of the mountain and churning of the seas gave birth to the
apsaras that grace the walls of Angkor Wat, as well as an elixir of immortality over which the gods
and demons subsequently dueled. In this story, Mount Mehru is not only the center of the universe,
but also the birthplace of the known world.
The Khmer empire included modern-day Burma, Thailand and Vietnam -- the largest area ever
covered by Cambodia -- and laid the foundations for Cambodian culture and art for centuries to come.
In a sign of the temple's importance, the king's palace was most likely on the temple grounds,
although nothing of it remains today. About one million men, women and children populated the
Angkor area, according to an estimate by French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier, making it
the largest settlement in the preindustrial world.
All this manpower was necessary to build the temples, which were painstakingly erected from giant
sandstone monoliths hewed out of a quarry more than 37 miles away. Rather than having foundations
that sink into the ground, most Angkorean temples are built on huge mounds of earth that give them
their pyramid shape, the soil excavated from a moat or from one of the lakes. Some historians
theorize that the blitz of building during the Khmer Empire could have been accomplished only
through a mandatory labor requirement levied on all citizens, or perhaps even through slavery.
The grandeur that marked the Khmer Empire was not to last, however. The royal city of Angkor was
repeatedly sacked by the Thai army during the 14th century, and in 1431 the capital was relocated
farther away from Thailand. Angkor Wat itself -- by that time converted to a Buddhist temple -continued to function, and for centuries it was home to a flourishing monastery that attracted pilgrims
from as far away as Japan, even while the former capital city nearby was gradually overtaken by the
jungle. Although the Buddhists occupying the temple removed most of the original Hindu art, Angkor
Wat's habitation and its continuous maintenance helped the temple remain relatively intact while
many other Angkorean temples now lie in ruins.
Even after surviving the removal of its Hindu art, Angkor Wat did not entirely escape the turbulence of
Cambodia's recent history. The Western part of Cambodia in which Angkor Wat is located was a
Khmer Rouge stronghold through the 1990s (the Khmer Rouge were ousted from the capital city,
Phnom Penh, in 1979). Restoration work on the temples took a forced, decades-long hiatus during
the wars that wracked Cambodia through the later half of the 20th century. The area was unsafe for
tourists until about 10 years ago, when the Khmer Rouge signed a peace treaty that formally ended
Cambodia's civil war. There was relatively little physical damage to the temple as a result of the wars,
but they did irreparable damage by destroying almost all of the remaining written records pertaining to
the Angkorean period. Khmer archaeology scholar Christophe Pottier of the French Research School
of the Far East estimates that 95% of the relevant documents have been destroyed in the past three
decades, an irreplaceable loss.
In the years since peace has come to Cambodia the opportunities for looting have also increased,
and many of the finest sculptures have been spirited out of the country and sold to buyers abroad.
Tourism also poses its own set of dangers, with some temples suffering from overexposure to
footsteps or curious hands. But despite this -- even as the physical structures of the temples
inevitably decay -- Angkor will continue to symbolize something greater than itself. The memory of the
Khmer Empire, and with it Cambodia's full potential, is unlikely to fade anytime soon.
Ms. Hook is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Asia.
National Review Online
Poisoned Root
by Paul Johnson
No political term has been more overused and misused than “fascism.”
Since the 1930s it has been a word of indiscriminate abuse by the Left
for anyone a scintilla to the right of them. And from the 1970s onward
many right-wing commentators have used the term “fascist Left” to
denote authoritarian tendencies on the socialist, liberal, or Democratic
side of the political equation. I have used it myself when in a bad
temper. Jonah Goldberg has now produced a comprehensive book
that summarizes all the ways in which the liberal Left, principally in
America, can legitimately be accused of fascist policies and states of
mind.
Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History
of the American Left
from Mussolini to the
Politics of Meaning,
by Jonah Goldberg
(Doubleday, 496 pp., $27.95)
The book is meaty with little-known facts, audacious intuitions, and sophisticated persiflage.
Republican activists, whether in the media or on the platform, will find it an indispensable handbook
for rough-and-tumble debate. Here are some of Goldberg’s thrusts, for which he supplies energetic
evidence. Woodrow Wilson was responsible for “the birth of liberal fascism.” FDR’s New Deal was
essentially fascist. So was the street-and-campus agitation of the 1960s. JFK’s myth and LBJ’s
dream were both hallmarked by the fascist “cult of the state.” The liberal stress on race politics
reflected “the eugenic ghost in the fascist machine.” Liberal economic theory and practice have
fascist characteristics. So has Hillary Clinton’s “New Village.”
Anyone today who uses the word “fascist,” except in its strict historical context, implicitly admits: “I
intend to be combative rather than fair-minded.” Thus, to take Goldberg’s first example, while it’s true
Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, and enforced them,
one of his main reasons for opposing America’s entry into World War I was precisely that such
legislation would inexorably follow, together with a vast and deplorable expansion of government
power. As Randolph Bourne put it, “War is the health of the State”; war, or any situation of extreme
peril for a society, whether military or economic, tends to produce ruthless and authoritarian behavior
by government. The case that Wilson was a fascist could equally be made against Lincoln.
A more persuasive example, in my view, is the behavior of FDR. His persecution of Andrew Mellon
for imaginary tax evasion was exactly the kind of abuse that regularly occurred in both Mussolini’s
Italy and Hitler’s Germany. The hounding of Mellon, an outstanding treasury secretary and the creator
and embellisher of the National Gallery in Washington, was a legal and constitutional crime unique in
American history, and reflected a personal decision of Roosevelt himself. It was possible only
because of the atmosphere of fear and panic created by the Great Depression. A similar atmosphere
might have been created by the Islamic-fundamentalist assault on the American population, and
similarly exploited. Happily, George W. Bush has steered the country through the crisis, so far,
without any resort to fascist-style methods.
But what exactly are such methods? Indeed, what precisely was Fascism? The party was founded by
Mussolini, a former socialist singled out by Lenin for praise, on March 23, 1919, and Goldberg quotes
its purpose in detail. It was essentially left-wing and democratic: universal suffrage (which meant
giving the vote to women), the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, old-age pensions, measures against
church wealth and the secular rich, workers’ councils, and some nationalization. Mussolini himself
called Fascism “the refuge of all heretics, the church of all heresies.” His first three years in power,
1922–5, were comparatively liberal and marked by freedom of speech and of the press. Jews played
a prominent part in setting up the regime. Previous governments since Italian unification had been
inefficient and corrupt, and the world, including many intellectuals, gave Fascism in its first phase a
favorable reception. Goldberg reminds us that an early version of the Cole Porter song read:
You’re the top! You’re the Great Houdini!
You’re the top! You are Mussolini.
The number of world-famous figures who paid tribute to what Mussolini was doing in the 1920s —
combating malaria by draining the Pontine Marches; building roads, railways, and magnificent railway
stations; suppressing the Mafia — included Lloyd George and Churchill. But, following the murder of
Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, and its consequences, there was a radical move toward authoritarianism,
announced in a speech by Mussolini on October 28, 1925. It is worth reading because it marked the
real beginning of Fascism and the corporate state. Opposition newspapers were banned, and
opposition leaders confined on a penal island. Opposition, said Mussolini, was unnecessary because
it already existed sufficiently in himself and his powers of self-criticism. This was a beautiful piece of
Leninism. Then came his famous formula: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State,
nothing against the State.” Thereafter Mussolini and his regime were doomed, because the Italian
state lacked the administrative resources to run everything efficiently, and Mussolini himself was a
classic case of a man easily corrupted by power, and indeed by others, such as Hitler.
Hitler’s Nazi party had virtually nothing in common with Fascism other than its generally left-wing
viewpoint. Its 1920 platform, which Goldberg quotes, owed more to Leninism. Hitler’s chief aim was to
abolish the Versailles settlement and introduce pan-German racism, which involved expelling the
Jews. If war came, the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish Problem” would take place. The most
characteristic expression of Nazi theory, once the regime was installed, was the Nuremberg Laws,
which were racial. Hitler’s suppression of the trade unions, combined with his rearmament and roadconstruction programs, enabled him to end mass unemployment; Germany was the first, indeed the
only, great power to do so. Hitler’s work was much admired and attempts to imitate him were made
across Europe, from Ireland to Romania. Nazi-style parties were ubiquitous, and had a variety of
names and doctrines.
The question of nomenclature was permanently confused by the skill of the Soviet Communists in
propaganda, and its amplification by the intellectual Left everywhere. The Soviets were initially
perplexed by the rise of Mussolini, and still more by Hitler. There was nothing in Marx, or even Lenin,
to prepare them for the rise of populist parties of the Left that could beat the Communists in both the
streets and the voting booth. Goldberg quotes the Communist ideologue Karl Radek explaining in
1923 that “Fascism is middle-class socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon
it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse.” This went some way toward the
truth; but an alternative explanation, by Leon Trotsky — that fascism was the last gasp of capitalism
— was more popular among Marxists because it could be supported by Marxist texts.
Also, the word “fascism” could be generalized into a denunciation of anything the far Left hated. In
1928 the Third International, dominated by Stalin, produced the useful formula of “social fascism.”
This could be applied not only to Nazism as well as the original Italian form, but also to all varieties of
Western democratic socialism. They were all equally evil and to be resisted. Finally, in 1933,
appeared an official Soviet definition, on Stalin’s orders: “Fascism is the unconcealed terrorist
dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist elements of finance capital.” This
jargon reflected the failure of supposedly “scientific” Marxism to predict the most striking political
development of the inter-war years. It made no sense at all but was an invitation, quickly accepted, to
the left-wing intelligentsia to describe as fascism anything they did not like. So the confusion has
remained, and the habit of right-wingers to describe as fascist anything they do not like about the Left
merely extends the confusion.
We can console ourselves by reflecting that no one has produced a satisfactory definition of
“liberalism” either. Indeed it means profoundly different things depending on which side of the Atlantic
you live. Nor have we got a universally approved definition of “conservatism,” and the advent of
neoconservatism has merely compounded the ambiguities. There is something to be said for the
English tradition of using potent but, strictly speaking, meaningless terms. Thus thoroughgoing British
Conservatives call themselves “Tories” (a label originating in 17th-century Ireland) and know what it
means to feel yourself Tory, even if they can’t define it. The name “Whig” also has still a real
resonance — I sometimes think I may be a Whig myself.
Whether use or abuse of labels for abusive purposes on the hustings or TV serves any honorable
purpose must be a matter of opinion. Goldberg quotes a TV exchange on ABC in 1968 in which Gore
Vidal goaded William F. Buckley Jr. by calling him a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley replied: “Now listen, you
queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Buckley instantly regretted this rare departure from civility. But most people will think Vidal, a notably
unscrupulous controversialist, had it coming to him, even if the threatened sock had been delivered.
Labels like “Nazi” and “fascist,” even if qualified by the nervous use of “crypto” or “neo,” are what the
Irish call “fighting words” — words that, if proved (in a 19th-century Irish court) to have been used,
were generally judged by juries to justify a blow. To “fascist” and “Nazi” I would now add the abusive
word “racist.” Of course such vituperation should not occur at all. But it will, we can be sure, and for
those thus tempted, Goldberg has provided an informative catechism.
Mr. Johnson is an author and historian. His most recent book is Heroes: From Alexander the Great
and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle.
NY Times - Freakonomics
Unintended Consequences
by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
The Case of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker
One year from today, a new president moves into the White House. This president will be eager to
carry out any number of plans — including, surely, plans to help the segments of society that most
need help. Extending a helping hand, after all, is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of the
presidency.
But before charging ahead with such plans, the new president might do well to first ask him- or herself
the following question: What do a deaf woman in Los Angeles, a first-century Jewish sandal maker
and a red-cockaded woodpecker have in common?
A few months ago, a prospective patient called the office of Andrew Brooks, a top-ranked orthopedic
surgeon in Los Angeles. She was having serious knee trouble, and she was also deaf. She wanted to
know if her deafness posed a problem for Brooks. He had his assistant relay a message: no, of
course not; he could easily discuss her situation using knee models, anatomical charts and written
notes.
The woman later called again to say she would rather have a sign-language interpreter. Fine, Brooks
said, and asked his assistant to make the arrangements. As it turned out, an interpreter would cost
$120 an hour, with a two-hour minimum, and the expense wasn’t covered by insurance. Brooks didn’t
think it made sense for him to pay. That would mean laying out $240 to conduct an exam for which
the woman’s insurance company would pay him $58 — a loss of more than $180 even before
accounting for taxes and overhead.
So Brooks suggested to the patient that they make do without the interpreter. That’s when she told
him that the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) allowed a patient to choose the mode of
interpretation, at the physician’s expense. Brooks, flabbergasted, researched the law and found that
he was indeed obliged to do as the patient asked — unless, that is, he wanted to invite a lawsuit that
he would probably lose.
If he ultimately operated on the woman’s knee, Brooks would be paid roughly $1,200. But he would
also then need to see her for eight follow-up visits, presumably with the $240 interpreter each time.
By the end of the patient’s treatment, Brooks would be solidly in the red.
He went ahead and examined the woman, paying the interpreter out of his pocket. As it turned out,
she didn’t need surgery; her knee could be treated through physical therapy. This was a fortunate
outcome for everyone involved — except, perhaps, for the physical therapist who would have to pay
the interpreter’s bills.
Brooks told several colleagues and doctor friends about his deaf patient. “They all said, ‘If I ever get a
call from someone like that, I’ll never see her,’ ” he says. This led him to wonder if the A.D.A. had a
dark side. “It’s got to be widely pervasive and probably not talked about, because doctors are just
getting squeezed further and further. This kind of patient will end up getting passed on and passed
on, getting the runaround, not understanding why she’s not getting good care.”
So does the A.D.A. in some cases hurt the very patients it is intended to help? That’s a hard question
to answer with the available medical data. But the economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist
once asked a similar question: How did the A.D.A. affect employment among the disabled?
Their conclusion was rather startling and makes Andrew Brooks’s hunch ring true. Acemoglu and
Angrist found that when the A.D.A. was enacted in 1992, it led to a sharp drop in the employment of
disabled workers. How could this be? Employers, concerned that they wouldn’t be able to discipline
or fire disabled workers who happened to be incompetent, apparently avoided hiring them in the first
place.
How long have such do-good laws been backfiring? Consider the ancient Jewish laws concerning the
sabbatical, or seventh year. As commanded in the Bible, all Jewish-owned lands in Israel were to lie
fallow every seventh year, with the needy allowed to gather whatever food continued to grow. Even
more significant, all loans were to be forgiven in the sabbatical. The appeal of such unilateral debt
relief cannot be overestimated, since the penalties for defaulting on a loan at the time were severe: a
creditor could go so far as to take a debtor or his children into bondage.
So for a poor Jewish sandal maker having trouble with his loan payments, the sabbatical law was
truly a godsend. If you were a creditor, however, you saw things differently. Why should you lend the
sandal maker money if he could just tear up the loan in Year Seven? Creditors duly gamed the
system, making loans in the years right after a sabbatical, when they were confident they would be
repaid, but then pulling tight the purse strings in Years Five and Six. The resulting credit drought was
so damaging to poor people that it fell to the great sage Hillel to fix things.
His solution, known as prosbul, allowed a lender to go to court and pre-emptively declare that a
specific loan would not be subject to sabbatical debt relief, transferring the debt to the court itself and
thereby empowering it to collect the loan. This left the law technically intact but allowed for lenders to
once again make credit available to the poor without taking on unwarranted risk for themselves.
The fallow-land portion of the sabbatical law, meanwhile, was upheld for centuries, but it, too, finally
gained a loophole, called heter mechira. This allowed for a Jew to temporarily “sell” his land to a nonJew and to continue farming it during the sabbatical year and then “buy” it back immediately afterward
— a solution that helped the modern state of Israel keep its agricultural economy humming.
The trouble is that many of the most observant Israeli Jews reject this maneuver as a sleight of hand
that violates the spirit of the law. Many of these traditionalists are also extremely poor. And so this
year, which happens to be a sabbatical year, the poorest Jews in Israel who wish to eat only food
grown on non-Jewish land are left to buy imported goods at double or triple the regular price — all in
order to uphold a law meant to help feed the poorest Jews in Israel.
Such well-meaning laws surely don’t end up harming animals as well, do they?
Consider the Endangered Species Act (E.S.A.) of 1973, which protects flora and fauna as well as
their physical habitats. The economists Dean Lueck and Jeffrey Michael wanted to gauge the E.S.A.’s
effect on the red-cockaded woodpecker, a protected bird that nests in old-growth pine trees in eastern
North Carolina. By examining the timber harvest activity of more than 1,000 privately owned forest
plots, Lueck and Michael found a clear pattern: when a landowner felt that his property was turning
into the sort of habitat that might attract a nesting pair of woodpeckers, he rushed in to cut down the
trees. It didn’t matter if timber prices were low.
This happened less than two years ago in Boiling Spring Lakes, N.C. “Along the roadsides,” an A.P.
article reported, “scattered brown bark is all that’s left of once majestic pine stands.” As sad as this
may be, it isn’t surprising to anyone who has examined the perverse incentives created by the E.S.A.
In their paper, Lueck and Michael cite a 1996 developers’ guide from the National Association of
Home Builders: “The highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A. issue is
to maintain the property in a condition such that protected species cannot occupy the property.”
One notable wrinkle of the E.S.A. is that a species is often declared endangered months or even
years before its “critical habitats” are officially designated. This allows time for developers,
environmentalists and everyone in between to have their say at public hearings. What happens
during that lag time?
In a new working paper that examines the plight of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, the economists
John List, Michael Margolis and Daniel Osgood found that landowners near Tucson rushed to clear
their property for development rather than risk having it declared a safe haven for the owl. The
economists make the argument for “the distinct possibility that the Endangered Species Act is actually
endangering, rather than protecting, species.”
So does this mean that every law designed to help endangered animals, poor people and the
disabled is bound to fail? Of course not. But with a government that is regularly begged for relief —
these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential
hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning
candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any
law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended
consequences.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of the book “Freakonomics.” More
information on the research behind this column is online at www.freakonomics.com
Borowitz Report
Nader Warns Bloomberg Not to Run
Only Room for One Egomaniac in Race, Activist Says
Not so fast.
That was the message delivered today to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg by consumer activist
Ralph Nader, who warned Mr. Bloomberg, “If some egomaniac is going to jump in and screw up this
election, it’s going to be me.”
Mr. Nader established an exploratory committee for a presidential bid today to let Mr. Bloomberg
know that there was “only room for one self-absorbed gas-bag in the 2008 race.”
At a press conference in Washington, Mr. Nader said that voters who are looking for someone to spoil
the 2008 election should be suspicious of Mr. Bloomberg’s motives: “Michael Bloomberg has a track
record of winning elections, not screwing them up.”
In contrast, Mr. Nader said, “I know how hard it is to wreck an election, and I am prepared to put in
the long hours necessary to mess this one up big-time.”
If both Mr. Nader and Mr. Bloomberg were to enter the race, they would be competing head to head
for the vote of egomaniacs, who make up three percent of the electorate nationwide but closer to fifty
percent in California and New York.
Speaking to that egomaniac constituency, Mr. Nader called Mr. Bloomberg a “novice spoiler,” adding,
“When it comes to screwing up elections, experience matters.”
“Michael Bloomberg can’t point to a single election he’s messed up – I can,” he said. “I am ready to
screw this one up on Day One.”
Elsewhere, Attorney General Michael Mukasey clarified his position on waterboarding, saying,
“Having to answer questions about whether waterboarding is torture or not is torture.”
The Onion
Congress To Raise Alpacas To Aid Struggling Economy
WASHINGTON—Members of Congress assured Americans that they have a definitive plan for
reviving the slumping economy when they unveiled on Monday a bold new fiscal stimulus package
that calls for the purchase of a pair of alpacas.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said the proposal, which is expected to solve the
sub-prime mortgage crisis, boost consumer confidence, and pump much-needed liquid capital into
the market, will be put into motion as soon as the first issue of Alpaca World magazine arrives and
Congress has a chance to go through the catalog and select the perfect mating pair.
Proponents of the new economic stimulus package show off the comfort and versatility of alpaca fleece.
"We're confident that breeding alpacas will jump-start the economy and lift this nation out of debt
once we get the start-up money," said McConnell, who insists the exotic livestock require very little
maintenance and are of a gentler temperament than their cousin the llama. "All you need is a fertile
male and a female in heat, and nature takes it course. Before you know it, the money is rolling in and
there's alpacas everywhere."
After weeks of debate, a bipartisan commission finally chose the alpaca initiative over a number of
other proposals, including handcrafting turquoise jewelry, an extensive job-training program in the
nation's most impoverished regions, and opening a U.S. Congress seller's account on Ebay.
McConnell said the group was swayed toward the idea of mating alpacas and also shearing them for
their valuable fleece because it required the fewest resources and was a "super-easy" way to rake in
cash.
"It is time to stop bickering and take real steps to revive the U.S. dollar—which is why we're sending a
fact-finding delegation out to the alpaca farm in Hagerstown [MD] next weekend," House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said. "Senator Chuck Hagel's brother-in-law said we could borrow his truck to
pick up the alpacas from the National Zoological Society on Saturday."
An alpaca
"I can't believe we ever wasted our time with tariffs, raising interest rates, and tax hikes," Pelosi
added. "This is such a no-brainer."