Lexington Green explains Beck. (Who agrees with the analysis — read the whole post at the link.)

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society…

Christopher Chantrill at American Manifesto:

The last two weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don’t understand what went wrong.

Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.

Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this earth for one great thing. They were put on this earth to midwife the civil-rights revolution. In their finest hour in the early 1960s they insisted on realizing the promise of the American revolution that all men are created equal. They insisted that the original sin of the American founding should be redeemed. They risked a lot in pushing through the civil-rights acts, and lost the South for a generation, just as Lyndon Johnson feared. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley didn’t get it; they got all caught up in legalisms.

The trouble is that liberals, put onto this earth for that one thing, want to fit every issue into the civil rights mold. They are like the hammer: everything looks like a nail. They’ve made women’s rights into a civil-rights issue, gay rights into a civil-rights issue. And now they want Muslims to be an historically marginalized group and apply the civil-rights solution to them too.

The conservative retort to liberals on the 9/11 mosque issue is simple, and it illustrates what conservatives were put on this earth to do.

Conservatives say to liberals: Yes, of course Muslims have a right to put up a mosque anywhere they want. The question is: should they exercise that right. Or should they think about the insult that such a mosque, so close to a site where 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed by Muslim terrorists, represents to New Yorkers and most Americans. Should Muslims, in a spirit of friendship and kindness, forbear to exercise their undoubted rights.

We conservatives are saying is that politics in particular and social relations in general are not just about rights and the rule of law. Life is not merely a mechanical thing about following the rules. Nor is it just an adversarial proceeding as in a court of law. Nor it is a blind application of bureaucratic rules. Life is give-and-take. Life is friendship. Life is restraint, holding back when you know you are about to hurt an acquaintance.

Indeed, if you try to reduce everything to a pound of flesh you will find that you inevitably end up committing one cruel injustice after another. The quality of mercy is not strained / It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

This need to blend rules with the sentiment of mercy and friendship has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke railed against “sophisters, economists, and calculators” 220 years ago. Here is the full quote from his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

“The age of chivalry has gone and that of economists and calculators has set in, and the glory of Europe has departed.’

Perhaps Burke was a little overwrought that day.

In the next few years we will see conservatism applied to the moral and material mess created by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the welfare state. Conservatives will be doing what they were made to do: pointing out that you cannot reduce the social relation–the caring things like care of the aged, care of the sick, the education of children–to rules and bureaucracy.

That’s what conservatives are on this earth to do. To show liberals where they went wrong.

Much has been made of the poll showing 24% of Americans think Obama is Muslim. (A slick way to make opposition to Obama seem ignorant.)

But that got me thinking about the other dumb ideas people believe.

For the record, I concocted these percentages, but I bet I’m close:

• 95% of the mainstream media think it possible for Obama to sit for 20 years in a Christian church pastored by Rev. Jeremiah Wright and not know that Wright was a black-racist, anti-American loudmouth.
• 62.5% of Democrats believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer (zero sum economics.)
• 72% of Democrats believe you can tax a nation into prosperity.
• 66% think Bush lied and people died.
• 59% think that Valerie Plame was a spy outed by the Bush administration to punish her husband, rather than the wife of a self-promoting liar who played the mainstream media like a penny-whistle. (There’s a movie coming out pushing this whopper, so the percentage will go up.)

Mark Tapscott:

It may not please New Yorker magazine’s James Surowiecki to hear this, but the tea party movement could be the clearest evidence yet of the growing relevance of his landmark book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” and its application in politics.

Surowiecki’s fundamental insight is this: The aggregate knowledge, experience, analytical prowess and inductive powers of a group are often greater than those of any one of its members. This observation isn’t always and everywhere true or evident, but compelling demonstrations of its operation in daily life are plentiful.

With everybody connected to everybody else via the Internet, new means of uncovering the wisdom of crowds become possible. The political implications therein remain rather murky, though.

I was reminded of Surowiecki earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and his tea party co-conspirator, Freedomworks.org President Matt Kibbe. The Journal piece coincided with publication of their new book, “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto,” published by HarperCollins.

Armey and Kibbe wrote that the tea party movement “has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless — not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda,” resulting in the creation of “a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics.”

This “beautiful chaos” is analogous to the “spontaneous order” Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek said results from the proper operation of free markets, according to Armey and Kibbe.

The clincher here was their noting that the tea party movement reminds Americans that “decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge.”

But if Armey and Kibbe are right, if the tea party movement is indeed sparking new ideas, innovative tactics of social and political organization, greater personal freedom and enhanced opportunities for individual expression, why is its mere mention certain to inspire frothing, spittle-spewing fury in your typical liberal, aka “progressive”?

The answer is, as Armey and Kibbe tell us, “the big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can’t imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge — someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

…there is the old issue of “compared to what”? Americans object to the decorum of building a Middle East-financed, 13-story mosque next to Ground Zero, but, of course, grant the legal right of someone to be so boorish should they choose. But why would not the world turn its attention to the Chinese and their rather illiberal treatment of Muslims, or the Russian scorched-earth strategy in Chechnya — or the endemic intolerance of Muslims themselves?

In Arizona’s case, review the now tired paradoxes. Mexico, with an awful record on illegal immigration to its south, lectures Americans about its ethical shortfalls up north. Millions of illegal aliens are angry that the state wishes to enforce federal statutes, but not quite to the extent of being too angry to quit residing illegally in the United States. The federal government sues a state for enforcing federal law, and ignores cities that subvert it. The president weighs in again, unnecessarily so, and once more misrepresents the issue, by suggesting the innocent on their way to buy ice cream will be profiled and deported.

What are the lessons? Privately, the hardest leftist knows that millions of Mexican nationals or Muslims want to enter the U.S. But then why that is so is never voiced. Does anyone simply tell the truth? The combination of private property, free markets, transparency, personal freedom, limited government, meritocracy, and a singular constitution makes life here good. And rather than appreciate such an exceptional system, much less defend the idea of it, we beat each other up that we are mere mortals, not gods, and, my God, we can find a supposed misdemeanor here amid rampant felonies abroad.

This is the most tolerant society in the world, the most multiracial and richest in religious diversity — and the most critical of its exceptional tolerance and the most lax in pointing out the intolerance of the least diverse and liberal.

It is market capitalism, unfettered meritocracy, and individual initiative within a free society that create the wealth for Al Gore to live in Montecito (indeed to create a Montecito in the first place), or for Michelle to jet to Marbella, or for John Kerry to buy a $7 million yacht. We know that, but our failure to occasionally express such a truth, coupled with a constant race/class/gender critique of American society, results in an insidious demoralization among the educated and bewilderment among the half- and uneducated.

In short, the great enigma of our postmodern age is how American society grew so wealthy and free to create so many residents that became so angry at the conditions that have made them so privileged — and how so many millions abroad fled the intolerance and poverty of their home country, and yet on arrival almost magically romanticize the very conditions in the abstract that they would never live under again in the concrete.

What, if anything, are electronic gizmos doing to our brains?

When I see people reflexively checking their smart phones, I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan in which humans are kidnapped and have devices installed in their bodies — if they think one though longer than 20 seconds, they get a searing pain.

Matt Richtel writes in the New York Times about a camping trip with five  scientists.

Todd Braver emerges from a tent nestled against the canyon wall. He has a slight tan, except for a slim pale band around his wrist.

For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says.

It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains?

Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons.

It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.

Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots.

As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them.

Some of the scientists say a vacation like this hardly warrants much scrutiny. But the trip’s organizer, David Strayer, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, says that studying what happens when we step away from our devices and rest our brains — in particular, how attention, memory and learning are affected — is important science.

“Attention is the holy grail,” Mr. Strayer says.

“Everything that you’re conscious of, everything you let in, everything you remember and you forget, depends on it.”

Echoing other researchers, Mr. Strayer says that understanding how attention works could help in the treatment of a host of maladies, like attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia and depression. And he says that on a day-to-day basis, too much digital stimulation can “take people who would be functioning O.K. and put them in a range where they’re not psychologically healthy.”

The quest to understand the impact on the brain of heavy technology use — at a time when such use is exploding — is still in its early stages. To Mr. Strayer, it is no less significant than when scientists investigated the effects of consuming too much meat or alcohol.

But stepping away is easier for some than others. The trip begins with a strong defense of digital connectedness, a debate that revolves around one particularly important e-mail.

Speaking of youngsters, Thomas Sowell takes a recent graduate to task:

A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions.

Young Justin Hudson, described as “black and Hispanic,” opened by saying how much he appreciated reaching his graduation day at this very select public high school. Then he said, “I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do you.” The reason? He and his classmates were there because of “luck and circumstances.”

Since Hunter College High School selects its applicants from the whole city on the basis of their test scores, “luck” seems a strange way to characterize why some students are admitted and many others are not. If you can’t tell the difference between luck and performance, what has your education given you, except the rhetoric to conceal your confusion from others and perhaps from yourself?

Young Mr. Hudson’s concern, apparently, is about what he referred to as the “demographics” of the school– 41 percent white and 47 percent Asian, with blacks, Hispanics and others obviously far behind. “I refuse to accept” that “the distribution of intelligence in this city” varies by neighborhood, he said.

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood but actual performance– whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere– involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society.

The reason a surgeon can operate on your heart, while someone of equal intelligence who is not a surgeon cannot, is because of what different people actually did with their intelligence. That has always varied, not only from individual to individual but from group to group– and not only in this country, but in countries around the world and across the centuries of human history.

One of the biggest fallacies of our time is the notion that, if all groups are not proportionally represented in institutions, professions or income levels, that shows something wrong with society. The very possibility that people make their own choices, and that those choices have consequences– for themselves and for others– is ignored. Society is the universal scapegoat.

If “luck” is involved, it is the luck to be born into families and communities whose values and choices turn out to be productive for themselves and for others who benefit from the skills they acquire. Observers who blame tests or other criteria for the demographic imbalances which are the rule– not the exception– around the world, are blaming whatever conveys differences for creating those differences.

They blame the messenger who brings bad news.

William Voegeli

…In 1932, FDR stated that under the social contract laid out in the Declaration of Independence, “rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The task of statesmanship has always been the re-definition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.” Unlike the rights described in the Declaration, however, there is nothing natural or inalienable about the ones described by FDR: They’re not yours to begin with, and statesmen and historical changes can always alter, augment, or rescind them.

By 1944, the social order had changed and grown enough for the statesman Roosevelt to explicitly redefine Americans’ rights to include jobs, housing, medical care, education — in short, a “Second Bill of Rights,” all of which “spell security.” That can’t be the last word, however; the prospect of future changes in the social order causes FDR to urge the recognition of “these and similar rights.” The governmental right to discover new rights could, for instance, someday lead to the development endorsed by FDR’s National Public Resources Board in 1943, when it called for recognizing the right to “rest, recreation and adventure.”

Who among us would disdain citizenship in that Club Med polity where safaris and sea cruises are guaranteed as a matter of right, where we might awaken any day to find that the changing social order has left us yet another shiny new entitlement in the driveway? The problem is that it turns out to be impossible to elevate every social-policy goal to a right without reducing every right to just one more policy goal. In 1994, the Clinton Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) enforcement of the Fair Housing Act was so zealous that it demanded that groups opposed to new homeless shelters or drug-treatment facilities in their neighborhoods turn over to federal investigators (who were seeking evidence of discriminatory motives or attitudes) every article, flier, or letter to the editor their leaders had written, as well as the minutes of every public meeting they addressed. The HUD assistant secretary called upon to defend this thuggery compressed six decades of liberal rhetoric into a single op-ed, which explained how the department had to “walk a tightrope between free speech and fair housing. We are ever mindful of the need to maintain the proper balance between these rights.”

…Peter Beinart of The Daily Beast recently concurred: “FDR’s greatness stemmed from his indifference to ideology.” Beinart approvingly quoted Roosevelt’s reply to a question about how he would explain the political philosophy behind the Tennessee Valley Authority: “I’ll tell them it’s neither fish nor fowl, but, whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley.” By the same token, Beinart praised Barack Obama for discovering and giving voice to his inner New Dealer in time to salvage health-care reform by turning “a theoretical debate into a tactile one.”

This tactile aspect of liberalism is the one that causes so many conservatives to pound their heads on the table in frustration. I refer to the moist-eyed, quivering-voiced, morally preening affirmation of the tautology that when the government gives people stuff, the people it gives stuff to wind up with more stuff than they had before the government started giving them stuff. After they calm down, conservatives say, “Fine. Stipulated: Benefits are (or at least can be) beneficial. Now, can we please talk about how we’re going to pay for all these programs? And how we’re going to make sure that the Santa Clausification of American government does not transform us from a republic of free and equal citizens into a nursery of wardens and wards? And, finally, what will be the governing practices that allow us to overcome the correlation of political forces that makes it so much easier to expand failed programs than to euthanize them?”

Given liberals’ disdain for specifying any sort of theoretical limit on how much the government should do, tax, spend, borrow, and regulate, the entire credibility of their assurances that we needn’t worry — that this affirmative government project of ours won’t spiral out of control — rests on the efficacy of the practical constraints, their ability to identify and eliminate instances of Big Government gone bad. It’s especially striking and important, then, that these ad-hoc limitations have also been so unavailing. “It is common sense,” Roosevelt said in 1932, “to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

This essay by Angelo Codevilla is a new addition to our “Essential Reading” section. It is long, 21 pages when printed out (although the print is mercifully large and easy to read) and thus too long to adequately summarize.

But here is the opening:

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Scott at Powerline:

Reading the scholarly work of Woodrow Wilson is an educational experience. It is shocking to read the expressions of his disaffection for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern liberalism lie in an assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.

Wilson’s expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama’s disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson’s views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” To achieve “redistributive change,” the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress.

Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the “second Bill of Rights” that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.

Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.”

Abraham Lincoln’s argument with Stephen Douglas also came down to a disagreement over the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln articulated this disagreement with special gusto in his critique of Douglas on July 10, 1858.

According to Douglas, the teaching of the Declaration had no general applicability beyond the immediate situation that confronted the Founding Fathers. Restating Douglas’s argument, Lincoln asked “in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.” This is certainly one of the question that is raised in acute form by the doctrine of welfare state liberalism in general and by Obamacare as a case in point.

The economic “rights” asserted by Roosevelt in his second Bill of Rights differ and conflict with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are claims on the liberty of others. If I have a right to medical care, you must have a corresponding duty to supply it. If I have a right to a decent home, you must have a duty to provide it.

The argument for the welfare state belongs in the same family as “the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden.” That’s Lincoln again.

Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”

William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State is one of the books of the year. George Will drew attention to Voegeli’s book in his excellent column “The danger of a government with unlimited power.” Michael Lind attacks Will and comes to the defense of liberalism. William Voegeli strikes back in “Why liberalism is dangerous.” Voegeli has reignited a profoundly important argument that ultimately requires us to recover a basic understanding of limited constitutional government.

Obama was an academic. Boehner was a businessman. Who do you think understands wealth and job creation?

The argument is an old one, but according to aides, both men were firm and adamant. Obama said relatively few small businesses pay the top two income tax rates because most small businesses barely scrape by. Many pay no income tax at all. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says 8.9% of people with any small business income have incomes of over $250,000, and that overstates the impact, because it counts investors in small businesses as well as actual small-business men.

But Boehner was ready with a comeback. A former small-business man himself, he quoted a congressional Joint Tax Committee study that found that half of all small business income would get hit by the president’s planned Bush tax-cut lapse. Sure, the small businesses not making any money wouldn’t be affected, but the ones succeeding out there would.

And “they’re the ones employing people because they’re the ones making money,” a House GOP leadership aide said.

It’s not just an academic argument. The side that wins the definitional war over the tax cuts will win the political war. Voters tend to side with Democrats and favor raising taxes on the rich to trim the budget deficit. They also hate tax hikes generally. If Americans see the president’s plan as soaking the rich, he wins. If they believe it will primarily hurt small businesses, the Republicans win.

Annie Leonard has become an internet sensation with her “Story of Stuff.” Now her anti-capitalist videos are being shown in elementary schools, indoctrinating kids. HowStuffWorks was created to counter her.

Here’s a taste.

The NYT is deeply, deeply puzzled.

Why is unemployment so high?

The whodunit has flummoxed economists in both parties for a year. In 2009, as the new Obama administration grappled with the financial crisis, joblessness rose nearly two points beyond customary recession forecasts.

Part of the uncertainty concerns why. More consequential now, as the administration and Congress determine what to do, is whether the unemployment spike reflects a short-term or permanent shift in demand for workers.

“The stakes are enormous,” said Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton economist who advised President Bill Clinton, because the answers are “going to dictate the pace at which jobs come back.”

And that, in turn, may dictate whether Democrats keep control of Congress or surrender at least one chamber to Republicans. So long as the job market remains weak, even substantial achievements like the passage of new financial regulations won’t alleviate voter discontent with the party in power.

In the days of unfettered capitalism, we dammed rivers, belched soot into the air and leveled  forests without a thought. We were rambunctious clods.

Then ecology took hold, the notion that all natural things are interconnected in a system, one we barely understand and which we could spoil via ignorant exploitation. Today we respect nature and its intricate ways (not enough to please Gaia types to be sure.)

What we need now is an new ecology, one that respects the delicate business ecosystem.

America is a rich nation because of that wealth generating ecosystem. It is more delicate than nature. The history of the world is rife with examples of once-great nations brought low. And of nations that never advance.  In recent times, Zimbabwe went from a rich nation to a beggar nation because of human error.

Democrats intellectually understand the importance of business enterprise, but in their gut, they harbor distrust of anything that turns a profit. This colors everything they do.

In one year alone, the Democrats have rushed through two massive laws — Obamacare and the financial regulations — that impact businesses in untold ways. Literally untold because these massive tomes still leave much to the discretion of newly minted bureaucrats who will write and enforce hundreds of new regulations.

In effect, the Dem Cong are the modern equivalent of the cloddish capitalists. They tamper, in ways big and small, with the delicate wealth-creating enterprise that we all take for granted. The goose that lays the golden egg is indeed mortal, as we may soon witness to our lasting regret.

Whenever private industry causes a calamity, certain voices rise to demand new laws that will prevent another.

But what about when government and its laws cause calamities? Just for fun, read the story below and substitute “laws” for “technology.”

Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

It’s all so familiar. A technological disaster, then a presidential commission examining what went wrong. And ultimately a discovery that while technology marches on, concern for safety lags. Technology isn’t as foolproof as it seemed.

Space shuttles shatter. Bridges buckle. Hotel walkways collapse. Levees fail. An offshore oil rig explodes, creating the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

The common thread – which the new presidential oil spill commission will be looking for – often is technological arrogance and hubris. It’s the belief by those in charge that they’re the experts, that they know what they’re doing is safe. Add to that the human weaknesses of avoidance, greed and sloppiness, say academics who study disasters.

Even before the oil spill commission holds its first meeting today in New Orleans, panel co-chairman William Reilly couldn’t help but point out something he’s already noticed.

The technology to clean up after an oil spill “is primitive,” Reilly said. “It’s wholly disproportionate to the tremendous technological advances that have allowed deepwater drilling to go forward. It just hasn’t kept pace.”

Then he added that government regulation also hasn’t kept pace. And something else hasn’t kept up either, Reilly said: how the oil industry assesses and works with the risk of catastrophic damage from spills.

Cutting-edge technology often works flawlessly. People are amazed. At

first, everyone worries about risk. Then people get lulled into complacency by success and they forget that they are operating on the edge, say experts who study disasters. Corners get cut, problems ignored. Then boom.
Technological disasters, like the BP oil spill, follow a well-worn “trail of tears,” said Bob Bea, a University of California at Berkeley engineering professor who has studied 630 disasters of all types. Bea is also an expert on offshore drilling and is consulting with the presidential commission.

Bea categorizes disasters into four groups. One such group is when an organization simply ignores warning signs through overconfidence and incompetence. He thinks the BP spill falls into that category. Bea pointed to congressional testimony that BP ignored problems with a dead battery, leaky cement job and loose hydraulic fittings.

It’s that type of root cause – not the equipment failure alone – that the oil spill commission will focus on, including looking at the corporate and regulatory “culture” that led to bad decisions, Reilly said.

Disasters don’t happen because of “an evil empire,” Bea said. “It’s hubris, arrogance and indolence.”

And disasters will keep on happening. In the future, watch out for problems with the U.S. power grid, Sacramento levee failures and even some of the newest airplanes, said Rutgers University professor Lee Clarke, author of the book “Worst Cases.”

“There’s nothing safe out there,” said Yale University professor Charles Perrow, author of the book “Normal Accidents.” “We like to pretend there is and argue afterward, `That’s why we took the risks because it hadn’t failed before.”‘

The oil rig explosion “reminds me an awful lot of the NASA accidents,” said Stanford physics professor Douglas Osheroff, who was on the commission that examined the causes of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.

“Obviously none of these systems are fail-safe,” Osheroff said. “People don’t spend enough time thinking about what could go wrong.”

Years ago, a friend’s father offered him (and I) some useful wisdom, which I’ve since dubbed Col. Stoll’s dictum. It is:

“The world was designed for average people. It had to be, otherwise it would fall apart.”

His counsel was meant to temper our frustration, as smart people, with the seemingly idiotic rules and systems that govern us all. If you ever rub up against some dumb rule and exclaim,  ”That just so stupid!” remember the dictum.

Now I wonder whether the bar — as low as it is — wasn’t set too high.

Yesterday brought news about people running into lamp posts and wandering into traffic while texting. Some think technological solutions are the answer. I say if you get bonked on the head more than once, your skull is too thick.

I blogged a year or so ago about a British town that installed safety pads on the light posts for this reason. In the British town of Torquay,  police now offer free flip flops to binge drinking women to prevent dangerous tumbles in their high heels.

This week the LA Times liberal consumer affairs columnist railed against the high fees banks charge for check overdrafts. He wants tougher laws on banks. I say if you get nailed for $39 for bouncing a check, you should learn your lesson. Avoiding the fee is quite simple: be responsible.

Come to think of it, much of the liberal agenda treats all citizens as idiots that need Nanny State protection to survive.

Many claim the financial meltdown was caused in large part because of “predatory lenders” and that new laws are needed to prevent a replay. But Truth in Lending laws were passed years ago that spell out every nit in a mortgage transaction. Buy a house and you’ll get writer’s cramp from signing that tall stack of papers created by law to protect you. But you have to read them or at least pay someone to read them for you. Is that too much?

Apparently, it is. James Surowieki writes in the New Yorker:

The depth of our financial ignorance is startling. In recent years, Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at Dartmouth and the head of the Financial Literacy Center, has conducted extensive studies of what Americans know about finance. It’s depressing work. Almost half of those surveyed couldn’t answer two questions about inflation and interest rates correctly, and slightly more sophisticated topics baffle a majority of people. Many people don’t know the terms of their mortgage or the interest rate they’re paying. And, at a time when we’re borrowing more than ever, most Americans can’t explain what compound interest is.

Average people are understandably pressed for time, too busy watching the Real Housewives of Atlanta or some such to manage their money.

Liberals are correct: there are a lot of ignorant people among us. They make stupid choices that hurt them. The liberal solution is to build Nerf World and make us all live there.

But I don’t want to. I believe that an essential aspect of freedom is the right to fail. That’s a shocking concept to liberals, I know. So just in case any libs are reading this, I’ll repeat: freedom must include the right to fail.

I fear we’re facing a headwind on this. Every problem seems to demand a new law to protect the average American. The more laws, the more average citizens believe there is less risk, less reason for them to mind their own business.

And so we blunder on. Living in a world not just designed for average people, but often designed by them too.

Today’s Internet is a perfect expression of the wisdom of crowds — sites live and die based on a very democratic system. What people like survives, what they don’t does not.

BBC News writes about efforts to harness the wisdom of crowds (read the terrific book by that title).

Both the British government and BP have recently called on the public to help them sort out a mess. Chancellor George Osborne asked for tips on programmes to be cut to trim the huge budget deficit, while deputy prime minister Nick Clegg wants us to suggest “silly” laws that can be repealed.

And the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico prompted BP to call on Joe Public for ideas to stem the flow of oil after its in-house solutions failed. So far BP’s corporate May Day has elicited more than 20,000 suggestions.

In trendy parlance, such appeals for outside help are known as crowdsourcing, a term that Mr Clegg made sure to name check in his appeal.

So what is crowdsourcing? Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything, says examples are everywhere.

Open source computer operating systems, such as Linux and Google’s Android, the big rival to Apple’s iPhone, are written and refined by members of the public.

Another good example of such collaboration is Wikipedia, which allows users to write and edit entries for its online encyclopaedia: “For the first time millions of people can aggregate their talent and expertise,” says Williams.

“Previously the assumption had been you had to create a company. Here is something completely different.”

There are numerous modern examples of how collaboration has transformed businesses, Williams says. One good recent example is that of the Canadian mining company Goldcorp, which was struggling financially and unable to find gold on its land in northern Ontario.

When a new chief executive arrived he put all its geological data online, asked for help on where the gold was located and put up $500,000 in prize money for accurate suggestions.

Striking $3bn of gold

“They got submissions from people all over the world, including people using 3D computer modelling techniques. They found $3bn worth of gold on the property and Goldcorp became one of Canada’s biggest mining companies.”

It’s just one of a number of examples of how opening a problem out to the public and away from a small pool of workers can lead to huge gains, Williams says.

“These things happen a lot. You’re making a problem accessible to a large range of people with a diverse range of skills. And it turns out it’s not just for companies it applies to government as well.”

The idea is gaining traction in the normally more conservative corridors of the public sector, says Natalie Evans, deputy director of think tank Policy Exchange.

“We now have the technology to reach a huge pool of talent and ideas from the general public in way that simply wasn’t possible before. Done properly, this means we can leverage mass collaboration in a way that fosters a sense of ‘public buy-in’.

“This can be particularly important where – say in the case of deciding where the axe must fall in terms of cutting public spending – there are difficult decisions to be made.”

Seeking ideas is one thing. But how willing are those in power to act on the public’s suggestions?

Those in power rarely value the wisdom of crowds, especially the Big Government busy-bodies currently running the USA.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

–Robert Heinlein

Don Rumsfeld:

Some might ask how our country has endured?  Well, it should be no mystery.  It is because we are a free people, blessed with a free political and a free economic system – Where we are: free to think and act; to believe and protest; to vote and petition; and, yes free to succeed, to fail, and to start again.

The night satellite image of the Korean Peninsula, my favorite as many of you know well, captured many miles above the earth, tells the whole story.  Below the 38^th parallel, South Korea is bathed in the light of dozens of cities, monuments to that nation’s freedom.  In one of the most successful economies in the world, millions of South Koreans go about their work, creating opportunity and prosperity for themselves and their families. North of the DMZ is darkness.  There live exactly the same people, with the same natural resources.  But those millions of Koreans labor not for themselves or their families, but for a regime that enslaves them.

The stark difference between the free and the unfree is illuminated in that picture.  The boundless energy of human beings is most assuredly not unleashed by governments of boundless power.  That energy is unleashed only by free political institutions and free economic systems.

But because we are free, as a people, we face choices:

We can choose to engage with the world, strengthening alliances with our friends, expanding trade agreements, deterring potential foes, and taking the fight to them when necessary.  Or we can retreat, or make the truly tragic mistake of modeling our country after systems that are obviously unsuccessful.  If we choose the latter path, let there be no doubt, we are certain to fail the generations to follow.

On September 12, 2001, hard hats unfurled an American flag over the still burning and deeply scarred Pentagon.  Joyce and I wanted to include that scene in this portrait because those traits of resilience and perseverance – while remarkable – are not uncommon for the men and women of this Department.  They are what built and sustained this country.  And they are what I saw every day in the men and women I served alongside in the months and years after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history.

To each of those who serve – military and civilian – or have served, and to your families, there will come a time when the achievements you’ve made, and the trials you’ve endured, will recede into history. But although time will pass, and memories fade, certain important things will remain always – your pride of service and the appreciation of a grateful nation.

This country – which has treated me so well, and which offers so much opportunity for us all – exists and prospers because the members of the United States armed forces, have stepped forward and volunteered to protect it.  In a very real sense, America is their gift to the future.

Tom Bunzel:

…recently I experienced some profound changes—I recognized that I had shifted my outlook and way of relating to others in a way that probably was the result of a specific physiological change (possibly in my brain) and asked about it from a scientific perspective when she replied with the words that are the title of this blog: “We really don’t know very much.”

I was taken aback and shaken by this remark for a number of reasons—at first it was a shock because if anyone could give me an answer to why my life had changed by adopting a cat, it was her. She has advanced degrees, years of research and experience, and incredible insight. Yet that was her initial response.

But her subsequent explanation of my response was more poetic and metaphorical than one might expect from a scientist – she said that I had opened a door into another area with unknown results, and I was experiencing a depth of emotion I hadn’t let in previously.

I couldn’t argue with this description. The undeniable reality is that since I let another small living being into my life, and connected and let it attach itself to me and show mutual affection, many things that used to weigh me down seem less significant.

But does that mean the cat is like Prozac? Does it directly affect specific areas of the brain or emotions in ways we can document and understand?

My understanding is that the actual effects of chemicals like Prozac aren’t entirely understood either; for one thing the results vary from person to person. Certainly there are volumes written about how drugs work with the brain chemistry and activate other chemicals like serotonin, or inhibit them.

And science goes on to unearth a tremendous amount of information about how we work, our world, and even the universe; for example, we seem to “know” that the universe is over 14 billion years old.

But returning to the psychologist’s remark, I think what really troubles most thinking and feeling people is that yes – we really don’t know jack about things that are really important.

David Brooks.

The larger conflict began with the end of the cold war. That ideological dispute settled the argument over whether capitalism was the best economic system. But it did not settle the argument over whether democratic capitalism was the best political-social-economic system. Instead, it left the world divided into two general camps.

On the one side are those who believe in democratic capitalism — ranging from the United States to Denmark to Japan. People in this camp generally believe that businesses are there to create wealth and raise living standards while governments are there to regulate when necessary and enforce a level playing field. Both government officials like President Obama and the private sector workers like the BP executives fall neatly into this camp.

Not so fast with Obama. Do GM and Chrysler ring a bell?

Truth be told, Obama and his arrogant cohort think they could run everything better — banks, the health care sector, pharmaceutical industry and on and on.

On the other side are those that reject democratic capitalism, believing it leads to chaos, bubbles, exploitations and crashes. Instead, they embrace state capitalism. People in this camp run Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela and many other countries.

Many scholars have begun to analyze state capitalism. One of the clearest and most comprehensive treatments is “The End of the Free Market” by Ian Bremmer.

Bremmer points out that under state capitalism, authoritarian governments use markets “to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit.” The ultimate motive, he continues, “is not economic (maximizing growth) but political (maximizing the state’s power and the leadership’s chances of survival).” Under state capitalism, market enterprises exist to earn money to finance the ruling class.

The contrast is clearest in the energy sector. In the democratic capitalist world we have oil companies, like Exxon Mobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, that make money for shareholders.

In the state capitalist world there are government-run enterprises like Gazprom, Petrobras, Saudi Aramco, Petronas, Petróleos de Venezuela, China National Petroleum Corporation and the National Iranian Oil Company. These companies create wealth for the political cliques, and they, in turn, have the power of the state behind them.

These companies (except China) are exploiting their own national resources, which makes their examples irrelevant.

How well do state-run enterprises excel in innovation? Creating entirely new businesses and products? In tapping the entrepreneurial potential in human beings?

Years hence the biggest story of our times won’t be oil spills or deep recessions, it will be the creation of the Internet — the greatest example of unregulated, free spirited untethered innovation.

…misguided compassion hits the poor. Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.

…No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor—moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural—that were particularly prevalent in the country (see “Childhood’s End,” Summer 2008).

My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most important charities in Britain’s increasingly corporatist society, was the government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people’s self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption—not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.

I first started thinking about poverty when I worked as a doctor during the early eighties in the Gilbert Islands, a group of low coral atolls in an immensity of the Central Pacific. Much of the population still lived outside the money economy, and the per-capita GDP was therefore extremely low. It did not seem to me, however, that the people were very poor. Their traditional way of life afforded them what anthropologists call a generous subsistence; their coconuts, fish, and taros gave them an adequate—and, in some respects, elegant—living. They lived in an almost invariant climate, with the temperature rarely departing more than a few degrees from 85. Their problems were illness and boredom, which left them avid for new possibilities when they came into contact with the outside world.

Life in the islands taught me a lively disrespect for per-capita GDP as an accurate measure of poverty. I read recently in a prominent liberal newspaper that “the majority of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day.” This statement is clearly designed less to convey an economic truth than to provoke sympathy, evoke guilt, and drum up support for foreign aid in the West, where an income of less than $1 a day would not keep body and soul together for long; whereas it is frequently said that one of Nigeria’s problems is the rapid increase in its population.

As it happens, an island next door (in Pacific terms) to the Gilbert Islands was home to an experiment in the sudden, unearned attainment of wealth. Nauru, a speck in the ocean just ten miles around, for a time became the richest place on earth. The source of its sudden riches was phosphate rock. Australia had long administered the island, and the British Phosphate Commission had mined the phosphate on behalf of Australia, Britain, and New Zealand; but when Nauru became independent in 1968, the 4,000 or so Nauruans gained control of the phosphate, which made them wealthy. The money came as a gift. Most Nauruans made no contribution to the extraction of the rock, beyond selling their land. The expertise, the management, the labor, and the transportation arrived from outside. Within just a few years, the Nauruans went from active subsistence to being rentiers.

The outcome was instructive. The Nauruans became bored and listless. One of their chief joys became eating to excess. On average, they consumed 7,000 calories per day, mainly rice and canned beef, and they drank Fanta and Château d’Yquem by the caseload. They became the fattest people on earth, and, genetically predisposed already to the illness, 50 percent of them became diabetic. It was my experience of Nauru that first suggested to me the possibility that abruptly distributing wealth has psychological effects as well as economic ones.

Liberals are convinced that poverty causes crime. They believe this religiously, despite ample contrary evidence.

So, now in year two of the great recession, crime has dropped. Wha?!

Crime in the United States dropped dramatically in 2009, bucking a historical trend that links rising crime rates to economic woes. Property crimes and violent offenses each declined about 5 percent, the FBI said Monday, citing reports from law enforcement coast to coast.

It was the third straight year of declines, and this year’s drops were even steeper than those of 2007 and 2008, despite the recession.

In San Jose, the number of violent crimes fell for the third year in a row, according to the FBI.

From 2008 to 2009, crime rates in five of 10 major categories, most notably robbery and aggravated assault, dropped in San Jose, according to the preliminary report released Monday. The number of murders in San Jose also fell from 31 to 28.

But as violent crimes fell in San Jose, property crime rose by about two percent, according to the statistics. The number of burglaries saw the biggest jump, from 3,457 to 3,741, while larceny/theft and motor vehicle thefts saw smaller increases.

There were words of caution from experts about the national numbers.

“It’s fabulous news, but I would draw an analogy to global warming: Even if you believe the long-term trend is increasing temperatures, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a cold year,” said Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.

I draw a different analogy to global warming — once again, secular religion trumping science.

This recalls Fox Butterfield, whose obtuseness earned him renown.

“The Butterfield Effect” is named in honor of ace New York Times crime reporter Fox Butterfield, the intrepid analyst responsible for such brilliantly headlined stories as “More Inmates, Despite Drop In Crime,” and “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction,” not to mention the poetic 1997 header, “Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has said that he is a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to the communist country that exiled him — China.

Don’t forget the part about invading and annexing Tibet.

“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

Paid? Marxist?

Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said yesterday.

However, he credited China’s embrace of market economics for breaking communism’s grip over the world’s most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to “represent all sorts of classes.”

Capitalism “brought a lot of positive to China. Millions of people’s living standards improved,” he said.

So to review:

• Marxism is moral, but leaves millions mired in poverty (or dead.)
  
• Capitalism is immoral, but creates wealth that has lifted a billion people out of poverty in the past century.
  

This is essential reading. Arthur C. Brooks in the WaPo.

America faces a new culture war.

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration’s money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation.

I call this a culture war because free enterprise has been integral to American culture from the beginning, and it still lies at the core of our history and character. “A wise and frugal government,” Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” He later warned: “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” In other words, beware government’s economic control, and woe betide the redistributors.

Now, as then, entrepreneurship can flourish only in a culture where individuals are willing to innovate and exert leadership; where people enjoy the rewards and face the consequences of their decisions; and where we can gamble the security of the status quo for a chance of future success.

Yet, in his commencement address at Arizona State University on May 13, 2009, President Obama warned against precisely such impulses: “You’re taught to chase after all the usual brass rings; you try to be on this “who’s who” list or that Top 100 list; you chase after the big money and you figure out how big your corner office is; you worry about whether you have a fancy enough title or a fancy enough car. That’s the message that’s sent each and every day, or has been in our culture for far too long — that through material possessions, through a ruthless competition pursued only on your own behalf — that’s how you will measure success.” Such ambition, he cautioned, “may lead you to compromise your values and your principles.”

I appreciate the sentiment that money does not buy happiness. But for the president of the United States to actively warn young adults away from economic ambition is remarkable. And he makes clear that he seeks to change our culture. (more…)

Stuart Schwartz at American Thinker:

…Welcome to government by professor. Assorted faculty of Ivy League schools have come together to form an administration with the least real-world and most academic experience of any in modern times, the American Enterprise Institute notes. And so we have a government of scolds, lecturers, and bullies, arrogant academics cheered on by mainstream media when they take a “paddle” to average citizens and taxpayers.

Main Street, say hello to Harvard Drive, Chicago Place, and Berkeley Boulevard. The latter are roads that begin in the elite universities and bring “someone better than you” to power in Washington, D.C. Or so says the dean of the School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a card-carrying member of what David Brooks of the New York Times fawningly calls “the educated class.”

It’s okay to be ordinary, a “swiller of beer,” Berkeley Dean Christopher Edley, Jr. says, but it takes a “superior intellect” like that of Barack Obama and his taxpayer-paid faculty, Ivy Leaguers most, to understand the needs of Main Street.

The dean well represents the arrogance of an educated class who sees the ordinary taxpayer as raw material to be shaped by regulations wielded by their intellectual superiors, as one of those superiors — Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein — has written.

Smart people lead and ordinary people follow, Dr. Sunstein maintains, showing the common touch developed during a lifetime on the law faculties of the University of Chicago and Harvard. He is part of a new breed of executive gathered by the Professor-in-Chief, all of whom share the view that Joe the Plumber and Millie the Hairstylist are too simple to understand their real needs…and require a federal government led by an educated elite to regulate them into appropriate behavior and values.

Ordinary taxpayers, those who simply live life and take up space in the world outside of the faculty lounge…well, it’s about time they recognized that, as the Berkeley dean noted, “what’s good for Harvard and Yale [is] good for America.” Professor knows best, not some Midwest father or parent who knows nothing of Marx and Mao and “libertarian paternalism” (all favorites of one or another Obama czar, the last a theory in vogue among Harvard faculty that translates into you-are-free-to-choose-anything-I-allow-you-to-choose).

Read on.

PBS’s Nova series usually sticks to hard science, but Tuesday’s show dipped into the world of economics and market psychology.

The resulting episode was both shallow and subtly partisan.

Here is how they describe their show:

In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, NOVA presents “Mind Over Money”—an entertaining and penetrating exploration of why mainstream economists failed to predict the crash of 2008 and why we so often make irrational financial decisions. It’s a show that reveals how our emotions interfere with our decision-making and explores controversial new arguments about the world of finance. Before the current crash, most Wall Street analysts believed that markets are “efficient”—that investors are reasonable and always operate in their own economic self-interest. Most of the time, these assumptions of classical economics work well enough. But in extreme situations, people panic and conventional theories collapse. In the face of the recent crash, can a new science that aims to incorporate human psychology into finance—behavioral economics—do better?

With mentioning Hayek by name, the producers were taking sides in the great economic debate of the 20th century: Hayek’s free market economics vs. Keynesian government-directed economics.

The topic was better explored in the PBS Frontline six-parter, The Commanding Heights. You can watch it online.

Nova showed some mildly interesting social science experiments that demonstrate how human beings will, at times, make irrational choices.

This is news?

Human beings are flawed. We’re often greedy, emotional, vindictive, etc. Open a newspaper and read any advice column for examples. (I’m assuming you have none in your own life.)

History is replete with economic bubbles. Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds covered some doozies and it was written in 1841.

Since then we’ve had bubble after bubble.

The Florida land boom of the 1920s made some people into overnight millionaires. The Internet/tech bubble of the Clinton years made a lot of people rich and then poor. A lucky few, like Mark Cuban, got out on top.

There was even a Beanie Baby bubble.

So it isn’t news that human beings are subject to bubbles.

What’s the prevention? What’s the cure? A more intrusive regulatory scheme?

Given that government policy prompted the loose lending rules that fueled the housing bubble, why trust the government? Didn’t we already have numerous agencies staffed with smart people in place to prevent such things?

Who is to say that regulators are immune to bubble psychology, which, when you consider it, is just group-think writ large.

The Democrats will probably pass their finance reform bill, which will no doubt have unintended consequences that depress economic activity. Wealth that otherwise would have been created, won’t be. We won’t notice the loss because it will be invisible. There will be no flashy bubble bursting.

Of all the ideas floated since the 2008 “crash,” the most innovative came from Daniel Roth in Wired. He proposed that all financial reporting be done in a unified electronic format, then posted online so that the role of financial watchdog can be crowd sourced. That is, unleash Glenn Reynolds’s “Army of Davids” to study the fine print.

Writes Roth:

Even the regulators can’t keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn’t been reviewed in a decade. We shouldn’t be surprised. While the SEC is staffed by a relatively small group of poorly compensated financial cops, Wall Street bankers get paid millions to create new and ever more complicated investment products. By the time regulators get a handle on one investment class, a slew of new ones have been created. “This is a cycle that goes on and on—and will continue to get repeated,” says Peter Wysocki, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “You can’t just make new regulations about the next innovation in financial misreporting.”

That’s why it’s not enough to simply give the SEC—or any of its sister regulators—more authority; we need to rethink our entire philosophy of regulation. Instead of assigning oversight responsibility to a finite group of bureaucrats, we should enable every investor to act as a citizen-regulator. We should tap into the massive parallel processing power of people around the world by giving everyone the tools to track, analyze, and publicize financial machinations. The result would be a wave of decentralized innovation that can keep pace with Wall Street and allow the market to regulate itself—naturally punishing companies and investments that don’t measure up—more efficiently than the regulators ever could.

Now there’s a novel idea for Nova (and Congress): rely on the wisdom of crowds, also a great book.

Bookworm

If you’d been around in 1894, you would instantly have recognized the name “Svengali.”  He was the chief villain in George du Maurier’s blockbuster novel Trilby. The Svengali plot-line was a simple one:  Trilby was an innocent (and tone deaf) laundress and model living in fin de siecle Paris.  Svengali hypnotized her into bec0ming a great singer and the toast of the music world.  When he suffered a heart attack during one of her performances, his spell over her broke, and she was left standing on stage, bewildered and humiliated.  Since then, we use the word “svengali” to describe a person who steals the will of another with evil intent.

It’s become increasingly clear to me that liberals view Rush Limbaugh in precisely that light.  And no, I’m not making the obvious point that the Obami and the Democratic party fear Rush’s bully pulpit and consistently demonize him.  I’m talking about the rank-and-file’s fear that even listening to Rush for a moment or two causes a person to lose the will to be a liberal.  Those liberals to whom I speak shy away from him, not because they disagree with what he has to say, but because they fear he will convince them that he’s right.

The following is a talk I had just the other day while driving in the car with a liberal friend who, having voted for Obama, is now deeply regretting that decision:

Me:  How would you like to do something completely different?  Let me put Rush on the radio.

Her:  No, no.  I don’t want to do that.

Me:  Come on, you’ll like him.  He’s not at all the way you’ve heard him described in the other media.  He’s very well-informed, quite funny, and amazingly prescient.

Her:  No, no.  He’s too arrogant.

Me:  Nah.  That’s just an act.  Give it a try, for just a few minutes.

Her:  No.  I can’t listen to him.  [Then, as a sop:]  I watch Fox sometimes.

So here we have a woman who realizes that she made a mistake voting Democrat this election, who is open to conservative news (I believe her when she says she watches Fox), yet who assiduously avoids any contact with Rush.  Incidentally, this was not a one time-0nly conversation.  I had virtually the same conversation with two other regret-filled liberals.