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Talk about the American off-year elections has been dominated by the Gubernatorial elections (victory for the Republicans in Mississippi – against a trial lawyer, victory for the Democrats in Kentucky – against an ‘ethically challenged’ Republican Governor) and by the onward march of the Democrats in the Washington D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia. And, of course, by the defeat of the voucher plan in Utah by the unions.
However, there is a another side to these elections – tax and spend is clearly not favoured by the voters.
For example, voters in Oregon voted down an increase in the cigarette tax in spite of the money being for more children’s health welfare. And voters in New Jersey voted down a proposal to borrow money for stem cell research. Children’s health welfare, and stem cell research – two poster issues for the left and they were defeated. And defeated in ‘Blue States’.
Also an election in the heartland of the United States caught my eye… the tax-and-spend Mayor Bart Peterson was defeated in Indianapolis by the almost unknown Republican Greg Ballard – in spite of Mr Peterson outspending Mr Ballard’s campaign some thirty to one (thanks to donations from politically connected business enterprises and so on) and the support of the usual suspects (the media and academia).
Message to Republicans:
If you really do oppose tax-and-spend (rather than just pretend to, whilst carrying on in your normal corrupt way) you can actually win in 2008.
The campaign to become Mayor of London must be taking its toll. Boris Johnson writes today that the interests of the US and the rest of the world would be best served if Hillary Clinton reaches the White House. His reasoning is thin at best. Perhaps the real problem is that America, even though it is such a vast nation, has only been able to produce Presidential candidates of such dreadful quality as this lot (I am afraid that applies partly even to Ron Paul, for whom I have a lot of sympathy).
Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.
The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:
The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.
Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls “civilian audit” of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.
Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)
Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West’s military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.
It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.
It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.
Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.
Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.
Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West’s warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.
Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.
(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)
I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:
I would like to thank you for writing this article.
Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!
But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake”
I hope he is still writing such articles.
I first wrote this article intending it to be a comment on this thread at the Volokh Conspiracy. It grew so big and wandered ‘through every room in the house’, straying away from the specific topic so I decided not to inflict it on them. Instead, Samizdatistas are the lucky beneficiaries. Seriously, I presume most of you will skip it. That is fine. Here is the amendment as it appears in the US Constitution.
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
In reading the Federalist Papers it appears obvious, at least to me, that ‘the militia’ and ‘a well regulated militia’ are two entirely different things. Hamilton clearly describes in #29 a great deal of commitment and training required to “acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia” [my underscore] and speculates that for “the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens” it “would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss”.
In #46 Madison calculates the number of “a militia” at 1/8 of the entire population.
The highest number to which, … a standing army can be carried … does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; … This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.”
Clearly Hamilton’s “well-regulated militia” and Madison’s “militia” are entirely different and together with the title of the New York statute that Eugene Volokh cites,”An Act for Settling and Regulating the Militia …”, suggests that the degree of regulation of the militia was a continuous scale.
The prize for the most stupid comment of the debate goes to Senator John McCain for saying that he wished “interest rates were zero”. Senator McCain also said that he did not understand monetary policy, so he could just have been joking, but as he has previously expressed admiration for Alan ‘Credit Bubble’ Greenspan I can not be sure. Senator McCain also had problems hearing some of the questions – although no one else had a problem with this.
Ron Paul gave a good explanation of the bad effects of the expansion of the money supply by the Federal Reserve system. This explanation was clearly wasted on John McCain, who suggested in total seriousness that Ron Paul read Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’ – which is absurd as Ron Paul has indeed read this book, and moreover because it showed that Senator McCain had misunderstood Congressman Paul to mean that the rich are rich because the poor are poor – when what Ron Paul was saying was that one of the bad effects of an expansion in the credit-money supply is that it tends to help rich people at the expense of the poor (which is not the same thing at all).
However, Congressman Paul did rather spoil things by waving his arms about and by the way his voice goes up and down for no reason. Still this is a matter of style – other people may like the Congressman’s style. What is not a matter of style was Ron Paul’s failure to mention Social Security or any of the ‘entitlement programs’. He even implied, constantly, that most Federal government spending goes to the ‘military industrial complex’ when most such spending has not in fact gone to the military since the 1960’s.
And whatever one may think of the present military campaigns, a claim that they are being fought to benefit the ‘military industrial complex’ merchants-of-death is absurd (even if one ignores the point that a lot of stuff is imported these days anyway).
Of course most of the other candidates did not talk much about the Welfare State either. They made ritual attacks on “domestic spending” but that was about it.
Tom Tancredo did make the point that most Federal government spending goes to the entitlement programs (those unconstitutional things that have been growing like cancers for decades), but he mostly twisted every question into an immigration question (for example to attack John McCain). I know that Congressman Tancredo is upset that there are sometimes no immigration questions in these debates – but twisting more than one question into an immigration question is not acceptable.
Fred Thompson said that the present entitlement programs were unsustainable in the long run and suggested (as first steps) people being allowed to use some of the Social Security tax to set up private investments, and that government benefits should be indexed to prices (not to wages). But he did not say much more than that. Senator Thompson also had the most stupid question of the debate directed at him (by some MSNBC moron whose name I did not catch) “who is the Prime Minister of Canada?” – “Harper” came the reply, but what was the point of the exchange?
Duncan Hunter gave me the impression, as he always does, of a good soldier who somehow found himself in the House of Representatives. He would be ideal man to be in a dangerous situation with, in that he would know what to do – and is also honourable (so he would not just save himself – indeed he would lay down his life to help the poor sap with him). However, his political policies (protectionism and so on) would have terrible results.
Senator Brownback was big on “family values” and being “pro life” (a not so veiled attacks on Rudy G.), but he also said he was in favour of an “optional flat tax” – so he did remember he was in a debate about economic policy.
Mike Huckabee, the Governor from Arksansas, told various folksy stories, which as usually did not seem to mean anything. But he also repeated that he was in favour of getting rid of the income tax. The Governor also said he would not have vetoed the SCHIP expansion. I suppose he squares the circle of no income tax and wild Federal government spending by supporting a sky-is-the-limit Federal sales tax.
Rudy G. did fairly well defending free trade and pointing out the tax cuts he made as Mayor of New City city. He also stressed his faith in technology and what human beings could do if freed from high taxes and regulations. However, he was rather vague in dealing with what government spending he would cut.
I am uncertain as to what Governor Mitt Romney said as I was distracted by the big neon sign saying “this man is dishonest slime” that I see over his head whenever he starts speaking. This may well be unfair to Governor Romney, who may be a very nice man in private life, but it is the impression I have of his public performances.
Who’d’a thought we’d see two shout-outs to King Canute in as many days in the health care arena? Yet there he is, popping up again in Business Week in the service of opposing more government intervention in health care.
According to legend, King Canute of Denmark facetiously tried to stop the rising tide by simply raising his hand and commanding the waters to roll back. The tide, of course, kept rising. Yet policymakers throughout history have followed Canute’s lead. From Hillary Clinton and John Edwards to Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, politicians across the spectrum have tried or vowed to solve America’s health-care woes by enacting an individual mandate – a law requiring every adult to purchase health insurance. Despite its bipartisan support, the individual mandate is bad policy, a vain attempt to command a better result while doing nothing to achieve it.
An excellent discussion of the folly of individual mandates follows. Of some interest is the way the estimate of the size of the problem meshes with that made below.
According to an Urban Institute study released in 2003, uncompensated care for the uninsured constitutes less than 3% of all health expenditures. Even if the individual mandate works exactly as planned, that’s the effective upper boundary on the mandate’s impact.
If you do the math, I think you will find that Mark Steyn’s number of the poor uninsured comes out to about 3% of the population.
More importantly, Whitman points out the major flaws in the individual mandate proposal – it would not work (people will still refuse to buy health insurance), and it will make the problem worse by driving costs even higher.
Even now, every state has a list of benefits that any health-insurance policy must cover – from contraception to psychotherapy to chiropractic to hair transplants. All states together have created nearly 1,900 mandated benefits. Of course, more generous benefits make insurance more expensive. A 2007 study estimates existing mandates boost premiums by more than 20%.
If interest groups have found it worthwhile to lobby 50 state legislatures for laws affecting only voluntarily purchased insurance policies, they will surely redouble their efforts to affect the contents of a federally mandated insurance plan. Consequently, even more people will find themselves unable to afford insurance. Others will buy insurance, but only via public subsidies. Isn’t that just what the doctor didn’t order?
His prescription for incremental policy reform strikes me as being pretty sound, as the fundamental shift that needs to be made in health care insurance is away from first dollar coverage, low deductibles and copays, etc. and toward catastrophic insurance. First dollar coverage has proven to distort if not destroy any semblance of financial responsibility on both sides of the health care transaction, and is one of the primary drivers of high costs. Catastrophic coverage fulfils the true function of insurance – protection against risks you can not afford – without creating the disastrously misaligned incentives that our current system has.
Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.”
Whether or not freedom is the desire of every heart, I think it is abundantly clear that most people are indifferent or hostile to their neighbor’s freedom, which is why a mere democracy, unencumbered by principles of limited government, is assured of devolving into some sort of Total State in short order. But the inimitable Mr. Steyn is not content with observing that most people think of freedom as “fine for me, but not for thee.” No, he has in mind the apparent eagerness of so many to give up their own freedom.
A year ago, I wrote that, “The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom — the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.”
This is what makes being a small-government libertarian so frustrating. Our patron saint should be King Canute, for it often seems like we are standing on the shore, trying to stop the tide. The reply to Mr. Steyn, if it is not couched in shallow democratism (“we are just giving the people what they want”) is usually couched in terms that imply that freedom is not possible, or at least can not be enjoyed, without material security provided by the State. This inversion of real freedom (the freedom of self-ownership) was perhaps best catechized by FDR, the man most responsible for freeing demagogic democracy from the strictures of the constitutional republic, as “freedom from want.”
FDR’s heir is Hillary Clinton, and she is pushing (again) for nationalized health care in America. The battlecry this time is that there are “45 million uninsured” (or whatever spurious number is trotted out).
My first response is “so what?” Anyone in America can get health care simply by walking into the nearest hospital, as all hospitals are required to give an exam and emergency treatment regardless of ability to pay.
But, as always, one should not let the factual assertions of the advocates of the Total State go unexamined. Mr. Steyn continues:
So, out of 45 million uninsured Americans, nine million aren’t American, nine million are insured, 18 million are young and healthy. And the rest of these poor helpless waifs trapped in Uninsured Hell waiting for Hillary to rescue them are, in fact, wealthier than the general population. According to the Census Bureau’s August 2006 report on “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage,” 37% of those without health insurance – that’s 17 million people – come from households earning more than $50,000. Nineteen percent – 8.7 million people – of those downtrodden paupers crushed by the brutal inequities of capitalism come from households earning more than $75,000.
In other words, if they fall off the roof, they can write a check. Indeed, the so-called “explosion” of the uninsured has been driven almost entirely by wealthy households opting out of health insurance. In the decade after 1995 — i.e., since the last round of coercive health reform — the proportion of the uninsured earning less than 25,000 has fallen by 20% and the proportion earning more than 75 grand has increased by 155%. The story of the last decade is that the poor are getting sucked into the maw of “coverage” and the rich are fleeing it.
At a conference on health law last week, I predicted (only half in jest) that Hillary would be signing the bill nationalizing health care at the beginning of her second term. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems. The tide of the Total State never sleeps.
I hardly know whether to laugh, or cry, at this one.
First, the tears:
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 “baby bond” from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.
A more grotesque pander is hard to imagine. Naturally, the more rational among us are puzzled:
How might this be funded? There are only three groups that could be asked to pay for the new entitlement with higher taxes (or lower benefits): the current elderly, those currently of working age, or the same future generations who are getting the new benefit and are slated to pay for existing unfunded entitlements. Which group do you think Senator Clinton has in mind?:
As with all arbitrary handouts, it also raises the question (and you can be sure it will be asked if this goes anywhere) of “why not more”? If $5,000 of free money is good thing, why isn’t $10,000 twice as good?
Now, the laughter:
Sixty percent (60%) of America’s Likely Voters oppose giving every child born in the United States a $5,000 savings bond, or “baby bond.” A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 27% support the concept suggested on Friday by Senator Hillary Clinton.
Unlike socialized medicine, which I believe is a genuine Cause to the otherwise calculating Hillary, the baby bond is most likely just a trial balloon, thrown out there to see if it would strike any sparks. Having drawn derision and virtually no support from anyone who wouldn’t vote for her anyway, I suspect we have seen the last of it. Still, it is a little chilling to contemplate the leading contender for President of the United States already toying with naked wealth transfers such as this.
There is a strange situation in Louisiana in which absurdly mis-labled ‘civil rights’ protests have been occurring. This has happened because six black students were arrested for seriously assaulting a white student in the aftermath of some nooses being hung suggestively from a tree in order to intimidate black students.
Now correct me if I am wrong but whilst hanging nooses from a tree is a very offensive reference to lynching, unless the owner of the tree objects or someone’s neck is in one of the nooses, dangling some rope from a tree is an act of constitutionally protected freedom of expression, is it not? It may be offensive (like, for example, a rap song extolling the murder of policemen) but it is not actually illegal. Beating a seventeen year old unconscious on the other hand is not constitutionally protected freedom of expression, it is at the very least assault and was initially being treated as attempted murder.
So…
It seems that the ‘civil rights’ protesters feel that if members of the local black community have their sensibilities (quite rightly) upset by the admittedly vile way some teenagers have expressed themselves (namely hanging nooses from a tree), then they should be given the right to assault people they are offended by without charge or indeed any restraint of law.
Presumably these same protesters would also argue that the editors of Jyllands-Posten should be the legitimate targets for violence by any Muslim offended by their provocative use of their right to freedom of expression. Certainly that is what many Muslims were saying about the publishers of the ‘Mohammed cartoons’. The protesters in Louisiana logically must agree with that notion as from what I have read they are not arguing just for broad social opprobrium for the noose-hangers (that is already the case), they are calling for legal sanction against them (just as there were demands for the editors of Jyllands-Posten to be ‘punished’) and some are contributing to the defence costs of the people who beat up the white boy, which presumably means they do not want the black youths who did it punished because being offended makes violence by six (black) teenagers against one (white) teenager perfectly okay.
Is that indeed a fair assessment of what the ‘protesters’ think should be the case, or am I missing something here?
The administration has sent you here today to convince the members of these two committees and the Congress that victory is at hand. With all due respect, I don’t buy it.
– Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, accusing General David Petraeus political motivations when delivering his report on military progress in Iraq. And of course a seeker-of-truth like Tom Landos’ utterances on the military situation could not possibly be motived by political considerations, right?
This essay, which I found while browsing the excellent website of Stephen Hicks, will resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.
As a farmer’s son, I sympathise with its message, but more optimistically, I’d argue that in some ways, life in the countryside is still a lot less regulated than in the towns, perhaps rightly, since when people live in close proximity and have to get along, more rules are required, if only tacit, rather than written, rules. But the sort of restrictions this farmer writes about are not caused by that sort of issue, but by the ongoing move by the state to regulate agriculture.
Cynics may argue that farmers have signed a Faustian pact with the state; they have accepted massive subsidies and can hardly be surprised if the providers of said increasingly demand to control the actions of the recipients. I agree with this. The sooner that the Common Agricultural Policy and its equivalents are obliterated, the better.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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