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Is it still the law in America that a person has to be born in the USA in order to be elected as President?
If so, then doesn’t that rather scupper the prospects of this campaign to get Tony Blair elected as US President in 2004?
Between the babbling of George W. Bush on the right, the blathering of the anti-war left, and the cluck-clucking of media hens everywhere, stands Tony Blair, articulate and principled.
Many Americans understand and support Iraqi Freedom because of the leadership provided by Mr. Blair, and many of us would feel much safer if Mr. Blair occupied the White House.
I have chosen to ignore the instincts that are screaming the word ‘spoof’ into my ear and play along with this for a moment because I can wholly understand where these people are coming from. Would not Our Glorious Leader, a slick, media-savvy (but ‘principled’) social democrat internationalist with hawkish defence policy credentials, make for the ideal Democrat candidate? Would those qualities not press the all the right buttons in just about every constituency to which the Democrats can possibly hope to appeal? Could he even win?
We will never know. If it was up to me, they could have him. Today. With considerable pleasure and relief. But it is not up to me. Had Mr and Mrs Blair senior taken it into their heads to up sticks and settle in California then I would not be in the least surprised to see Governor Blair as runaway favourite for the Democrat nomination in 2004.
And therein lies the story here. You can pretty much discount all the guff about ‘Iraqi Freedom’. Having decided that none of their home-grown candidates stands a cat in hell’s chance of dislodging George Bush, this particular faction is seeking comfort and refuge in an acted-out fantasy of what-might-have-been.
Nobody who has read The Road To Serfdom will have been in the least surprised at the increased use these days of the word “Czar” in political discourse. It signals the quite deliberate, conscious and explicit demand for governmental tyranny, not for its own sake, but to cut through all the crap deposited everywhere by previous government officials. Czarism signals the demand that government cease playing even by its own rules, let alone anyone else’s.
To dig a bit deeper into the subject I tried typing “czar” into Google.
I actually didn’t get as many different Czarships as I was hoping for. Not really hoping, you understand, but hoping for the purposes of this posting. I had in mind a posting along the lines of this one, which lists all the different ways in which “the public needs to be educated“. Googling reaped a rich harvest with that one. But czardoms proved to be in relatively short supply. So, in a way, I have good news to report. Not as many czardoms as you might think.
I found this Privacy Czar and a call, reported on here, for him to be replaced by the current US administration. And inevitably there is this personage, who is genuinely scary of course, to be laughed and sneered at only as part of the deadly serious business of running him out of office and abolishing his job, and strangling the fatuous ambitions it is based on.
There is this cybersecurity czar. Apart from that, very little, apparently. Is there a list of czardoms somewhere that I have missed?
In other words, and I’m really very pleased about this, truly, what I actually discovered was what these people at the Cornell University Computing Science Department, way ahead of me, had long ago spotted, which is that czardom in your average democracy is usually only a word, not to say a poisoned chalice. A czar is a commissioner, an under-secretary with special responsibility for, a “co-ordinator”, a gopher, with a grander and scarier sounding title than those, but with none of the means on his desk actually to solve the problem he has been put in charge of, which in any case has only reached the czar stage because it is insoluble.
The Cornell computerfolk would seem to have been watching all this, because they’ve taken to calling their own functionaries “czars” also.
In their case the insoluble problem is somewhat different to those confronted with czardom by your average government. Their problem is to get people to do boring things without being paid anything. And it seems that the thrill of being a czar doesn’t work any better there than elsewhere, as they foresaw.
Replacements have been requested for the following czarships. If you are interested in taking up one of these positions, or would like to have a position listed as available, please contact either the current czar listed for that position or the Czar Czar. Please remember that it is the current czar’s responsibility to find a replacement when they wish to give up a czarship, though the Czar Czar can offer suggestions of people who might be available to fill the position.
Czardom as slavery! You have to find some other poor sap to do it before you are allowed to stop. It would seem that the current Colloquium Czar is anxious to replace himself. He’s got fed up with doing this.
The Colloquium Czar unlocks the lecture hall for the weekly department colloquium and makes sure that any overhead projectors or other equipment that is needed is available. They also close up the room after the colloquium is over.
Well, at least the job is doable, for as long as you can stand doing it.
But of course, having to replace yourself is only a rule, which can be Cut Through like any other piece of Red Tape. The people in charge of these arrangements can’t actually do anything if the slave simply buggers off the plantation while neglecting to entice any other slave to perform his ex-duties. And if there are no volunteers in the first place, what do you do then?
The following czarships are no longer active, due to lack of interest or judgment that they are no longer needed. If you would like to see one of these czarships reactivated, contact the Czar Czar.
That has to be the job description of the century so far:
The overseer of the czarships, the Czar Czar maintains the current list of czarships and their corresponding czars. In addition, they keep track of any information about performing particular czar duties. If a czar wishes to retire from their position, the Czar Czar can help find possible replacements.
The name of the current Czar Czar is Stephen Chong. I know, he/she should be called “Gabor” – glad we’ve got that out of the way. But how long before a “Czar Czar” pops up for real, in a real public sector, somewhere?
Seriously, I congratulate these Cornellians (?) for having (a) spotted something seriously funny and funnily serious going on out there in the real world, (b) deciding to take some appropriate piss out of it, and (c) doing so by having some fun with their own arrangements, thereby proving that they are not taking themselves and their own activities over-seriously either.
A true understanding of the world? A sense of their own relative unimportance in that larger scheme of things? A sense of humour? Can they really be students at all?
The fine science fiction writer Orson Scott Card delivers a brutal, and well-deserved, rebuff to the Democratic Party.
[The Democratic candidates] platforms range from Howard Dean’s “Bush is the devil” to everybody else’s “I’ll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the devil.” Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general public.
There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling America.
But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It might–because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the message that the Bush presidency is a failure–even though by every rational measure it is not.
God knows I am no fan of the Bush administration’s domestic policies, but for the most part the Dems promise more of what I don’t like about Bush. Fine, I can deal with that, I vote for a couple of Democrats consistently because they are sterling human beings, every political system needs to have legitimately competitive parties to keep the bastards in power honest, etc.
However, the truly disturbing development from the Dem side of the aisle is that they have, in important ways, ceased to be a loyal opposition. → Continue reading: If the shoe fits . . .
Wonderful editorial in the Wall Street Journal today that spins out one of my favorite conceits – that there is no difference between the Mafia (the mob, la cosa nostra, call it what you will) and party politics. The details are very much American politics “inside-baseball”, but I have no doubt that a similar column could be written in England or elsewhere. A taste:
Al Gore’s grandly public endorsement of Howard Dean last week confirms my view that the easiest way to understand the Democratic Party today is by watching “The Godfather.”
I think of Bill Clinton as the Don Corleone of the Democratic Party. In the organization, there is no one above him. Terry McAuliffe is his Tom Hagen, who talks to the outside world. I leave it to others to fill out the rest of the cast.
It has been talked about among the cognoscenti for some weeks now that the new Dean organization, if he secured the nomination, would challenge the Clintons’ control of the party apparatus, meaning mainly the cash flow from contributors and the unions. But I thought it more likely that if Mr. Dean got the nomination, he would be visited over a table in a nice restaurant, the Palm in Washington, by Mr. McAuliffe and Harold Ickes, who would explain that he could win the presidency with them, but not without them.
With this understanding, an alliance of partners would result. The old organization and its traditional sources of income–the patronage mills, the government contracts, the public-bond issues, the legal jobs–would survive, and Mr. Dean’s people would be given significant control, maybe half. Now it’s not so clear that Howard Dean needs to cut a deal with the Clinton factions, because maybe the factions aren’t so close to the Clintons anymore.
I have long suspected that by far the most important aspect of the current Democratic primary is the internal struggle for control of the party that it is part of. Howard Dean has never liked the Clintons, who now control the party, and owes them nothing – he has his own internet-based grassroots and fundraising machinery. If he wins the nomination, he will become the new head of the Democratic Party, displacing the Clintons.
The Clintons have to oppose Dean because they don’t have any hooks in him – if you don’t understand this, you don’t understand power politics at all. The Clintons have always been the primary motivator behind the Stop Dean movement. They must maintain their control of the Democratic Party, or Hillary’s Presidential ambitions will come to naught. Wesley Clark, the quintessential Stop Dean candidate, is wholly a creation of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t concerned that Dean will win the Presidency and prevent Hillary from running in 2008 (as the incumbent, Dean would be almost impossible for Hillary to challenge). They are concerned that Dean will win the nomination and control of the party, so that they will lose their only remaining fingerhold on influence, and the wealth and power it brings.
I regard the Clintons as a cancer on my country, and so, even though I think Howard Dean would make a dreadful President, I am all in favor of his winning the nomination.
The estimable Austin Bay has a midstream assessment of the Iraq campaign and occupation. Grades are mixed. Given Mr. Bay’s knowledge of things military and strategic insight (he was a supporter of the Iraqi campaign for hardnosed geopolitical reasons), the mixed grades bear some pondering. Read the whole thing (its not long), but a few excerpts struck my eye:
The number of Free Iraqi police and paramilitary personnel in the field is a rough yardstick, but ultimately Iraqi security is their job. The major U.S. mistake prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was failing to create a functioning Iraqi constabulary. The United States had 3,000 exiles training in Hungary, but that simply didn’t cut it. Interim coalition grade: D.
The March-April military campaign was a huge success. Saddam’s regime collapsed quickly, with few civilian casualties. The strategic demonstration of American power was dramatic, and it put teeth in the U.N.’s 1991 resolutions. Some day, U.N. sanctions may mean something again. Final Grade: A (No attack from Turkey, so no A+. A northern attack would have swept Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, conceivably diminishing the current opposition in these Baathist districts.)
International contributions to Iraqi reconstruction, both in number of contributors and total capital is a strategic political measure. Interim Grade: C-
One measure that he does not address is control of Iraq’s borders with neighboring sponsors of terror. Until this occurs, Iraq is not secure. I’m not sure how we are doing on this front, but I read Austin Bay to find out stuff like this!
Interesting, and to my mind somewhat pessimistic, overview of the current situation.
The New York Times startles today with an editorial that is all in favor of personal responsibility rather than legal diktat. The topic: speed limits.
With the conviction Monday of Representative Bill Janklow of South Dakota for vehicular manslaughter, the West’s fondness for fast driving is again in the news, this time as part of a tragedy. Mr. Janklow sped through a stop sign near his hometown, Flandreau, S.D., last August and killed a motorcyclist. He has resigned from the House and faces up to 11 years in prison.
Mr. Janklow’s very conviction is proof that Westerners’ love of speed has its limits. But the limits are those dictated by duty and personal responsibility, not by law.
Western attitudes about speed limits have always been misconstrued: we do not encourage deviant behavior so much as personal responsibility. It’s an antiquated stance, this resistance to limiting individual freedom, and it is often used as evidence of our irresponsibility.
We can hold individuals accountable for bad choices without limiting everyone’s freedom.
Needless to say, the author is not a regular staff writer for the NYT, but nonetheless, the publication of these thoughts without a single sneer of condescension by the panjandrums of the Upper West Side is worth recognizing. It is almost impossible to find criticism of the nanny state in the Times, but here it is.
Hat tip to Samizdata reader Mr. Haas for the pointer.
Today, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that will live in infamy. It upheld the core provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. I confess I have not yet digested the full 300 page turd dropped on the Constitution by our masters at the Supreme Court, but I would observe that any decision of this length is bound to be flawed. It does not take many words to apply the simple phrase “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” to overturn legislation; it does, however, take many, many words to obfuscate the meaning of that phrase sufficiently to uphold legislation that, in part, prohibits the airing of campaign commercials in the weeks before an election.
I will address one of the fundamental flaws underlying the entire project of regulating campaign finance – the claim that money does not equal speech.
First, though, allow me to state that it is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech to outlaw bribery and other permutations of the quid pro quo that may crop up in connection with campaign finance activities. Outlawing bribery in such circumstances is no more a restriction on freedom of speech than outlawing the fencing of stolen property is a restriction on freedom of contract.
It is a fundamental premise of campaign finance regulation that such laws do not restrict speech, but rather restrict only the raising and spending of money.
This distinction between speaking and expending resources on speaking is utterly fallacious, unless you believe that guarantees of free speech extend only to the fine art of conversation. Any attempt to distribute your thoughts to persons who are not in the room with you when you utter them requires the use of resources, and thus the expenditure of money. Allowing the state to prohibit the use of resources to broadcast or distribute speech means that freedom of speech is no more than freedom to converse.
Speech, for all practical purposes, is the distribution to an audience of your thoughts. In the political realm (and most others as well) this distribution cannot be made to any meaningful audience without applying resources, that is, spending money. You cannot print a newspaper, distribute a flyer, operate a website, or stand on a streetcorner ranting through a bullhorn, without using money to distribute your speech. Even bullhorns cost money, after all. The use of resources, the expenditure of money, to distribute your speech, is an absolutely indivisible part of freedom of speech.
Yet campaign finance regulation is nothing more than state limitations on the use of resources to distribute political speech, which is to say, state limitations on political speech. No one would say that a prohibition on expenditures by a publisher to print and mail a magazine, or on a publisher charging for subscriptions or advertising, are consistent with freedom of speech, yet these limitations are closely analogous to the campaign finance restrictions now blessed by the Supreme Court.
UPDATE: I was grousing about this to one of my partners, and he pointed out that apparently the Supreme Court was just being somewhat over-literal. The Constitution protects “free speech,” and they thought that meant it protected FREE speech. If you see what I mean. Sadly, that seems to be about the level of comprehension on display in the opinion.
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair:
The Green Party is expected to take control of San Francisco tomorrow and reclaim the city’s hippy heritage with a campaign that has relied on mass yoga rallies and poetry readings to overturn 40 years of Democrat rule.
Victory in the mayoral election would provide the party with its first senior official in the United States and the result would confirm San Francisco’s status as America’s most politically radical city.
Yoga? Poetry readings? So that’s how to beat the Democrats!
Among his policies are vast investment in cheap housing and the raising of the minimum wage to the highest in the country.
Assuming, of course, that any Green Party supporters actually have any intention of working for a living.
If he wins he has promised to make the city a “laboratory” for the party’s policies.
And where have we heard that one before?
At his campaign offices supporters with Mohawk haircuts mingle with those with facial piercings. Or as self-styled “free-flowing” poet Dave Whitaker, who says he once got Bob Dylan stoned, put it: the campaign’s success has been simply “karmic”.
That place sounds like a white-hot furnace of cutting-edge political and economic analysis.
“Cast a wide net. Find the common thread. Let life flourish. Then, don’t panic. Think organic. It’s a race between history and hip-story.”
Yup, works for me.
For a textbook example of rent-seeking, look no further than that pustulent petri dish of corruption, Illinois, for a dandy look at how it is done with affirmative action, casino licensing, and (of course) political connections. It has to do with the troubled Rosemont casino, which would have been located just outside of Chicago. (Sorry, this post has been rattling around in draft long enough for my links to rot. You’ll just have to take my word for it).
The State of Illinois licenses casinos, generally under terms that skim off obscene amounts of the profit to various appendages of the state. I suppose the State earns its money; since Illinois licenses very few casinos (Rosemont would be the 10th), it suppresses competition and thus enables those high profits to a significant degree. Regardless, I defy anyone to distinguish this racket from the more straightforward protection racket run by organized crime. Let the record show that the State of Illinois, through its protection racket for casinos, is perhaps the uber-rent-seeker in the whole sordid arrangement. → Continue reading: Rent seeking
I got dinked out of posting on a Mark Steyn column earlier this week. Fortunately, the prolific Mr. Steyn has lobbed another one my way, this time ruminating on the endemic corruption of Canada’s one-party state in response to a reader inquiry. His thoughts are well worth the read, as they explore the many, many byways of political corruption in what is by all accounts a relatively law-abiding liberal democracy.
It’s certainly – how shall we put this? – striking that a fellow [Prime Minister Chretien] who’s spent 40 years in the House of Commons with the exception of a brief time-out in the late Eighties is, by Canadian standards, so phenomenally wealthy.
Let’s just pause there for a moment. In the modern Canadian state, it is not necessary for M Chrétien to do anything illegal. As he has said, after years in government, he’s a well-connected guy with a fat Rolodex who knows the wheels that have to be oiled: he can tell his clients “what is necessary for them to do”. That’s something folks will pay for, as out-of-office politicians in many western democracies have discovered. But very few have the opportunities of patronage that exist in Canada: unlike M Chrétien with Senator Fitzpatrick, Mr Bush cannot install a boardroom buddy from his ball-team days in the US Senate.
Third, it’s interesting to see how M Chrétien’s business deals – like the Grand-Mère – circle back to the government, in the form of one agency or another. He was able to tell M Duhaime “what it is necessary for him to do” – ie, put him touch with the BDC – and also able to tell the bank “what it is necessary for them to do” – ie, pony up the dough to M Duhaime. In a one-party state, he is in the fortunate position of being able to tell all parties “what it is necessary for them to do”.
Canada’s “national identity” is supposedly to be found in its “social programs”; Canadians are supposedly willing to pay higher taxes in order for a more equitable society. Quite where the 50% of income the government takes winds up is hard to see: I can’t help noticing that I see far more beggars on the streets of Toronto and Montreal than in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other American city I’ve been in recently, whether run by Republicans or Democrats. The hospitals in Canada are so overloaded they’re unable to observe even basic hygiene procedures, a basic failing which covers everything from the Ontario health system’s incubation of SARS to Labrador’s gift of Chlamydia to its gynaecological patients. M Chrétien lectured Wall Street that, while Canada had fewer millionaires than America, it also had fewer poor people. But what you can’t help noticing is that the plutocrats we do have are almost all well-connected Liberal Party types or businessmen whose businesses are either subsidized or regulated by the government. That’s why in the one-party state we wind up not just with one party but one bookstore chain, one media chain, etc. Meanwhile, the gap in income between the governing class – in its broadest sense – and the governed grows ever wider. After 40 years as a guy who knows “what’s necessary” for others to do, M Chrétien is merely the most prominent exemplar of the system.
There are words to describe the kind of society that kicks veterans’ widows out on the street while giving the former riding secretary who approves the decision a $160,000 expense tab, that lavishes billions on corporate welfare on Lib-friendly businesses but can’t wash the instruments between pap smears: “Welfare state”? “Just society”? Try “kleptocracy”.
I find myself with very little to add.
Some people have far too much time on their hands:
The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County’s expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.
One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words “Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.
Okay, how about we use the term ‘Boss-man/Bitch’?
This is the subheading of Mark Steyn’s latest Spectator piece:
Mark Steyn lists the countries that must be dealt with if we are to win the war against terrorism
Okay. But the first regime listed gave me a bit of a turn:
New Hampshire
Does the axis of evil have a new member? Has the Governor of New Hampshire been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? Is the whole article some kind of joke? Steyn is a funny man. Is this a funny piece?
Steyn goes on to list five further targets for regime change: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea.
Profound changes in the above countries would not necessarily mean the end of the war on terror, but it would be pretty close. It would remove terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). They’re the fronts on which the battle has to be fought: it’s not just terror groups, it’s the state actors who provide them with infrastructure and extend their global reach. Right now, America – and Britain, Australia and Italy – are fighting defensively, reacting to this or that well-timed atrocity as it occurs. But the best way to judge whether we’re winning and how serious we are about winning is how fast the above regimes are gone. Blair speed won’t do.
That all sounds fairly serious, doesn’t it? So what does Steyn have against New Hampshire? Ah. Penny drops. New Hampshire is where he was writing from. The universe makes sense again.
Nevertheless, behind this little joke there is a serious point. Steyn is describing a war against terrorism that does make sense to me. But the opponents of this war say that by the time Uncle Sam has toppled the regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea – or by the time it has given up trying to – it will indeed end up governing New Hampshire, and everywhere else in the USA, somewhat differently. War is the health of the state, as somebody once said.
My answer would be that hardly anyone is suggesting that there be no vigorous war fought against Islamic terrorism – and hence that no measures be taken that might infringe the liberties of Americans, or others. The war is being fought and will go on being fought. The only serious argument is about where to fight it. Is it to be fought in places like Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, North Korea, and back home in places like New Hampshire? Or should some or all of the first five be struck off the list?
Either way, New Hampshire is indeed liable to end up a rather different place.
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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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