Yesterday, in the dead of night, the U.S. House of Representatives took a small step for Nancy Pelosi and a giant step for despotism.
Freedom, David Hume famously observed, is seldom lost all at once. More often, it leaks out slowly. The petty tyranny of good intentions colludes with the bureaucratic imperative to stymie individual initiative and barter liberty for the sake of central control.
Last night, it happened by a slender margin: 220 votes to 215. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the 1900-page bill. One Republican — first- and (I suspect) last-term Anh Cao of Louisiana — voted for it. You can see the entire roster of votes at http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll887.xml. Did your congressman just vote to further impoverish the country, rob you of choice in managing your medical care, and arrogate to Washington decisions that should be left to the individual? Consult that list and remember next year and in 2012.
Pace Nancy Pelosi, you do not have to put up with this economically disastrous assault on freedom. You still — just barely — have a say in how you are governed. Please do not fritter it away. Slowly, now not slowly, your prerogatives are being whittled away as bureaucrats in Washington tell you what, and what not, to eat, how to light and heat your house, how much money you may make, what sort of car your must drive, how you must, and must not, educate your children, what sort of medical care you must, and must not, arrange for yourself.
I have in this space several times argued that the Obama administration’s efforts to take over health care is only incidentally concerned with enlarging or improving access to medical care. At bottom, it is about enlarging Washington’s control over your life.
My sunny thoughts about the once-again great states of New Jersey (welcome, Governor Christie!) and Virginia (ditto, Governor McDonnell!) are not displaced by the (to me) disappointing and (to everyone) surprising news that Doug Hoffman lost to Bill Owens in New York’s 23rd Congressional District.
There has been a great deal of hand wringing and pundit-izing over that result: How did it happen? Why? What does it mean? If you work for Barack Obama, it means that the entire country is still drunk on his promises of Hope-n-Change while the defeat of Messrs. Jon Corzine and that chap–what’s his name?–from Virginia tell us absolutely nothing about the mood of the country. Poor Nancy Pelosi, who has progressed from the surreal to the positively delusional, seems to have regarded election 2009 as a victory for the Democrats. I hope we’ll be seeing more such victories next year and in 2012.
But back to Doug Hoffman. What happened? After super-RINO Dede Scozzafava crashed, burned, and dropped out of the race, many commentators supposed that by endorsing the Democrat Owens she merely underscored her own petulance and political irrelevance. Hoffman’s surge in the polls, they thought, would carry him all the way to victory. Well, it didn’t happen, Why? My friend Roger Simon spoke for many when he suggested that Hoffman’s patent social conservatism was the issue and, ultimately, the kiss of death. “America,” Roger argues, “is a fiscally conservative country — now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification — but not a socially conservative one.” Not, he hastens to add, that it is socially liberal: “It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.”
According to Roger,
Hoffman’s capital-C Conservative campaign . . . tried to separate itself from the majority parties by making a big deal of the social issues. He was all upset that Scozzafava was pro-gay marriage, seemingly as upset as he was with her support for the stimulus plan. He projected the image of a bluenose in a world that increasingly doesn’t want to hear about these things. Hoffman’s is a selective vision of the nanny state — you can nanny about some things but not about others. I suspect America deeply dislikes nannying about anything.
I wish Roger were right about Americans disliking “nannying about anything.” Alas, I suspect many Americans crave it more and more. As exhibit A, I direct your attention to what happened elsewhere in New York: in New York City, Michael Bloomberg, a veritable black belt nannier, was elected to a third term. This is the man, remember, who outlawed smoking, who tells you what sort of fat you may eat, who frowns upon salt, who puts cameras in taxicabs and on the street, and who volunteers to help Santa Claus each Christmas to determine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
Just in case your survey of the world scene has left you with a residue of cheerfulness, below is a video of a talk given by Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, last week that should complete your gloom.
The ostensible subject was the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Treaty, scheduled to take place in December. Anyone who doubts that environmentalism has become one of the most potent weapons in the quiver of the international Left should take a look at some of the treaty’s proposed provisions. Basically, it is a wealth transfer scheme in which rich countries send money to poor countries because they, the rich ones, have (so the story goes) done more to insult the environment. (Isn’t the real story that they have enriched the entire world beyond imagining? Yes–but that contravenes the left-wing narrative.) Take a look at what the U.N. has in store for you: It has to be read to be believed. These items from Article 7 will give you a flavor of the thing:
1. A massive scaling up of financial resources, from both the public and private sectors, is required in order to adequately, sufficiently and swiftly reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions, adapt to climate change and achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and the shared vision. Developing country Parties will require significant, stable and predictable financial support from industrialized country Parties in order to fulfill their commitments under this Protocol.
2. Parties included in Annex B shall, as a group, provide at least [n.b, at least!] 160 billion USD per year for the 2013-2017 commitment period as financial support to developing country Parties for their low carbon development, technology, adaptation and reducing emissions from deforestation efforts in line with Articles 4, 5, 8 and 9. Additional financing is required and shall be made available for the reporting requirements and capacity building efforts under this Protocol. The scale of resources required shall be reviewed for each subsequent commitment period.
What does it all mean? Lord Monckton gives an appropriately scary summary in his talk. Chief items:
> Creation of a world government.
> Massive transfer of wealth form the countries of the West to the Third World countries to satisfy “climate debt.”
> Enforcement.
Regarding the last, Lord Monckton has this to say:
How many of you think that the word election or democracy . . . or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of the treaty? Quite right it doesn’t appear once. So at last, the Communists to piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left. . . . Now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a Communist world government on the world. You have a President who has very strong sympathies with that point of view.
Michael Mukasey, the last Attorney General to serve under George W. Bush, has an essential essay in The Wall Street Journal today. It’s called “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” and its caption explains something very important that I hope Eric Holder, the current Attorney General, will take on board as he contemplates cleansing Guantanamo Bay of its prisoners and turning its inmates over to the more tender mercies of the U.S. Justice system. “We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts,” the caption begins. “In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.”
That is a fact that the transnational, multicultural progressives who are now running America really need to understand. I know that the default mode in Washington now is to apologize for America, to believe that accommodation and capitulation are the new, improved fashion in patriotism. But please tell me that they also understand that the world is a dangerous place, that there are many people — and many regimes — that wish us ill, that the threat of Islamism has not dissipated in the wake of 9/11 but has merely gone underground where it is plotting, planning, bidding its time. In New York, the FBI foiled a major plot just a few weeks ago. In London, hundreds of Muslims have taken to the streets, braying for the head of visiting Dutch politician and Geert Wilders — the “dog” Geert Wilders as one protester denominated him in this video, which should have been aired on every major outlet, but has not been.
My greatest fear about the Obama administration at the moment is that its principals do not understand evil. They are, at bottom, followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even if they’ve never read a word of that misguided sage. They believe that man everywhere was born good and does bad things because of a faulty upbringing, poverty, or a lack of the right sort of community organization in his life.
It’s a child’s, or, rather, a spoiled adolescent’s view of the world. Mr. Mukasey is an adult:
critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. True, this won us a great deal of goodwill abroad-people around the globe lined up for blocks outside our embassies to sign the condolence books. That is the kind of goodwill we can do without.
–She didn’t mean it.
–She was only quoting a Republican operative.
–Fox News is mean to Democrats.
–Glenn Beck is an extremist.
–The President is trying to clean up a big mess left by George Bush.
–Can’t we just change the subject?
When Glenn Beck aired a video of White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praising Chairman Mao — one of her “two favorite political philosophers” — in front of an audience of high school students, the conservative blogosphere lit up like a non-denominational sustainably harvested Kwanza tree. I wrote about it here. Andrew McCarthy added some historical background here. Peter Wehner had this to say. Et, I need hardly say, cetera.
There’s one part of the left-wing reaction to the obloquy heaped upon Anita Dunn that should not be allowed to go unchallenged. It might go like this: “George Bush quoted Mao [or Stalin, or Hitler, or some other bad guy]: does that make him a Maoist [or Stalinist, a Nazi, or whatever]?”
As Fausta Wertz points out, Anita Dunn offered a variant of this exculpatory strategy when she claimed, in reaction to the tsunami of criticism her remarks occasioned, that she was only quoting Lee Atwater.
Let’s say that Mr. Atwater had quoted the bit from Mao that Anita Dunn quoted — you fight your war and I’ll fight mine, etc., etc. So what? Lee Atwater did not identify Mao as one of his two favorite political philosophers. He did not stand before a room full of high school students and praise the revolutionary tactics of the greatest mass murderer in history.
Bottom line: it is one thing to quote a tyrant. It is another to endorse his view of the world.
Jeremiah Wright. William Ayers. Van Jones. Where does the rogues’ gallery of Barack Obama’s radical friends end? These people are not liberals. They are not “progressives.” They are radicals who hate America and in many cases have advocated or even perpetrated violence in an effort to destroy it.
Thanks to Glenn Beck, the American public has now been introduced to yet another radical member of Obama’s inner circle: Anita Dunn, Interim White House Communications Director, former top advisor to Obama’s political campaign, and wife of Obama’s personal lawyer, Robert Bauer.
In a speech before high school students last June, Dunn spoke passionately about her two favorite political philosophers, “the two people I turn to most” for answers to important questions like “how to do things that have never been done before.” Who are these paragons? One was Mother Teresa. Dunn didn’t have much to say about her. Most of her enthusiasm was lavished upon her other favorite fount of political wisdom: Mao Tse-Tung.
Mao Tse-Tung. That would be the deviant monster who, quite apart from his disgusting personal life, engineered the mass murder of anywhere from 50 to over 100 million people. Estimates vary so widely because murder on that wholesale scale is difficult to tabulate, especially in a country as backwards as China was under Mao’s long reign. But there is little doubt that Mao has the grisly distinction of being the greatest mass murderer in history.
Yet this is the man that one of Obama’s closest advisors commends to an audience with warmth and enthusiasm. In 1947, she tells her audience, Chiang Kai-Shek seemed to hold all the cards: he had the army, the airforce, and yet Mao went on to victory, telling people, as Anita Dunn told her listeners, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” Don’t believe me? Listen:
I have been trying to discover just how many people our duly elected representatives employ on their staffs — how many people they employ, and how much they spend to employ them. It is data that is not easy to come by, but I am poking around and will reveal my findings in due course.
But wait, I said “duly elected” representatives — I meant, of course, not only those who have been elected by the American people (sometimes with the help of ACORN) to serve the American people and their interests, but also the (I believe) unprecedented number of sitting Senators who have been appointed, not elected:
–Paul Kirk Jr., in Massachusetts (tapped by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to replace Ted Kennedy after Kennedy asked that state law be changed to allow that “right of succession” (after he had previously changed it to be sure that a former Republican governor couldn’t appointment someone no sanctioned by the Kennedys).
–Roland Burris, Barack Obama’s replacement in Illinois.
–Michael Bennet, Ken Salazar’s replacement in Colorado.
–George LeMieux, Mel Martinez’s replacement in Florida.
–The former Biden staffer who, as George Will puts it, will make himself scarce next year “in service to the ancient notion that public offices should be family patrimonies” so that Beaux Biden, the Vice President’s son, can run in Delaware for the seat that dear old dad held for some 36 years.
Ah, democracy: what a quaint idea!
But back to the staffs and perquisites commanded by our rulers. As I say, it takes some digging to find out. But an enterprising Canadian Journalist supplied a supplementary bit of information about a supernumerary member of our ruling entourage, Michelle Obama, the First Lady.
Paul L. Williams, writing in a couple of articles in the Canada Free Press, has some news that should be of interest to U.S. Taxpayers. In his first article on the subject, reported on the size of Michelle Obama’s taxpayer-funded: 22.
Pretty amazing, what? Twenty-two people, paid for by you and me, for . . . for what?
But I am here to tell you that Mr. Williams was wrong. Michelle Obama does not employ 22 people at the taxpayer expense. No, the correct number (as Mr. Williams later reported) is 26.
“In my own life,” Mr. Williams quotes Michelle Obama as saying, “in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this country that has given me so much. See, that’s why I left a job at a big law firm for a career in public service.”
Touching, is it not? “Public Service,” at a cost (Mr. Williams calculates) of merely $1,750,000 to the taxpayers — and that is “without taking into account the expense of the lavish benefit packages afforded to every attendant.”
Here’s the breakdown:
1. $172,2000 – Sher, Susan (Chief Of Staff)
2. $140,000 – Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Policy And Projects For The First Lady)
3. $113,000 – Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary)
4. $102,000 – Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the First Lady)
5. $102,000 – Winter, Melissa E. (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
6. $90,000 – Medina, David S. (Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
7. $84,000 – Lelyveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady)
8. $75,000 – Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance for the First Lady)
9. $70,000 – Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
10. $65,000 – Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
11. $65,000 – Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
12. $62,000 – Goodman, Jennifer R. (Deputy Director of Scheduling and Events Coordinator For The First Lady)
13. $60,000 – Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip Director for the First Lady)
14. $60,000 – Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First Lady)
15. $52,500 – Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Associate Director and Deputy Press Secretary To The First Lady)
16. $50,000 – Jarvis, Kristen E. (Special Assistant for Scheduling and Traveling Aide To The First Lady)
17. $45,000 – Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of Correspondence For The First Lady)
18. $45,000 – Tubman, Samantha (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)
19. $40,000 – Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Assistant to the Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)
20. $36,000 – Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social Secretary)
21. $36,000 – Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)
22. $36,000 – Jackson, Deilia A. (Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)
Missing from this is a hair-dressing, a make-up artist, and two other personal servants.
So here we have it, folks: Senate and House seats that are effectively family property if you come from the right family, and lavish staff arrangements not only for our legislators, elected or not, but also for certain select spouses.
I wonder how all this plays in the midst of a huge global recession when millions are out of work and our rulers are busy thinking of ways to increase taxes while decreasing individual freedom through various regulations.
It used to be said that the Democrats were for “the little guy”: they were supposed to be the party that was on the side of the working man and woman, who looked after the underprivileged, the downtrodden, etc. It was always a myth, but today it is completely belied by reality. As a USA Today headline puts it, “In major flip, House Dems now represent richest regions.” “The Democratic-controlled House,” the paper reports, “is now an unusual combination of the richest and poorest districts, the best and least educated, and the best and the worst insured. The analysis found that Democrats have attracted educated, affluent whites who had tended previously to vote Republican.”
It’s a union of the top and the bottom against the middle. The question is, How long will the middle suffer the slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune?
It’s coming to crunch time for the centerpiece of Obama’s legislative agenda for his first year: nationalizing health care. Will he get away with it? Really, it’s up to us. America is still, even now, a sort of democracy, and our rulers in Washington still serve at our pleasure, notwithstanding the decades-long reign of the Byrds, Kennedys, Inyoues, Leahys, et al. Remember that. And if haven’t done so yet, consider joining ThrowTheBumsOut.org
But as the battle over who is to control another one-sixth of the U.S. economy — you or the bureaucrats in Washington — as this battle approaches its denouement, I’d like to offer a couple points for reflection.
For an overview of the entire debate, let me recommend Dr. David Gratzer’s “Why Obama’s Government Takeover of Health Care Will Be a Disaster,”
The pamphlet has just rolled off the press and will be coming to a book emporium near you any day. It’s available for pre-order now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and will soon be in stores and available for download via Kindle and other electronic readers.
As Hinderaker dryly observes, “PWC concluded that the cost of health insurance for the average family will rise by $4,000 by 2019, as compared with doing nothing.” He supplies this handy graphic to illustrate the point:
One of the most often repeated assertions from TeamObama about their proposed “reform” of health care has been that individuals would be able to keep their current health insurance if they so desired. But this, to employ Joe Wilson’s colorful characterization, is a lie. As Hinderaker shows, the Baucus plan before the Senate, combining a “weak mandate” to buy insurance with “a strong requirement on the insurance industry that it insure everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions or state of health,” would “devastate” the private insurance industry.
What is meant by a “weak mandate” is that, in the current version of the Baucus bill, there is no requirement to buy health insurance at all until after 2013, and by 2017 the penalty for failing to buy health insurance still amounts to only about 15% of the cost of the insurance. Now, think about it: if you know that you don’t have to buy health insurance when you are young and healthy, but if you should get sick, or just get older, you can apply for health insurance at any time and it will be illegal for the insurance company to turn you down, what would you do? Obviously, you would defer buying insurance unless and until you get sick. This means that the pool of those who are insured will be lower quality, and the cost therefore higher for everyone who buys insurance. It is as though you could wait until you die, and then your heirs can buy life insurance on you.
As Hinderaker observes, “This isn’t reform, it is stupidity.”
What, then, should the government do? In brief, it should get out of the way. Improving the delivery of health care, if that is what we care about, really isn’t that difficult. (I say “if” because the real goal is only incidentally concerned with health care: the real goal is extending government control over your life.) First, go after the trial lawyers: cap malpractice judgments and severely limit what lawyers can take away in fees. Second, let the market, i.e., let competition, work in the insurance industry. “It actually would be very easy to make health insurance cheaper,” Hinderaker points out.
All we have to do is allow insurance companies to compete nationally instead of state-by-state and eliminate all mandates that limit consumer choice. It has been estimated that these simple reforms — which are not part of any of the Democrats’ “reform” bills, for obvious reasons — would reduce health care costs by one-quarter to one-third. Instead of such common-sense reforms, the Dems are proposing Rube Goldberg measures that will make health care more expensive. Instead of eliminating mandates, their measures, including the Baucus bill, increase them — in effect making cheaper health insurance illegal.
Of course, all these details about the cost of insurance, who must do what for whom when and how much it will cost, is a bureaucratic spaghetti. The complication — what John Hinderaker aptly refers to as the “Rube Goldberg” aspect of the whole debate — is deliberate. It is meant to stun, confuse, obfuscate, and depress. Clobber the slobs with a miasma of conflicting proposals whose ultimate aim is lost in the mists of ill-defined mandates and sooner or later many people will throw up their hands in submission.
Before you do that, however, let Obama advisor Robert Reich tell you what’s really going to happen if ObamaCare becomes a reality (h/t Instapundit). The year is 2007. Reich tells an appreciative audience “What an Honest President Would Say about Health Care Reform.” Reich himself is not wholly candid, for he begins with the bizarre and dishonest observation that the U.S. health care system is the only one in the world designed to avoid caring for sick people. But leave that big lie to one side. Here’s what Obama’s advisor thinks is the “truth” about what needs to be done to improve U.S. health care.
–Young and healthy people will have to pay more;
–The old will be denied various drugs and technology: “we are,” Reich said to a round of applause, “going to let you die.”
–The government will pressure drug companies and the medical establishment to bring costs down, with the result that there would be less medical innovation and fewer new drugs in the future. Probably, you will not live longer than your parents as most generations in that past could reasonably have hoped to do: get used to it.
Think I am making it up? Listen to the master in his own words:
Brutal? Moderately. But this is the Age of Obama, the age of diminished expectations for Americans. Remember, Obama swept into office promising to “fundamentally transforming the United States of American.”
In only nine months, he’s done an amazing job. He has made us poorer, less secure, and less free. If his proposal to let the government gobble up health care goes through, it will be another step down the road Obama calls Hope and Change. I think Friedrich Hayek came closer to the truth when he called it The Road to Serfdom.
See the bottom of this story for a shocking update!!
In 2001, Joseph Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize for economics. Don’t let that prejudice you, though. Despite the hilarious burlesque with this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, some people who win Nobel Prizes actually deserve public acclamation.
Did Stiglitz? I really don’t know. I have my doubts. Stiglitz is an economist of the Paul Krugman stripe, i.e., someone who finds the spectacle of wealth being created offensive. I suspect that, like many left-wingers, he wishes wealth could come about through an economic form of parthenogenesis. Deep down, he seems to look upon economics as a variety of social work. So, like Krugman, he is always swanking about saying silly things that disparage the very power that makes economics more than a pastime for left-wing academics, namely, the free market, a.k.a. capitalism. Indeed, among the many silly things said about the current economic crisis, none was sillier than Stiglitz’s comment in September 2008 that “fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism.”
Moronic, what? I was pleased to see Jagdish Bhagwati, who is Stiglitz’s colleague at Columbia University, cover that tendentious and ideologically motivated analogy with some of the obloquy it serves. In an almost entirely splendid piece for World Affairs (a newish journal that should be better known than it is: thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for bringing it to my attention), Bhagwati drily observes that while “all analogies are imperfect, . . . this one is particularly dicey.”
When the Berlin Wall collapsed, we saw the bankruptcy of both authoritarian politics and an economics of extensive, almost universal, ownership of the means of production and central planning. We saw a wasteland. When Wall Street and Main Street were shaken by crisis, however, we witnessed merely a pause in prosperity, not a devastation of it.
When was the last time you heard such good sense emanating from the ivied halls of the academy?
Jagdish Bhagwati is a very sensible fellow. He understands that the economic crisis we’re living through was precipitated in part by wild over-leveraging of dubious assets like (subprime) mortgage-backed securities. I am sorry he didn’t pause to consider the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in this little drama, but the important point is that he, unlike Stiglitz, understands that the economic crisis is not an indictment of the free market but rather a warning to hold fast to those safeguards that traditional underwrote the operation of the free market, for example, a rational adjudication of risk.
Professor Bhagwati also offers a salutary corrective to the glib contention that, powerful though markets may be, they tend to “corrupt” or at least undermine traditional societal values. “After two and a half centuries of this fascinating debate,” he writes,
I have to say that my own sympathies lie with those who have found markets, on balance, to be on the side of the angels. But I should also add that I find the specific notion that markets corrupt our morals, and determine our ethical destiny, to be a vulgar quasi-Marxist notion about as convincing as that other vulgar notion that ownership of the means of production is critical to our economic destiny. The idea that working with and within markets fuels our pursuit of self-interest, greed, avarice, and self-love, in ascending orders of moral turpitude, is surely at variance with what we know about ourselves.
Exactly right. And Professor Bhagwati goes on to elaborate the point: Sure, markets will influence values.
But, far more important, the values we develop will affect in several ways how we behave in the marketplace. Consider just the fact that different cultures exhibit different forms of capitalism. The Dutch burghers Simon Schama wrote about in The Embarrassment of Riches used their wealth to address the embarrassment of poverty. They, the Jains of Gujerat (from whom Mahatma Gandhi surely drew inspiration), and the followers of John Calvin were all taking values from religion and culture to bring morality to the market.
So where do these countervailing values come from? Your mother was right: “They come from our families, communities, schools, churches, and indeed from our religion and literature.”
A corollary of Professor Bhagwati’s argument is that bad hats like Bernie Madoff stand not as evidence of some fundamental fault in our economic system but, on the contrary, as an evildoer whose eventual exposure and repudiation points to the system’s underlying strength.
How does one react then to a phenomenon like Bernie Madoff? Does it not represent the corrosion of moral values in the marketplace? Not quite. The payoffs from corner-cutting, indeed outright theft, have been so huge in the financial sector that those who are crooked are naturally drawn to such scheming. The financial markets did not produce Madoff’s crookedness; Madoff was almost certainly depraved to begin with. The financial sector corrupts morality in the same sense that the existence of an escort service corrupted Eliot Spitzer. Should we blame the governor’s transgressions on the call girls rather than on his own flaws?
Jagdish Bhagwati’s article is full of good things. I will particularly cherish his quotation from John Maynard Keynes, who observed in a letter to Kingsley Martin, editor of The New Statesman, that “The inevitable never happens. It is the unexpected always.”
I also applaud Professor Bhagwati’s observation that
Capitalism works best when those who do not succeed, and are buffeted by the vicissitudes of life, still believe in success — believe that those who do succeed put their wealth to good use, and do not merely engage in self-indulgence. Capitalism works well when those who lose feel that one day they might also win. This is the great American dream: even when mobility has been less real than imagined, the belief matters.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of this dream, this belief. It is part and parcel of a larger civilizational tonic: cultural confidence, the fundamental engagement with and allegiance to the enabling values of our society. Folks like Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, — along, of course, with 99.7 percent of academics in the humanities and social sciences — repudiate those values. Their “anti-capitalism” is merely one face of a much larger abjuration: an abjuration of the West and the commitment to individual liberty that made “the West” as much the name of a specific cultural impetus as a point on the compass. That’s what’s so refreshing about Professor Bhagwati’s article. He concludes a few tedious nostrums about “improving education” and reforming health care, but for the most part his energetic article is a manly, unsentimental paean to the advantages of liberty and our acting like grown ups, not unwitting wards of some bureaucratic behemoth whose care of its charges is only an excuse for its self-perpetuation.
* * * *
And this shockeroo just in: Obama fails to win this year’s Nobel Prize for economics! MarketWatch reports:
LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.
While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.
The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.
Obama reacts to Nobel
From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.
How is it, then, that the Nobel Prize Committee failed to honor this brilliant intercession in what was, only yesterday, the world’s greatest economy? Has any one individual ever had a bigger effect on a great economy than Barack Obama? Millions of Americans are now without jobs. All Americans are poorer because of the precipitous decline of the dollar: “Dollar Reaches Breaking Point As Banks Shift Reserves” screams a headline at Bloomberg News. Thank you, Oh Barack, for making good on your promise of “change,” on your promise to “fundamentally transform the Untied States of America.”
Over at The Corner, a fellow calling himself David Kahane (a pen name of a Hollywood writer) posts this splendid exercise in hypothetical prestidigitation. Watch in amazement as obvious counter-factuals turn out to boast the blunt currency of quotidian reality. You scale the heights of subjunctive fantasy only to find yourself delivered to the stern threshold of the indicative. The barely possible transfigures itself into the ineluctable. “What if” becomes “of course.” Check it out:
What if a guy nobody’s ever heard of, from Hawaii no less, with a Muslim African father and a Muslim Indonesian stepfather and a mom from Kansas named Stanley inexplicably glides from Punahou to a short sheep-dip at Occidental to the Frankfurt School’s favorite Ivy League haunt, Columbia, to Harvard Law? What if he’s such an arrogant, aloof suckup of no particular ability or accomplishment that his fellow students openly ridicule him with the invention of the “Obamamometer,” which measures epic brown-nosing on a scale from one to ten? What if he’s blissfully unaware of his own deficiencies, and instead comes to believe that he’s earned everything that’s come his way — or ever will?
Sound incredible? Read on:
And what if this guy – let’s give him a patently implausible, comically grandiose name like “Barack Hussein Obama II” – moves to . . . New Jersey? Arkansas? No, I’ve got it – Chicago, Ill. – falls in with . . . wait for it . . . former domestic-terrorist fugitives, adopts a racist pastor to burnish his hitherto-nonexistent “Christian” credentials, and becomes, say, a state senator? Even better: a U.S. senator! And what if he gets a guy named . . . Jake Lingle, yes, that’s it! – to use his Chicago Tribune connections to destroy not one but two opponents, both over divorce records! And what if this obscure senator, after less than two years in Washington and with a grand total of one speech to his credit, decides to run for president on a platform of “fundamental change?”
What if his opponent is a creaky, cranky, cantankerous old fart who hates his own party and then – I know this bit is unbelievable but we’re still spit-balling here – out of the blue selects some dizzy moose-hunting dame from . . . Alaska! . . . to be his running mate? And what if she electrifies his doomed candidacy (heck, even he doesn’t really seem to want to win) and sends him vaulting into the lead in the polls? What if he’s on the verge of actually defeating BO2 when Barry’s media pals lay down some serious covering fire and then, mysteriously, the booming U.S. economy collapses almost overnight as George Soros strokes a white cat and chuckles menacingly?
The New Criterion
The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse
Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity
Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age
Tenured Radicals, NEW, EXPANDED EDITION FALL 2008! How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education
Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts
The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America
Against the Idols of the Age
Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century
The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age
Physics and Politics, by Walter Bagehot, edited with an
Introduction by Roger Kimball
