Sarah Palin. The female Dan Quayle? Or the new Ross Perot? Tyler Cowen:

Palin has an outside, straight talker, pro-reform, true blooded American, take no prisoners image much as Perot did. (A second point of comparison is Arnold Schwarznegger, with some obvious differences.) And she has only begun to cultivate that image. Do you recall how much impact Perot had on the American people?

Of course if Perot actually had had the chance to be President, the results probably would not have been pretty. He would have been forced to act like "just another politician," as has been the case with Arnold because in fact the job revolves around knowing how to govern.

There is one biographical fact about Palin’s life that the critics (...) are hardly touching upon. I mean her decision to have a Downs child instead of an abortion. This is the fact about her life and it will be viewed as such from now through November and perhaps beyond.

If only for this reason, she will be seen as a candidate who stands on principle. I don’t think the critics are sufficiently appreciating how tired the American people are of candidates who say one thing and do another and who abandon their principles at the first provocation. This is a deep and very strong current and it runs through virtually every group of American political voters. Because of her decision to have a Downs child, many voters will not view Sarah Palin in a cynical light, no matter what the critics say. No story about firing a state trooper will break that seal.

In my jaded view, "politicians who break their word, violate their ideals, and do not follow through on their promises" is not one of the major problems in American politics. In fact it’s often good that political promises are forgotten in the light of the realities. So the American obsession with political promise-keeping does not resonate with me. But the American people have been hungry for a "promise keeper, ideals believer" for decades and when was the last time they actually got one?

By the way, my mom’s first reaction to the nomination (hi mom!) was that other mothers of "different" children (what exactly is the right word here?) would very much identify with Palin and view her life as validating theirs and thus support her.

Over at In Flanders Fields Vincent De Roeck has posted a timely piece by conservative James Bovard in which he strenously and correctly tackles the torture record of the Bush-administration:

Is torture compatible with liberty? Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favour permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States. This controversy is reminiscent of a disagreement between the famous economists F. A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) brilliantly restated the classical warnings on Leviathan, showing the similarities in trends between Nazi Germany and Western democracies. Keynes claimed that Hayek had gone too far in his criticism because “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.” Many have embraced Keynes’s assumption in the post-9/11 era. They have accepted that a democratic government should be permitted to unleash itself if the rulers promise to do good things. They have ignored or shrugged off the specific methods used because of their confidence that politicians “think and feel rightly.”

President George W. Bush exploited this confidence by invoking American values in response to his critics. Shortly after the Abu Ghraib prison photos were published, Bush brushed aside a question about his personal responsibility by assuring a French interviewer that “America is a great and generous and decent country.” After Amnesty International declared that the United States had become “a leading purveyor and practitioner” of torture, Bush sought to refute the charge by invoking American moral greatness: “The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.” Much of the American media continued praising Bush as a visionary idealist long after the evidence of grave abuses had surfaced. The Bush administration’s invocation of freedom to justify its interrogation policies is premised on the assumption that the U.S. government could never be a threat to Americans’ freedom. The Founding Fathers recognized that individual liberty depends on a “government of laws, not of men.” Unfortunately, the Bush administration decided that the law could not be permitted to impede its war against terrorism.

Justice Department lawyers busied themselves creating legal pretexts for the President to scorn the federal Anti-Torture Act and the Geneva Conventions. A secret 2002 memo written by Justice Department official John Yoo proclaimed that “the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces (…) We will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President’s ultimate authority in these areas. “White House counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly declared that Bush had a “commander-in-chief override.” Thus the statute book no longer applied to the nation’s Supreme Leader. Bush and his defenders continually portray the torture scandal as problems caused by a “few bad apples” or simply the equivalent of college-fraternity hazing. In reality, the abuses ranged from the endless high-volume repetition of a “Meow Mix” cat-food commercial at Guantanamo to tearing out toenails in Afghanistan to compulsory enemas for recalcitrant prisoners to beating people to death in Iraq and kicking them to death outside Kabul to illegally sending detainees to foreign governments to be tortured by proxy and creating a system of “ghost prisoners” worthy of a banana republic.

U.S. torture has been confirmed by FBI agents, former U.S. military interrogators, a Department of Defense Inspector General report, and court cases around the globe. Yale law professor Jack Balkin wrote, “The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law.” After 9/11 the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” the New York Times noted last year.

The United States had long condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium. Torture regimes crafted to perpetuate repressive systems suddenly became engines of freedom - at least in the eyes of some Bush supporters. The Justice Department produced a secret legal opinion in 2005 permitting CIA interrogators to use “combined effects” on detainees, including head slapping, simulated drownings (“waterboarding”), frigid temperatures, manacling people for many hours in stress positions, and blasting them with loud music to assure sleep deprivation. The New York Times, which published the leaked memo, labeled it an “expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the CIA.” The memo signaled that the Bush administration explicitly rejected the definition of torture that had been used for the previous century.

From the time when the first Abu Ghraib photographs were published, President Bush emphatically denied that the U.S. government ever used or approved of torture. But this past April,ABC News revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials would sit around a table in the White House and specify the precise extreme interrogation methods that would be used on Muslim detainees. ABC noted: “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed (…) some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed - down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Thus the number of times each prisoner could be whacked upside the head or almost drowned - or how long he could be shackled in a painful position - were decreed by the administration’s top officials. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was the loudest apologist for Bush power grabs, warned, “History will not judge this kindly.” Bush later confirmed that he was aware that his top officials were dictating exactly how brutal the interrogations would become.

The torture scandal has made clear how little protection American laws provide to U.S. victims. Lawyers for four British citizens who had been locked up at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2004 sued U.S. officials, seeking damages for the illegal detention and torture they suffered. In January 2008 federal Judge Karen Henderson rejected their lawsuit, declaring that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” A federal appeals court ruled: “It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably ‘seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.” The court ruled that the officials could not be sued because they were merely carrying out their official duties. The fact that they were following Bush’s orders gave them legal immunity in American courts - a tacit revocation of the Nuremberg doctrines established in the war-crimes trials after WW II. Eric Lewis, the detainees’ lawyer, lamented, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a day’s work for the defense secretary and senior generals.”

In recent years, the U.S. government has appropriated the title of the Supreme Defender of World Freedom, akin to the Catholic Church’s role as the defender of the true faith in earlier centuries. During the Inquisition, torture was justified to rid the world of heresy. Bush, who promised to “rid the world of evil,” perhaps feels justified in using torture to achieve his transcendent goal. But this is where one of the problems arises. In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush talked about al Qaeda as the target of U.S. efforts.The target list soon expanded to include the Taliban, the Afghan rulers who had provided sanctuary to al Qaeda. Bush later added “radicals” and “extremists” to the list of enemies. Attorney General Gonzales declared in 2006 that it is “essential that we continue to develop the tools we need to investigate (…) and prosecute those who travel down the road of radicalization.” There is nothing to constrain a politician from labeling his opponents “radicals” - as has happened repeatedly in American history.

Some people support torture because they are confident that the government will only barbarize foreigners. This was how Bush’s power to designate enemy combatants was first sold to the public - as something that would only be applied to foreign perils. But after José Padilla was arrested in Chicago in 2002, his American citizenship did not save him from brutality while incarcerated in South Carolina and elsewhere in the United States. Once the government decrees that someone has no rights, it is a small step to declare that there will be no limits on how the government treats that person. Some Americans support torture because of their distrust or hostility to Muslims, the usual target of contemporary extreme American interrogation methods. But the government claims the right to designate as enemy combatants (and thus eligible for torture) alleged members or supporters of any designated terrorist group. Irish Americans could be at risk of torture if the feds alleged they were linked to the Real Irish Republican Army, and Jews could face similar perils if the feds alleged their connection to the Sword of David or American Friends of the United Yeshiva Movement.

Human Rights Watch warned in 2005 that the government’s terrorist-group designation process has been “challenged in the courts for being vague, overbroad, and for there being no transparent criteria for listing entities on the lists or removing entities from the lists.” Torture supposedly saves lives by providing the surest way to get the evidence of a “ticking time bomb.” There are no good verified examples of that from American experience. However, it was torture that produced “evidence” that spurred the American public to support Bush’s rush to war against Iraq. The “smoking gun” linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein came from an al Qaeda operative captured in Afghanistan, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on al-Libi’s information for his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council. However, Powell did not know that al-Libi had been tortured in Egypt – where he was “renditioned” by U.S. agents. Had it not been for the torture of al-Libi, thousands of American soldiers might still be alive, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would not have perished in the 2003 invasion and the subsequent civil war.

Torture is not a “bleeding heart” issue; instead, it is simply a question of whether a president will have absolute power. In reality, the Bush administration’s torture policies are simply the most vivid example of its belief that the president is now permitted to do as he pleases. Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury declared in 2006: “Under the law of war, the president is always right.” Bradbury also informed a closed congressional committee in 2006 that Bush has the authority on his own to order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. Bradbury’s assertion stirred zero controversy - despite the administration’s long record of false accusations of terrorist connections. The vast majority of people charged in federal terrorist investigations have not been convicted on terrorism charges.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to recognize that the existence of perils cannot justify absolute power. The Constitution was created by a generation of men who had fought a war against the most powerful government in the world. At the same time, it was also a civil war, thanks to the pervasive Tory sympathizers in many parts of the colonies. The Constitution was not made for sunny days and smooth sailing. Instead, it was crafted for hard times, with many provisions for dealing with deadly threats to the nation’s survival. For a president to effectively claim that he can no longer be bound by the Constitution is an insult to the Founding Fathers who survived far harsher tests in their time than America did on and after 9/11.

I thought the United States was planning to win over many islamic hearts by the force of its ideals and liberties. Turns out that the United States is taken over by the practices of the Islamic terrorists. It all brings back memories of this piece by William Graham Sumner aptly titled The Conquest of the United States by Spain (1898). It’s a piece about the Spanish-American war, a war against an imperialistic power: Spain. But it turned out that the United States was becoming more and more alike the enemy it defeated:

Spain was the first, for a long time the greatest, of the modern imperialist states. The United States, by its historical origin, its traditions, and its principles, is the chief representative of the revolt and reaction against that kind of state. I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of the Spanish symbol.

We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies.

So it’s hard too tell who exactly won. Likewise, it’s difficult, very difficult, to argue that the United States can become a moral victor in the war against terror, when it is becoming a terrorist nation itself.

You don’t say:

Trying to appear moderate is not always the best strategy for capturing votes during an election, reveals a new study. Extreme positions can build trust among an electorate, who value ideological commitment in times of uncertainty.

Well, we already know this in Belgium for more than three decades.

On the other hand, maybe the study is on to something. I mean, libertarianism is an extreme position as well, especially in Europe. But it doesn’t seem to be capable of building trust among the electorate. Maybe it’s because libertarians don’t think much about elections and democracy anyway. The bad feelings seems to be mutual.

Brad DeLong is against her, so she must be doing something good. And indeed she has:

Governor Sarah Palin announced today the State of Alaska has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to overturn U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne’s decision to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

You see, the polar bear is considered a threatened species because of global warming (shrinking artic ice). And is isn’t...

Glenn Greenwald:

There’s a misconception that American Jews largely support the neoconservative agenda. They simply don’t. Polling data on this question is unequivocally clear. A recent poll from the American Jewish Committee, surveying American Jewish opinion, found that in large numbers, they disapprove of the way the U.S. is handling its “campaign against terrorism” (59-31); overwhelmingly believe the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq (67-27); believe that things are going “somewhat badly” or “very badly” in Iraq (76-23); and believe that the “surge” has either made things worse or has had no impact (68-30).

More strikingly, when asked whether they would support or oppose the United States taking military action against Iran, a large majority — 57-35% — say they would oppose such action, even if it were being undertaken “to prevent [Iran] from developing nuclear weapons.” While Jews hold views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which are quite pessimistic about the prospects for Israel’s ability to achieve a lasting peace with its “Arab neighbors,” even there, a plurality (46-43) supports the establishment of a Palestinian state.

People like Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman are not only a small minority among Americans generally, they represent a minority of American Jews. Another recent poll, this one from the nonpartisan Israel Project, found that the vast majority of American Jewish voters have priorities that are indistinguishable from American voters generally, and it is only a small minority of those voters for whom Israel is a top priority: “Three quarters of the American Jewish community say that there are other issues more important than Israel,” . . .only 23 percent of the Jewish population listed Israel as a top issue. . .While 51% of the respondents acknowledged that the economy and jobs were their major concern, only 7% cited the Middle East conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the threat of Iran.”

The one version is known to us all, and we loath it: socialism. The other version is less well known and we generally defend it, because we confuse it with the free market: corportatism. Roderick Long explains:

Those who see government power and corporate power as being in conflict, and those who seem them as being in cahoots, each have a point. The alliance between government and the corporate elite is like the partnership between church and state in the Middle Ages: each one wants to be the dominant partner, so there’s naturally some pushing and shoving from time to time; but on the other hand the two parties have a common interest in holding down the rest of us, and so the conflict rarely goes too far. The main difference between “left-wing” and “right-wing” versions of statism, as I see it, is that the former generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of the state (i.e., toward state-socialism) while the latter generally seek to shift the balance a bit farther in favour of corporatism and plutocracy. (In the U.S., the reigning versions of liberalism and conservatism are arguably both more corporatist than state-socialist; but the liberals are still a few notches farther toward state-socialism than the conservatives are.)

But whether the special interests who are the primary beneficiaries of state power are mainly within the state apparatus or mainly outside it, the actual application of state power remains much the same. Hence it is a mistake to suppose that the corporatist-plutocratic version of statism is in any interesting sense less statist than the state-socialist version.

But it is an all-too-common mistake – and this tendency to underestimate the chasm between free markets and corporatism is enormously beneficial to the state, enabling a slick bait-and-switch. When free markets and government grants of privilege to business are conflated, those who are attracted to free markets are easily duped into supporting plutocracy, thus swelling the ranks of statism’s right wing – while those who are turned off by plutocracy are likewise easily duped into opposing free markets, thereby swelling the ranks of statism’s left wing. (...)

As one of the villains in The Fountainhead explains in a moment of frankness, talking about the choice Europe was then facing between communism and fascism:

If you’re sick of one version, we push you in the other. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads – collectivism. Tails – collectivism. Give up your soul to a council – or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective.

The largely (though not completely) illusory conflict between state-oriented Palpatine and corporate-oriented Dooku in the Star Wars prequels is a nice dramatisation of the same principle.

This dynamic applies in particular to the debate over health care policy. The contrast between, say, the Canadian and American approaches is frequently described – by both sides – as a contrast between a “governmental” or “socialised” system on the one hand, and a “market-based” or “free enterprise” system on the other. But the American health care system bears little resemblance to a free market; instead it represents massive government intervention on behalf of private special interests, from insurance companies to the medical establishment. The choice between the American and Canadian models is simply a choice between different two different flavours of statism – each with somewhat different vices, it’s true (e.g., do you prefer higher prices or longer waits?), but ultimately coming down to a matter of the percentage to which control of your healthcare is exercised by people sitting in government offices as opposed to being exercised by people sitting in governmentally-privileged “private” offices – but in either case by ambitious, avaricious apparatchiks who aren’t you.

The reason why defenders of the free market have such a hard time is elegantly explained here. Defenders of big business will drop their defence of free markets when the two are in conflict with each other (which they often are). Socialists conflate the combination of big business and big government with markets and so they will not defend free markets either. There is an alternative (TIA), it’s called libertarianism.

He probably even meant it. Ronald Reagan:

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

People don’t start wars, governments do.

For all those artists, writers, musicians, movie makers who can’t stop whining about the hollowing out of their intellectual property rights by the internet here is an important observation. Two books that are online for free and that argue against intellectual property rights are selling very well indeed. On Amazon:

Right now on Amazon, in the "Intellectual Property" legal books subcategory, my Against Intellectual Property (Amazon link) is ranked #22, and Boldrin and Levine’s Against Intellectual Monopoly (Amazon link) is #48. Eat my dust, suckas! :)
Interestingly, both books are available for free online, yet the print editions are still selling well.

And in the bookstore:

You will note that Kinsella’s book Against Intellectual Property is the #2 bestseller in the store. This is despite its having been online for six years and remains so, in two formats. What a way to demonstrate a thesis. If you have something that is valuable to others, people might be willing to pay for it.

Copyright has become obsolete. Now it’s time for lawmakers (yes, that also means you, Joe Biden) to recognize this and render copyright impotent as well.

From Gallup this interesting opinion poll:

Large majorities of Democrats and independents, and even about half of Republicans, believe the president of the United States should meet with the leaders of countries that are considered enemies of the United States. Overall, 67% of Americans say this kind of diplomacy is a good idea.

(...)

Although separate Gallup polling shows that few Americans view Iran favorably, and that Iran leads Americans’ list of top U.S. enemies in the world, the new Gallup survey also finds high public support for presidential-level meetings between the United States and Iran, specifically.

About 6 in 10 Americans (59%) think it would be a good idea for the president of the United States to meet with the president of Iran. This includes about half of Republicans, a majority of independents, and most Democrats.

The issue of using presidential diplomacy with U.S. enemies distinguishes Barack Obama from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, and even from his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton.

Obama is the only one of the three who has said he would personally meet with the leaders of countries like Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela as president, and he recently defended his position by saying "strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries." Clinton has criticized Obama’s approach as "naïve," and McCain has been unrelenting in his attacks on the issue, accusing Obama of being dangerously inexperienced and having "reckless judgment."

McCain may eventually persuade more Americans that there is nothing for the president of the United States to discuss with hostile foreign leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that to do so only undermines U.S. efforts to destabilize such regimes.

However, for now, whether it’s the leader of an "enemy" country, generally, or the president of Iran, specifically, Americans think it’s a good idea for the president of the United States to meet directly with the nation’s adversaries.

Ok, McCain has begun an offensive with Obama just now ready to respond and go on the counter-attack. But the fact that McCain’s offense seems to be working (in spades!) appears to indicate that the race is not yet run, and that Obama faces a very tough battle. A landslide-victory appears to become much less likely with the day. From Zogby:

As Russian tanks rolled into the Republic of Georgia and the presidential candidates met over the weekend in the first joint issues forum of the fall campaign, the latest polling includes drama almost as compelling - Republican John McCain has taken a five-point lead over Democrat Barack Obama in the race for President, the latest Reuters/Zogby telephone survey shows.

McCain leads Obama by a 46% to 41% margin.

I think that as long as neither candidate can score 50% or higher in the polls a landslide-victory is very unlikely (and of course in the case of McCain non-existent, even with 50% in the polls). And with 41% Obama is very far from it. By the way, about that first joint forum. The only thing we heard from McCain is that the will follow Osama (not Obama!) to "the gates of hell" to catch him. Of course we in Europe had all a few good laughs with his statement. In the U.S. however the consensus seems to be that McCain won that debate.

This could be fun:

David Zucker, the director and writer who helped create “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” franchise has called on Hollywood’s tiny but tightly knit Republican A-list crowd to help him make a broad yet unusually right-leaning political satire titled “An American Carol.”

The low-budget indie co-stars Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer with Oscar-winner Jon Voight, cinema icon Dennis Hopper, model-heiress Paris Hilton and frequent Zucker stooge Leslie Nielsen in minor roles. Release is planned sometime by year’s end; the director suggested Friday, Sept. 12, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

As with many of Zucker’s earlier films, his latest japefest is loaded with sight gags and a litany of one-liners, but there are few sacred cows. Along with many Muslim terrorists named Mohammed, even severely handicapped children are subject to the film’s screwball comedy. Jimmy Carter shows up for a brief razzing, but far more relevant Dems, including Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, seem conspicuous in their absence.

Instead, Zucker (with co-writer Myrna Sokoloff) mocks the usual conservative targets: ACLU attorneys, liberal colleges and anti-war protesters. The movie saves its most severe scorn for the main character, a slovenly documentary filmmaker based on Oscar winner Michael Moore. The attack is literally scorched-earth style: In a climactic scene, Moore’s stand-in (here named “Michael Malone”) finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Voight) hovers nearby.

Anarchist humor and conservative politics make for strange bedfellows. Another “Carol” scene takes place inside a portable toilet stall, where Malone is repeatedly slapped around by real-life Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, accompanied by the spirits of former President John F. Kennedy and World War II icon Gen. George Patton.

Using Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” as a loose framework, Scrooge’s holiday humbuggery is replaced with Malone’s anti-American bias. Not only does the character attempt a boycott of the Fourth of July, but he also lends unwitting aid to jihadists plotting to blow up Madison Square Garden. Through the imagined interventions of Patton, the dead presidents and country singer Trace Adkins, Moore’s surrogate travels through history, eventually coming around to embrace patriotic values.

Airplane and The Naked Gun are two of the most funniest movies ever made. Zucker is also the man behind two of the Scary Movie-series. He says he’s a Democrat turned Republican by the events on 9/11. Here is an ad he made for the Republicans. It’s about Madelaine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton:



And here are some hilarious parts of Airplane and The Naked Gun. Enjoy.

From McClatchy kind of explosive news:

Bush administration officials, worried by what they saw as a series of provocative Russian actions, repeatedly warned Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to avoid giving the Kremlin an excuse to intervene in his country militarily, U.S. officials said Monday.

But in the end, the warnings failed to stop the Georgian president — a Bush favorite — from launching an attack last week that on Monday seemed likely to end not only in his country’s military humiliation but complete occupation by Russian forces.

The cost of the fighting in lives has yet to be tallied. But President Bush on Monday made it clear that the outcome was sure to mark a turning point in Russia’s relations with the West. It might also prove costly for the West’s relationship with the budding democracies of Eastern Europe, which now must contemplate a world where the United States could do little to protect a close ally in the face of a determined Russian onslaught.

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people," President Bush proclaimed after returning from China. "Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

"These actions jeopardize Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe," Bush said. "It’s time for Russia to be true to its word to act to end this crisis."

Pentagon officials said that despite having 130 trainers assigned to Georgia, they had no advance notice of Georgia’s sudden move last Thursday to send thousands of Georgian troops into South Ossetia to capture that province’s capital, Tskhinvali.

Not only did the U.S. troops working alongside their Georgian counterparts not see any signs of an impending invasion, Georgian officials did not notify the U.S. military before the incursion, a senior U.S. defense official told McClatchy.

But the Bush administration had fretted for months over what officials saw as intensifying Russian moves that it feared were aimed at provoking Georgia into a conflict over South Ossetia or Abkhazia, another secessionist province.

Russia has been angry over Georgia’s close links with Washington, and has been determined to stop the admission to NATO of its former vassal, which is located on strategic energy and transportation routes to Central Asia.

The Russian actions against Georgia "seemed designed to provoke a Georgian over-reaction," said a senior U.S. official. "We have always counseled restraint to the Georgians."

Some experts, however, wondered whether the administration might have inadvertently sent Saakashvili mixed messages that would have led him to believe he could count on U.S. support if he got into trouble.

Bush lavished praise on the U.S.-educated Georgian leader as a "beacon of democracy." He gave military training and equipment to Georgia, which supplied the third-largest contingent to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and had promised NATO membership, they said. He visited the country in 2005 and addressed a huge crowd from the same podium as Saakashvili.

"The Russians have clearly overreacted but President Saakashvili . . . for some reason seems to think he has a hall pass from this administration," said former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

U.S. officials had been warning of Russian actions designed to provoke Georgia for months.

In June, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Russia’s "unremitting" political and economic pressure included closing its border with Georgia, suspending air and transportation links, imposing an embargo on Georgian agricultural exports and allowing Russian banks to operate "virtually unregulated" with unlicensed Abkhazian banks.

Earlier this year, he said, Russia strengthened official ties with separatist leaders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, shot down an unmanned Georgian surveillance drone, sent heavy combat troops with artillery as peacekeepers to Abkhazia and dispatched military personnel to repair a rail line without Georgia’s permission.

He also said senior Russian officials were assigned to the internationally unrecognized self-declared governments in the two enclaves and that senior Russian military officers operated with the separatists’ military forces.

The senior U.S. official said the Russians had also dragged their feet on a recent German-led effort to head off a conflict.

A "parade" of U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, visited Tbilisi to urge Saakashvili to avoid giving the Kremlin to act, a State Department officials said.

At the same time, U.S. officials said that they believed they had an understanding with Russia that any response to Georgian military action would be limited to South Ossetia.

"We knew they were going to go crack heads. We told them again and again not to do this," the State Department official said. "We thought we had an understanding with the Russians that any response would be South Ossetia-focused. Clearly it’s not."

One problem in under-estimating the Russian response, another U.S. official said, was "a dearth of intelligence assets in the region."

U.S. "national technical means," the official name for spy satellites and other technology, are "pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan," the official said, and there was only limited monitoring of Russian military movements toward the Georgian border.

Additionally, the United States had lost access to vital information when Russia dropped out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in December to protest U.S. plans to build missile defense sites in Europe.

Under the treaty, Russia had been required to exchange reports on troop, armor and aircraft deployments with the United States and other members on a monthly basis. But once Russia dropped out, that information was no longer available.

"I wouldn’t say we were blind," the official said. "I would say that we mostly were focused elsewhere, unlike during the Cold War, when we’d see a single Soviet armor battalion move. So, yes, the size and scope of the Russian move has come as something of a surprise."

Now, the United States is left with few options for countering what it calls Russia’s "disproportionate" response to Georgia if the Kremlin persists in spurning a U.S.-backed European plan calling for a ceasefire, a pullback of all forces, an accord on the non-use of force and deployment of international monitors.

The delicacy of the situation was underscored by the U.S. decision to leave its military advisers in Georgia, though, with Georgia’s troops no longer in Iraq, there was little for the advisers to do.

"While their utility in country may be very limited, removing them might inadvertently signal to the world that we are abandoning our ally, which we most certainly are not," said a senior U.S. military official.

I wonder if those guys of the Economic Freedom of the World project take something like this into account when ranking countries according to the amount of economic freedom there is:

The United States thinks of itself as a free economy with lots of competition. But I am often struck by the number of petty monopolies that exist. Here is one in Montgomery County Maryland where a woman, certified to massage people, can’t massage her favorite patients, horses (...). Why? Because to massage horses, you have to be a veterinarian. The case gets worse. She has also been informed that chiropractors are specifically forbidden from practicing on animals. She is suing to be allowed to massage animals but is being opposed in court by the state veterinary board and the state chiropractic board.

I can imagine something like this happening in Europe or in Belgium. I think that this kind of petty monopolies are actually quite common over here. But in the United States? The freeest country in the world?

Neoconservative Bill Kristol says Colin Powell is to going to endorse Obama:

And for a coherent Russia policy:

The international conflict between Russia and Georgia over the status of Georgia’s breakaway territory of South Ossetia rightly brought about hand-wringing from a war-weary international community. The crisis has already caused a humanitarian catastrophe in which thousands have been killed and tens of thousands have been displaced in and around South Ossetia.

The idea of Russian troops potentially occupying the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and deposing the pro-Western Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, rightly conjured geopolitical nightmares that the United States and other Western nations didn’t want to think about.

So it’s promising that Russia has finally agreed to a conditional cease-fire. Hopefully, the aggressive diplomacy by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of the West will prove decisive, and the cessation of hostilities will hold. As negotiations continue over the days and weeks to come, however, the Bush administration and the presumptive nominees for president should be taking a good look at the state of Russian relations with the West, which are, frankly, a mess.

Improving this vital relationship must be a centerpiece of American foreign policy going forward.

A bit of history: South Ossetia has managed its own affairs since fighting for independence from Georgia in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. In that relatively short but violent conflict, hundreds were killed and tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes. A peace deal ended the fighting, but essentially froze the conflict without resolving the underlying disagreements.

Under the terms of the deal, Russian peacekeepers moved into South Ossetia, and Georgia was forced to accept de facto autonomy for parts of that region. While South Ossetia has declared independence, it has not been recognized by any other country. And tension has only grown since the 2004 election of Saakashvili, who has promised to bring South Ossetia and another breakaway territory, Abkhazia, back under complete Georgian control.

Why do Ossetians want to break away? In essence, they don’t like the Georgians very much. The Ossetians are a distinct ethnic group with origins in the Russian plains. Ethnic Georgians are a minority in South Ossetia, accounting for less than a third of the population. In the past 20 years, tensions between Georgians and South Ossetians have grown, with Ossetians identifying more and more with Russia. This is due, in large part, to Russia’s support of the separatists and because so many South Ossetians fled into Russia in the early 1990s.

Most South Ossetians now see Moscow as a protector and would be open to joining up with their ethnic counterparts in North Ossetia—an autonomous region within Russia. Georgia strongly opposes this, and even rejects the name "South Ossetia," preferring to call the region by the ancient name of "Samachablo," or "Tskhinvali," after its primary city.

Occasional clashes escalated this year between Georgia and South Ossetia. Then recently, South Ossetia accused Georgia of firing mortars into the enclave after six Georgian policemen had been killed in the border area by a roadside bomb.

In essence, Georgia overplayed its hand—believing that the West would be more forceful in keeping Russia in check and that Russia would be more measured in its response. Russia, on the other hand, overreacted, and used a level of force well beyond that necessary to re-take South Ossetia. Both sides blame each other for the current conflict and accuse each other of atrocities.

What does the situation tell us about Russian relations with the West? First of all, Russia’s overbearing response to the crisis demonstrates that Russia is likely still angry about NATO’s indication that Georgia would be allowed to join the alliance at some point, as well as other international matters such as America’s missile defense plans in Europe (which Russia feels threatened by) and the West’s support for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia earlier this year (against Moscow’s wishes). Russia clearly feels the need to flex its muscles in the Caucasus and show that it’s still the dominant player in the region.

At the same time, the crisis shows that the United States doesn’t really have a relationship with Russia at the moment and has been relegated to making empty threats when Russia behaves badly. The United States isn’t about to start a war with Russia.

The administration was correct to condemn Russia’s overreaction and continued aggression in both Georgia proper and the South Ossetian region. Key strategic interests are at stake, including a pipeline carrying oil through Georgia to the West. But the crisis also shows that we need a more comprehensive and coherent Russia policy. Whether the United States likes it or not, we need Russia to effectively deal with Iran, non-proliferation and other security matters. The United States must have a more effective strategy than simply reacting aggressively to crises as they arise. We can’t afford a return to the bad old days of the Cold War.

From Wired:

The American military has been training and equipping Georgian troops for years.

(...)

Since early 2002, the U.S. government has given a healthy amount of military aid to Georgia. When I last visited South Ossetia, Georgian troops manned a checkpoint outside Tskhinvali -- decked out in surplus U.S. Army uniforms and new body armor.

The first U.S. aid came under the rubric of the Georgia Train and Equip Program (ostensibly to counter alleged Al Qaeda influence in the Pankisi Gorge); then, under the Sustainment and Stability Operations Program. Georgia returned the favor, committing thousands of troops to the multi-national coalition in Iraq. Last fall, the Georgians doubled their contingent, making them the third-largest contributor to the coalition. Not bad for a nation of 4.6 million people.

Leaving aside the question of Russian interference (...), the larger concern has been that Georgia might be tempted to use its newfound military prowess to resolve domestic conflicts by force.

As Sergei Shamba, the foreign affairs minister of Abkhazia, told me in 2006: “The Georgians are euphoric because they have been equipped, trained, that they have gained military experience in Iraq. It feeds this revanchist mood… How can South Ossetia be demilitarized, when all of Georgia is bristling with weaponry, and it’s only an hour’s ride by tank from Tbilisi to Tskhinvali?”

One of the U.S. military trainers put it to me a bit more bluntly. “We’re giving them the knife,” he said. “Will they use it?”

Some more sanity about Georgia. From an expert:

Following a series of provocative attacks in its secessionist region of South Ossetia late last week, Georgia launched an all-out attempt to reestablish control in the tiny enclave. Russia then intervened by dropping bombs on Georgia to protect the South Ossetians, halt the growing tide of refugees flooding into southern Russia, and aid its own peacekeepers there.

Now, the story goes, Russia has at last found a way of undermining Georgia’s Western aspirations, nipping the country’s budding democracy, and countering American influence across Eurasia. But this view of events is simplistic.

American and European diplomats, who have rushed to the region to try to stop the conflict, would do well to consider the broader effects of this latest round of Caucasus bloodletting – and to seek perspectives on the conflict beyond the story of embattled democracy and cynical comparisons with the Prague Spring of 1968.

Russia illegally attacked Georgia and imperiled a small and feeble neighbor. But by dispatching his own ill-prepared military to resolve a secessionist dispute by force, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has managed to lead his country down the path of a disastrous and ultimately self-defeating war.

Speaking on CNN, Mr. Saakashvili compared Russia’s intervention in Georgia to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. Russia has massively overreacted to the situation in Georgia. It has hit targets across Georgia, well beyond South Ossetia, and has killed both Georgian military personnel as well as civilians. The international community is right to condemn this illegal attack on an independent country and United Nations member.

But this is not a repeat of the Soviet Union’s aggressive behavior of the last century. So far at least, Russia’s aims have been clear: to oust Georgian forces from the territory of South Ossetia, one of two secessionist enclaves in Georgia, and to chasten a Saakashvili government that Russia perceives as hot-headed and unpredictable.

Regardless of the conflict’s origins, the West must continue to act diplomatically to push Georgia and Russia back to the pre-attacks status quo. The United States should make it clear that Saakashvili has seriously miscalculated the meaning of his partnership with Washington, and that Georgia and Russia must step back before they do irreparable damage to their relations with the US, NATO, and the European Union.

The attack on South Ossetia, along with Russia’s inexcusable reaction, have pushed both sides down the road toward all-out war – a war that could ignite a host of other territorial and ethnic disputes in the Caucasus as a whole.

The emerging narrative, echoing across editorial pages and on television news programs in the US, portrays Georgia as an embattled, pro-Western country struggling to secure its borders against a belligerent Russia. Since coming to power in a bloodless revolution in late 2003, Saakashvili has certainly steered a clear course toward the West.

The EU flag now flies alongside the Georgian one on major government buildings (even though Georgia is a long way from ever becoming a member of the EU). The Saakashvili government seeks Georgian membership in NATO, an aspiration strongly supported by the administration of George W. Bush. Oddly, before the conflict erupted on its own soil Georgia was the third-largest troop contributor in Iraq, a result of Saakashvili’s desire to show absolute commitment to the US and, in the process, gain needed military training and equipment for the small Georgian Army.

Russia must be condemned for its unsanctioned intervention. But the war began as an ill-considered move by Georgia to retake South Ossetia by force. Saakashvili’s larger goal was to lead his country into war as a form of calculated self-sacrifice, hoping that Russia’s predictable overreaction would convince the West of exactly the narrative that many commentators have now taken up.

But regardless of its origins, the upsurge in violence has illustrated the volatile and sometimes deadly politics of the Caucasus, the Texas-size swath of mountains, hills, and plains separating the Black Sea from the Caspian.

Like the Balkans in the 1990s, the central problems of this region are about the dark politics of ethnic revival and territorial struggle. The region is home to scores of brewing border disputes and dreams of nationalist homelands.

In addition to South Ossetia, the region of Abkhazia has also maintained de facto independence for more than a decade. Located along Georgia’s Black Sea coast, Abkhazia has called up volunteers to support the South Ossetian cause. Russia has now moved to aid the Abkhazians, who are concerned that Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia were a dress rehearsal for an attack on them.

Farther afield, other secessionist entities and recognized governments in neighboring countries – from Nagorno-Karabakh to Chechnya – are eyeing the situation. The outcome of the Russo-Georgian struggle will determine whether these other disputes move toward peace or once again produce the barbaric warfare and streams of refugees that defined the Caucasus more than a decade ago.

For Georgia, this war has been a disastrous miscalculation. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are now completely lost. It is almost impossible to imagine a scenario under which these places – home to perhaps 200,000 people – would ever consent to coming back into a Georgian state they perceive as an aggressor.

Armed volunteers have already been flooding into South Ossetia from other parts of the Caucasus to fight against Georgian forces and help finally "liberate" the Ossetians from the Georgian yoke.

Despite welcome efforts to end the fighting, the Russo-Georgian war has created yet another generation of young men in the Caucasus whose worldviews are defined by violence, revenge, and nationalist zeal.

Some downright irresponsable neoconservative commentators are suggesting that America should start fighting a proxy war against Russia, via Georgia. Other conservative commentators, fortunately, are a more sane. Here is Ross Douthat:

It’s hard for me to believe that Putin’s Russia is both an aggressive, expansive power poised to rebuild the Soviet Empire at tank-point and that the Russians would be more or less helpless to retaliate against us in their own neighborhood if we decided to start a proxy war with them in the Caucuses. Sure, maybe Moscow wouldn’t have a strong countermove, but do we really want to dare them to make things harder for us where Tehran’s quest for nukes is concerned? Or dare them to foul up our ongoing counter-insurgency in Afghanistan? Is the fate of Abkhazia and South Ossetia really worth escalating the already-substantial risks we face in the Middle East and Central Asia?

This comes back to the point I tried to make a few days ago, about grand strategy and trade-offs. Russia is not quite the resurgent global powerhouse, I think, that Boot and other hawks seem to suggest it is: Rather, it’s a potent regional power whose lousy long-term prospects have been offset, for now at least, by booming energy revenues and extremely savvy leadership. Whereas the Soviet Union could project power into Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia with relative ease, Putin’s Russia can project power against its smallish neighbors, and even then only within limits. (Moscow’s difficulties in merely holding onto Chechnya suggest that maintaining an actual occupation of Georgia, as the Tsars and Soviets managed to do without much hardship, would probably be beyond the current Russian regime’s capabilities.)

As a general post-Cold War rule, Russia’s relative weakness on the global stage means that the United States doesn’t need to take a kid-gloves approach to the Kremlin when their interests and ours diverge. But at this specific moment, the U.S. is engaged in extremely costly, extremely important nation-building, counter-insurgency and counter-proliferation efforts involving countries that border on the Russian near abroad. And as long as the locus of the War on Terror (or the struggle against Islamist extremism, or whatever you want to call it) remains in Iran, Iraq, and Central Asia - as opposed to, say, the Andean highlands, or some other place where Russia’s influence and capacity for mischief are pretty negligible - it seems imprudent, to put it mildly, to simultaneously launch ourselves into a proxy war with one of the largest countries in the region. Diplomatically, we should of course be taking Georgia’s side right now; militarily, not so much.

So who is now the enemy: islamic fundamentalism, or Russia again? We supported the fundamentalists in Afghanistan against the Russians. We even supported the vile dictator of Pakistan while he was building the bomb and while he was turning his country into an islamic state. That was ok of course, because they were fighting against communists. And now? Should we cancel or suspend the war on terror again? And Benjamin Friedman:

1. Obama praises George Kennan and realism (...). George Kenann calls NATO expansion a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions” (...), a position most realists share. Obama calls for NATO expansion to Georgia (...), despite the fact that an alliance with Georgia offers little benefit to Americans but is likely to the drag the US into conflict with a nuclear armed state. Obama, if it wasn’t clear already, is no realist. That is a perhaps a result of running for President of a country that wants idealist presidents, but the fact remains.

2. John McCain, various neocons, and George Will argue that had NATO membership been offered to Georgia last spring, Russia would have been deterred from attacking it. Will writes:

Georgia, whose desire for NATO membership had U.S. support, is not in NATO because some prospective members of McCain’s league of democracies, e.g., Germany, thought that starting membership talks with Georgia would complicate the project of propitiating Russia…If Georgia were in NATO, would NATO now be at war with Russia? More likely, Russia would not be in Georgia. Only once in NATO’s 59 years has the territory of a member been invaded — the British Falklands, by Argentina, in 1982.

Will is confused. Even if George Bush had his way at the NATO conference last spring, Georgia would be on a path to membership in NATO, not in it. What Germany blocked was a Membership Action Plan for Georgia, which takes years, not months. McCain argues that the mere prospect of NATO membership would have deterred Russia from invading Georgian territory. But it is more likely that a Membership Action Plan would have proved an accelerant for this war, both by heightening the moral hazard that seemed to encourage Georgian President Saakasvili’s move into South Ossetia, and by inducing Russia to fight before Georgia had an official defense commitment from NATO.

3. Commentators of all stripes seem to assume that Russia’s move into Georgia was driven by its increasingly autocratic nature. (This is reminiscent of Kennan’s argument back in the X article that Communism made the Soviet Union prone to aggression, which he later regretted.) It is worth considering whether this is a misperception. A powerful body of political science argues that states’ foreign policy actions are driven mostly by their circumstance and interests, not their regime type or the personality of the leaders. Regime type and personality affect how states interpret their circumstances, but maybe not as much as we tend to think. The United States is not particularly tolerant of seemingly hostile states in its near abroad either, whether they are democracies or not.

Examples abound: Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chili, Brazil, Grenada, Dominican Republic (invaded four times in 58 years!), no reason to go on I suppose. I also presume that those commentators who are now so ill-disposed against the powerplay of the Russians were altogether not so hostile about the powerplay of the U.S. in its own backyard. Hey, for what is a backyard otherwise for than to play.

James Galbraith, son of, writes:

The job of discipline belongs to governments. And they must act not only on behalf of today’s citizens but of all those yet to come - of those who need clean food and water, of those who need safe cars, appliances and workplaces, and of those will be around the low countries when the ice caps melt. Dealing with problems means thinking ahead, from an independent, forward-looking point of view. This is called planning. It means providing stable, predictable rules for the private sector. This is called setting standards.

Arnold Kling responds that he wants to opt out of it. But that is not possible. How can the government perform the job of discipline if everyone wants to stay out? The job of discipline belongs to governments, writes Galbraith. So only governments obviously. That job is a government monopoly.

But disciplining what or who? The private sector probably. And the market of course. In other words: the people. On behalve of themselves no less. Big Brother is helping you.

Frightening and quite depressing. Take global warming. First, the government subsidises big energy-intensive corporations. It builds roads, airports and so on. It subsidises transport especially long-distance transport. The result: more carbon dioxide in the air than seems to be good for us. At least that is what the same government is telling us now. So much for "thinking ahead, from an independent, forward-point of view"!

So government creates "the new industrial state", hailed by James Galbraith’s father. This is now destroying our climate. (See here for a devastating critique of the new industrial state).

And now the government must discipline the private sector and today’s citizens into proper behaviour. For their own good of course. From the new industrial state to the new authoritarian state.

Is there anyone who does not want to opt out?

Neoliberalism started in Britain under Thatcher. In the 1990’s we got the Washington Consensus partly followed in Latin-America and Asia. Some are now saying that the era of neoliberalism is over. Reality-check. Maybe it is just beginning. China also needs a further dose of neoliberalism:

China has a large untapped source of further growth: its vast state-owned assets, including enterprises, resources and land. Privatising these assets would unleash the wealth effect and boost domestic consumption. This reform would transform China’s growth model from being investment and export-driven to being led by domestic consumption. It would reduce its over-dependence on industry and stimulate its service sector. At a time of a global slowdown, such reform is timely.

When reform started in 1978, almost all productive assets were state-owned in China. But reforms since then have not included privatisation. Today the government owns more than 70 per cent of China’s productive wealth. During the first 20 years of reform, concentrating the country’s assets in government hands served a good development purpose, allowing the creation of infrastructure and expansion of industrial capacity. If state assets had been privatised, it might have been difficult for China to mobilise resources during the rapid industrialisation of the 1980s and 1990s. To the government’s credit, the initial marketisation-without-privatisation approach has paid off. A robust infrastructure has emerged and China is an industrialised economy.

But this industry-first, government-investment-driven and export-oriented growth model has run its course. The focus on industry not services has damaged China’s environment. It has also been highly resource intensive. China has expanded export markets beyond developed countries to include Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. But this past success is limiting the potential for further export growth. The slowdown, coupled with rising protectionism in the US and the global economy is not making export growth easy. To transform its economy, China needs to shift towards growth driven by domestic demand, not exports, and one led by services not industry.

What can stimulate such a transformation? Given that industrial capacity is already too high, privatisation is the answer. A decision to continue to concentrate resources in government hands would do more harm than good.

China’s gross domestic product has been growing at more than 10 per cent a year, but its domestic consumption has been slow to catch up. Why?

This becomes less puzzling once we examine how past income and wealth gain are split between the government and households. First, the government’s share in China’s income has been rising at the expense of private citizens. From 1995 to 2007, the inflation-adjusted annual growth rate was 16 per cent for government tax revenues (not including state enterprise profits or proceeds from selling land usage rights), and 8 per cent and 6.2 per cent, respectively, for urban and rural household disposable income. In 2007, government tax revenues increased by 31 per cent but urban and rural disposable income went up by just 12.2 per cent and 9.5 per cent respectively. As private households’ share in China’s income pool is shrinking fast, consumption growth can only be slow.

However, the split in asset ownership between the government and households is even more damaging to consumption growth. It is true that 30 years of fast growth has enlarged China’s income pool and dramatically increased asset values. Thus one would have expected a significant wealth effect on private consumption. However, with 70 plus per cent of this gain going to the government, private citizens have not been able to feel much of a wealth effect.

A wealth effect on private consumption is not possible unless consumers own more wealth. It is no surprise that all state-owned economies, whether China’s or the Soviet Union’s, have one thing in common: growth driven by investment, not consumption.

Therefore wages from labour are the main, or even the only, source of disposable income for most Chinese consumers. Even this single source is growing more slowly than expected. That is why private consumption is slow to rise. State ownership depresses consumption demand.

In addition, depending on whether the government or private households control the country’s wealth and income, the economy will have a different demand structure. If households control spending power they will favour consumer goods and services, which benefits the service sector. If the government controls spending power, it will favour infrastructure, industrial projects and industrial goods, boosting heavy industries and energy and natural resource consumption.

In the 1980s and 1990s, these consequences of state ownership were growth-enhancing. Now, the over-investment in industry is a negative. It is fundamental for China to dis­tribute ownership rights of the remaining state assets equally among its citizens. This private ownership would return the missing wealth effect to millions of families. In the short run, it would help maintain growth during a ­global slowdown. In the long run, it would improve China’s industry/service sector mix, reduce its dependence on exports and also create more employment.

Yes, privatisation has created short-term disappointments in eastern Europe. However, it ran into challenges because it occurred in former socialist countries that had no prior experience with capital markets, mutual funds and the associated legal and regulatory structures. China has nearly two decades of experience in these. Its mutual fund industry manages more than 100m accounts. China is operationally ready.

Highly recommended: Charlie Wilson’s War. I mean the book. I’m sure the movie is pretty good, but it can’t be better than the book. Everybody should read it.

New research says that we naturally think logarithmically, not linear:

We humans seem to be born with a number line in our head. But a May 30 study in Science suggests it may look less like an evenly segmented ruler and more like a logarithmic slide rule on which the distance between two numbers represents their ratio (when ­di­vided) rather than their difference (when subtracted).

The mathematical idea of a number line—a line of numbers placed in order at equal intervals—is a simple yet surprisingly powerful tool, useful for everything from taking measure­ments to geometry and calculus.

Previous studies of Westerners showed that people tend to map numbers on a linear scale, with the numerals evenly spaced along the line. But if the numbers are presented as hard-to-count groups of dots, people will logarithmically group the larger numbers closer together on one end of the scale in what researchers call a “compression effect.” Preschoolers also group numbers this way before they begin their formal education in math.

To investigate which number-line concept is innate, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene of the College of France in Paris worked with the Mundurukú, an Amazonian culture with little exposure to modern math or measuring devices. The Mundurukú were immediately able to place numbers on a line when asked, but they grouped them logarithmically.

Dehaene says the research suggests that a logarithmic number line might be an intuitive mathematical concept, whereas the idea of a linear number line might have to be learned.

The final downfall of Paul Krugman:

Says Paul Krugman, a writer for a local New York paper,

The only way we’re going to get action, I’d suggest, is if those who stand in the way of action come to be perceived as not just wrong but immoral.

He means “action” on man-made global warming. We’ll come back to his musing after a moment.

The other day, Krugman wrote an essay featuring Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist, who speculated that the earth was doomed unless something is done “before it’s utterly too late.” By “something” they both meant “elect Barack Obama.” Weitzman wrote a paper with “sophisticated” equations and which assumed climate model output was infallible, said that we humans will “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.” Again says Krugman

It’s true that scientists don’t know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?

There is something in economics called decision analysis. The idea is simple. Find out how much something will cost if it happens. Then find out the probability of that thing happening. Multiply these two numbers to get the expected cost. If the expected cost of that thing is too high, or higher than any other possibility, it’s best to try to alter or stop the thing from happening.

If you do not know the probability, then you cannot calculate the expected cost. Weitzman calculates there is a “5 percent chance” that global temperatures will rise at least “18 degrees Fahrenheit.” In Weitzman’s paper, he also calculates there is a 1 percent chance that temperature will rise at least 36 degress Fahrenheit. Yes, you read that right. 36 degrees. The expected cost of a 36-degree rise is, of course, enormous, meaning that we should certainly try and stop global warming.

But we are actually confronted with probabilities of two outcomes, not just one. There could be apocalyptic global warming or Wietzman could be wrong. This implies our probabilities are: (1) A 1% chance of truly catastrophic warming, or (2) The economist Weitzman has fooled himself into being too certain by relying on complex formulae with faulty input.

Everything we’ve ever experienced about the accuracy of economists’ predictions, especially in areas in which they have absolutely no expertise, makes most of us believe (2). Thus, (2) is the rational and optimal option.

Immoral?

Krugman, obviously, believes (1). He’s an economist, too, you see, and naturally sides with his brother economist. All of which would be perfectly harmless, even if Krugman did nothing more than write a column explaining Weitzman’s mathematical fantasies. Except for that one little thing that Krugman advocates: painting those who do not agree with him as not just wrong but immoral.

That is to say, not just wrong, but evil. Krugman, limited in imagination as he is, cannot conceive that anybody could possibly disagree with him, nor look at the same data and come to a different conclusion. People that fail to accord with him are not just making a mistake, they are being mischievous.

Krugman is not the first to suffer from this kind of delusion. La Shawn Barber has written an article called Is Climate Change… Racist? He looks at liberal Congressman James Clyburn, who has written a report echoing the old joke: “World Ends Due to Global Warming: Poor Blacks Hardest Hit.” The gist is that those who disagree with the end-time visions risk being called a racist, a frightening term in today’s USA. University of Amsterdam “philosopher” Marc Davidson has even written a peer-reviewed paper in a prominent journal alluding that those who disagree with Weitzman-like claims are no better than slave holders (no, I’m not kidding).

In a society, when something is wrong, it must be corrected. For example, a person who forgets to apply for a certain kind of building permit to repair his fence is punished by having to pay a small fee back to society. Few would claim that the homeowner had acted immorally, however. More heinous crimes are punished more strongly, such as by restricting the liberty of the perpetrator.

A crime is an act which is immoral. Acts which are perceived to be immoral by the ruling class of society are usually made criminal. These actions usually happen over time. For example, being a “racist” has gone down the path of being distasteful, to being immoral, to finally being illegal in certain ways. Disagreeing with newspaper columnists’ perception of climate change is already distasteful—those who disagree are called “deniars” and even, we now see, “racists.” Krugman now wants these people to be seen as immoral.

How much longer, then, before some enlightened journalist or politician calls for disagreement being illegal? For the “good of society”, of course.

A worthwhile experiment:

It may sound strange, and it’s certainly not what we’re used to. Today we have a "carrier-centered" model; phone and cable companies spend billions to build, operate, and own the "last-mile" connection -- the copper, cable, or fiber wires that come into your house. Individual consumers then pay for particular services, like phone service or Internet access.

In turn, we tend to think about broadband deployment in carrier-centric ways. If we want to see super-fast fiber connections rolled out to consumers, the main question appears to be whether carriers have appropriate incentives to invest.

But there’s no law of nature that says this is the only possible model. Many businesses, governments, universities, and other entities already own their own fiber connections, rather than leasing access to lines. It may also be possible to find ways for consumers to purchase their own last-mile strands of fiber.

Here, as anywhere, there would be certain advantages that come with ownership over renting. No one necessarily needs to own skis or a car, but many of us do. If you owned your own fiber, you’d be able to connect it to a service provider of your own choosing. Over time, you might save money, and it could make your house more valuable to have a fiber "tail."

This may all sound rather abstract, but a trial experiment in Ottawa, Canada is trying out the consumer-owned model for a downtown neighborhood of about 400 homes. A specialized construction company is already rolling out fiber to every home, and it will recoup its investment from individual homeowners who will pay to own fiber strands outright, as well as to maintain the fiber over time. The fiber terminates at a service provider neutral facility, meaning that any ISP can pay a fee to put its networking equipment there and offer to provide users with Internet access. Notably, the project is entirely privately funded. (Although some schools and government departments are lined up to buy their own strands of fiber, just like homeowners.)

The main challenges with this model are economic, rather than technical. Most importantly, ownership has to be made appealing and affordable to consumers. The construction company is using conservative estimates that only 10% of homeowners will sign up and there will be a per-customer cost of $2700. If you assume 50% take-up, then the per-customer cost drops to $1100. Both figures might seem like a lot, but people pay for a variety of improvements to their home -- like remodeled kitchens, or a deck -- that also cost large sums.

This model faces other significant obstacles as well and it may only be possible in certain circumstances, if it’s practical at all. But the only way to really figure that out is to experiment. Cable television started out as CATV -- community antenna television, an experiment by individual entrepreneurs and rural towns to deliver broadcast signals across longer distances. The Internet started as an experiment in the research community before becoming the worldwide network we know today.

It’s also worth considering that, as recently as a few decades ago, personal telephones were unheard of -- the telephone was owned by Bell and simply part of the network. Similarly, the very idea of a "personal" computer used to seem ridiculous, and people relied on sharing access to mainframes. Sure, there are differences between owning your own computer and your own Internet connection, but perhaps one day we may see that the differences weren’t as great as we thought.

Bjorn Lomborg with an unconvenient truth:

When it comes to global warming, extreme scare stories abound. Al Gore, for example, famously claimed that a whopping six meters (20 feet) of sea-level rise would flood major cities around the world.

Gore’s scientific advisor, Jim Hansen from NASA, has even topped his protégé. Hansen suggests that there will eventually be sea-level rises of 24 meters (80 feet), with a six-meter rise happening just this century. Little wonder that fellow environmentalist Bill McKibben states that “we are engaging in a reckless drive-by drowning of much of the rest of the planet and much of the rest of creation.”

Given all the warnings, here is a slightly inconvenient truth: over the past two years, the global sea level hasn’t increased. It has slightly decreased . Since 1992, satellites orbiting the planet have measured the global sea level every 10 days with an amazing degree of accuracy – 3-4 millimeters (0.2 inches). For two years, sea levels have declined. (All of the data are available at sealevel.colorado.edu.)

This doesn’t mean that global warming is not true. As we emit more CO2, over time the temperature will moderately increase, causing the sea to warm and expand somewhat. Thus, the sea-level rise is expected to pick up again. This is what the United Nations climate panel is telling us; the best models indicate a sea-level rise over this century of 18 to 59 centimeters (7-24 inches), with the typical estimate at 30 centimeters (one foot). This is not terrifying or even particularly scary – 30 centimeters is how much the sea rose over the last 150 years.

Simply put, we’re being force-fed vastly over-hyped scare stories. Proclaiming six meters of sea-level rise over this century contradicts thousands of UN scientists, and requires the sea-level rise to accelerate roughly 40-fold from today. Imagine how climate alarmists would play up the story if we actually saw an increase in the sea-level rise.

Increasingly, alarmists claim that we should not be allowed to hear such facts. In June, Hansen proclaimed that people who spread “disinformation” about global warming – CEOs, politicians, in fact anyone who doesn’t follow Hansen’s narrow definition of the “truth” – should literally be tried for crimes against humanity.

It is depressing to see a scientist – even a highly politicized one – calling for a latter-day Inquisition. Such a blatant attempt to curtail scientific inquiry and stifle free speech seems inexcusable.

But it is perhaps also a symptom of a broader problem. It is hard to keep up the climate panic as reality diverges from the alarmist predictions more than ever before: the global temperature has not risen over the past ten years, it has declined precipitously in the last year and a half, and studies show that it might not rise again before the middle of the next decade. With a global recession looming and high oil and food prices undermining the living standards of the Western middle class, it is becoming ever harder to sell the high-cost, inefficient Kyoto-style solution of drastic carbon cuts.

A much sounder approach than Kyoto and its successor would be to invest more in research and development of zero-carbon energy technologies – a cheaper, more effective way to truly solve the climate problem.

Hansen is not alone in trying to blame others for his message’s becoming harder to sell. Canada’s top environmentalist, David Suzuki, stated earlier this year that politicians “complicit in climate change” should be thrown in jail. Campaigner Mark Lynas envisions Nuremberg-style “international criminal tribunals” against those who dare to challenge the climate dogma. Clearly, this column places me at risk of incarceration by Hansen & Co.

But the globe’s real problem is not a series of inconvenient facts. It is that we have blocked out sensible solutions through an alarmist panic, leading to bad policies.

Consider one of the most significant steps taken to respond to climate change. Adopted because of the climate panic, bio-fuels were supposed to reduce CO2 emissions. Hansen described them as part of a “brighter future for the planet.” But using bio-fuels to combat climate change must rate as one of the poorest global “solutions” to any great challenge in recent times.

Bio-fuels essentially take food from mouths and puts it into cars. The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year’s corn production in the United States will be burned up on America’s highways. This has been possible only through subsidies that globally will total $15 billion this year alone.

Because increased demand for bio-fuels leads to cutting down carbon-rich forests, a 2008 Science study showed that the net effect of using them is not to cut CO2 emissions, but to double them. The rush towards bio-fuels has also strongly contributed to rising food prices, which have tipped another roughly 30 million people into starvation.

Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked an unmitigated disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation.

We have to stop being scared silly, stop pursuing stupid policies, and start investing in smart long-term R&D. Accusations of “crimes against humanity” must cease. Indeed, the real offense is the alarmism that closes minds to the best ways to respond to climate change.

Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian who is against intellectual property rights, has written an open letter to leftish opponents of IPR’s. He says that their attitute is inconsistent: opposing IPR’s as such, but still supporting socialism and thus government intervention in general. On the other hand the letter you also be read as an attack on right-wing supporters of IPR’s. Their attitude is inconsistent as well. Supporting IPR’s but opposing all other kinds of socialism:

We libertarian opponents of IP sometimes perplex IP advocates and leftists. There’s an analogy here to the way libertarians, and especially anarcho-libertarians, are treated by mainstreamers. The press does not know what to do with libertarians, for example. They typically use "libertarian" to denote civil-libertarian ACLU types; while libertarian thinkers and institutions are often described as "conservative." And "anarchy" is usually associated with chaos, bomb-throwing, or leftist anarchists--rather than with anarcho-libertarianism, which is the only genuine form of anarchism. (...)

There is a common assumption in society that "intellectual property" is a legitimate type of private property right. Thus socialists and leftists oppose IP because of their hostility to private property rights, capitalism, corporatism, and industrialism. Thus, many IP opponents are leftist, anti-capitalist types (for example, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen are, IIRC, at least somewhat leftist [...]).

Likewise, many libertarians accept the fallacious notion that IP is a type of property, and thus support IP because they support property (and because many well-known libertarians, such as Ayn Rand, were strong advocates of IP).

Conversely, those who innately or independently oppose IP, are often classified as leftists, or even believe themselves to be leftists (I believe a similar phenomenon explains why the press tend to be left; they naturally tend to be pro-freedom of speech and freedom of press, but accept the mainstream dichotomy that if you are for personal liberties, you are against economic liberties, and vice-versa; they do not understand that economic and personal liberties are essential and complement each other).

The truth is that the only principled case against IP is the libertarian one, as I’ve argued in my Against Intellectual Property. The problem with IP is that it undermines and infringes on private property rights: it lets some person gain rights of control over the property already owned and acquired by others (for example, a patent or copyright gives the holder a veto right over certain uses others might put their own property (their bodies, paper, raw materials) to). To oppose IP is to uphold private property rights--libertarian rights. To oppose IP while also supporting socialism is a confusion.

And more than this. IP is not possible without legislation; legislation is not possible without the state. And conversely: with a state, you always get legislation; and legislation always leads to a proliferation of bad laws (...).

What this means is that not only is your case against IP weakened if you do not adopt libertarian principles and reasoning to undergird it. But if you support the state at all--if you are not an anarcho-libertarian--then you do not really oppose IP. If the state exists, it will legislate, and it will probably enact IP laws, along with plenty of other bad laws. So, if you support the state, you really can’t complain about IP laws. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out, "No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves."

IP opponents must not oppose only the "worst excesses" of IP. They must oppose all IP, root and branch, on principled, pro-private property, grounds; and more than this: they must oppose the state itself, and legislation as a means of making law.

So shape up, non-libertarian IP opponents. If you want to make a real case against IP, you must ground it in sound political principles.

Creationism of course. Science and education. And islam:

“It’s fine to teach children about scientific controversies,” Dawkins says. “What is not fine is to say, ‘There are these two theories. One is called evolution, the other is called Genesis.’ If you are going to say that, then you should talk about the Nigerian tribe who believe the world was created from the excrement of ants.”

(...)

“Islam is importing creationism into this country,” he says. “Most devout Muslims are creationists – so when you go to schools, there are a large number of children of Islamic parents who trot out what they have been taught.”

(...)

“Teachers are bending over backwards to ‘respect’ home prejudices that children have been brought up with,” he says . “The government could do more, but it doesn’t want to because it is fanatical about multi-culturalism and the need to ‘respect’ the different ‘traditions’ from which these children come. The government – particularly under Tony Blair – thinks it is wonderful to have children brought up with their traditional religions. I call it brainwashing.”

(...)

“Teachers are bending over backwards to ‘respect’ home prejudices that children have been brought up with,” he says . “The government could do more, but it doesn’t want to because it is fanatical about multi-culturalism and the need to ‘respect’ the different ‘traditions’ from which these children come. The government – particularly under Tony Blair – thinks it is wonderful to have children brought up with their traditional religions. I call it brainwashing.”

(...)

And science teachers, people who should be Darwin’s flag-wavers, are simply looking the other way. “It seems as though teachers are terribly frightened of being thought racist,” says Dawkins. “It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because [if you do] you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.”

The newest trend on the anti-smoking front. Banning smoking on the streets and in public places because it sets a bad example for others, especially children. So smoking has become a moral issue now, not an health issue anymore. This, it seems to me, is a very dangerous trend. If you treat smoking as a health issue, you are at least on solid scientific grounds. But treating it as a moral issue, you can only be on a very slippery slope. I for myself am annoyed when I see an old fat (sorry, overweight) guy with a nude upper body. Yuk. At least he should wear a sweater.

I cringe when I see a libertarian write something like this:

Nath and other developing country WTO negotiators are absolutely right: subsidies are bad, period. They should be completely eliminated.

Oh no, no, no. They are not bad, period. In fact in a time of rising food prices subsidies are quite good, period. Of course from a philosophical viewpoint subsidies are bad for a libertarian. They are government expenditures and you need to raise taxes for it, generally speaking. And even in its effects subsidies for biofuells for instance áre bad, period. But when poverty is rising with over 100 million people worldwide, subsidies that have as a result lower prices for food are not bad. Period.

...is to embrace immigration from Latin-America. Bryan Caplan:

The Hispanic voting data seem to support my pet theory that the smart long-run strategy for Republicans is to embrace Latin American immigration. Mid-income Hispanics already vote Republican. If you’re willing to generalize from cross-section to time series, it’s quite plausible that economic growth will gradually Republicanize Hispanics - unless anti-foreign populism gets in the way. As I suspect it will.

Some of the agitation on the issue of same-sex marriages strikes me as a case of trying to lock the barn door after the horses have already gone.

That is Stephanie Coontz isn her book about the history of marriage. Many conservatives of course see the traditional marriage as an institution (and a sacred one at that) which has to be protected against innovative heresies like same-sex marriages. Some even think that gay marriage will be the beginning of the end. You start with legalizing gay marriage and before you know it even polygamy and group marriage will be legal.

But those who think that are putting the cart before the horse. The demand for gay and lesbian marriage is the result, not the cause, of the relative decline of our sacred institution. In fact, the revolution has been started by heterosexuals. It are they who have created many alternative structures for organizing sexual relationships or raising children. It are heterosexuals themselves who have broken down the primacy of two-parent families based on a strict division of labor between men and woman.

Divorce, single parenthood, cohabitation have become more common, in the United States and elsewhere. Even in very religious countries like Spain. Consider the fact that in the U.S. married couples with children constitute just 25% of all households. Married with children is no longer the norm… Never before have so many people lived alone. In France and Britain 40% of all births are to unmarried women. In Iceland it’s a clear majority.

Heterosexual marriages have become the exception. Most of the horses have left the barn. Others, however, are knocking on the barn door, but in many cases all over the world, the law keeps the door closed. It’s kind of strange: many gays and lesbians want to get into the barn but many conservatives apparently prefer an empty one.

Me? If the barn is empty it should be torn down. Marriage is not an institution, but a form of relationship. Like friendship. With its ups and downs. And if it doesn’t work out it can, or should, be terminated. Anyway there is no reason that the law should discriminate between different kinds of relationships. If anything it should stay out of the regulation of personal bonds. And if it does prefer one kind of relationship over another then it should be equally open for everyone. Sacred or not. Traditional or not.

Let me finish with Stephanie Coontz again:

In America’s Bible Belt out-of-wedlock births and divorce rates are higher than anywhere else in the country, even though polls indicate that the region has the highest disapproval of "nontraditional" family behaviors.

Another article of faith of the climate alarmists going down the drain:

New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers -- the Ganges and the Brahmaputra -- had caused the landmass to increase.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into account new land being formed from the river sediment.

"Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea," Sarker said.

"A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land."

Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board’s Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.

He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion.

"For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this," he said.

"Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries into the future."

Dams built along the country’s southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology, Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said.

"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation and dams have more than compensated this loss," Rahman said.

Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to prevent flooding.

"If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim 4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future," Rahman said.

Food apartheid. Health fascism. Whatever. The attack on freedom continues:

The war on fat has just crossed a major red line. The Los Angeles City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting construction of new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area inhabited by 500,000 low-income people.

We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about banning the sale of food to adults. Treating French fries like cigarettes or liquor. I didn’t think this would happen in the United States anytime soon. I was wrong.

The mayor hasn’t yet signed the ordinance, but he probably will, since it passed unanimously. It doesn’t affect existing restaurants, and initially it will impose only a one-year moratorium. But that period is likely to be extended to two years or more, and the prohibition’s sponsor hopes to make it permanent.

What we’re looking at, essentially, is the beginning of food zoning. Liquor and cigarette sales are already zoned. You can’t sell booze here; you can’t sell smokes there. Each city makes its own rules, block by block. Proponents of the L.A. ordinance see it as the logical next step. Fast food is bad for you, just as drinking or smoking is, they argue. Community Coalition, a local activist group, promotes the moratorium as a sequel to its crackdown on alcohol merchants, scummy motels, and other "nuisance businesses." An L.A. councilman says the ordinance makes sense because it’s "not too different to how we regulate liquor stores."

A few other cities and towns have zoned restaurants for economic, environmental, or aesthetic reasons. But L.A. appears to be the first to do it for health reasons. Last year, a public-interest law group at Johns Hopkins outlined the rationale: "Given the significance of the obesity epidemic in the United States and the scientific evidence and legal basis supporting the zoning of fast food outlets, municipalities have an effective, yet untried, tool to address obesity in their communities."

I assumed this idea would go nowhere because we Americans don’t like government restrictions on what we eat. You can nag us. You can regulate what our kids eat in school. But you’ll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.

How did the L.A. City Council get around this resistance? By spinning the moratorium as a way to create more food choices, not fewer. And by depicting poor people, like children, as less capable of free choice.

Start with the press release (PDF) issued a week ago by the moratorium’s sponsor, Councilwoman Jan Perry. Its subhead says the ordinance will "help spur the development of diverse food choices." In the second paragraph, Perry declares,

"This ordinance is in no way attempting to tell people what to eat but rather responding to the need to attract sit-down restaurants, full service grocery stores, and healthy food alternatives. Ultimately, this ordinance is about providing choices—something that is currently lacking in our community."

How does blocking new fast-food outlets provide more choices? It helps local officials "attract grocery stores and restaurants to the area, by preserving existing land for these uses," says the release. And why does the moratorium apply only to the poor part of town, around South-Central L.A.? A fellow council member explains: "The over concentration of fast food restaurants in conjunction with the lack of grocery stores places these communities in a poor situation to locate a variety of food and fresh food." Supporters of the moratorium call this state of affairs "food apartheid."

It’s an odd slogan. As the encyclopedia Africana notes, apartheid was a racially discriminatory policy "enforced by white minority governments." Opening a McDonald’s in South-Central L.A. is not government-enforced racial discrimination. But telling McDonald’s it can open franchises only in the white part of town—what do you call that?

And what about the argument that people in South-Central need the government to block unhealthy food options because they’re "in a poor situation" to locate better choices? This is the argument normally made for restricting children’s food options at school—that they’re more dependent and vulnerable than the rest of us. How do you feel about treating poor people like children?

It’s true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem. And the helplessness attributed to poor people is exaggerated. "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it’s virtually impossible," says the Community Coalition’s executive director. Really? The coalition’s headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world’s greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.

Already, the majority leader of New York’s city council wants to adopt food zoning, and several cities have phoned L.A.’s planning department to request copies of the ordinance. Hey, I’m all for better food in impoverished neighborhoods. Incentives for grocery stores are a great idea. But telling certain kinds of restaurants that they can’t serve certain kinds of people is just plain wrong, even when you think it’s for their own good.

And by the way, there are many healthy salads in some fast food restaurants, like McDonalds, as well.

Joseph Stalin to American ambassador W. Averell Harriman, june 1944:

about two-thirds of all the large industrial enterprises in the Soviet Union has been built with the United States’ help or technical assistance

More here.

Ronald Baily:

According to the Energy Information Administration, the existing capacity of U.S. coal, gas, and oil generating plants totals around 850,000 megawatts. So how much would it cost to replace those facilities with solar electric power? Let’s use the recent announcement of a 280-megawatt thermal solar power plant in Arizona for $1 billion as the starting point for an admittedly rough calculation. Combined with a molten salt heat storage systems, solar thermal might be able to provide base load power. Crunching the numbers (850,000 megawatts/280 megawatts x $1 billion) produces a total capital cost of just over $3 trillion over the next ten years.

What about wind power? Oilman T. Boone Pickens is building the world’s biggest wind energy project with an installed capacity of 4,000 megawatts at a cost of $10 billion, or about $2.5 billion per 1,000 megawatts. For purposes of illustration, this implies a total cost of around $2.1 trillion over the next ten years to replace current carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity with wind power. That’s assuming that the wind projects generate electricity at their rated capacity at or near 100 percent of the time. Making the heroic assumption that in fact wind projects will generate power at about one-third of their rated capacity (due to wind variability), this would imply tripling the number of wind power generators. This boosts the total overall cost to more than $6 trillion over the next ten years.

What’s the potential for geothermal electricity generation? Geothermal power taps the heat of the Earth itself to make steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. For instance, superhot water erupting from the Geysers in northern California fuel power plants with a generation capacity of 725 megawatts. But such geothermal sites are relatively rare. However, an unconventional geothermal source—hot dry rocks—might supply us with no-carbon electricity. In lots of places, rocks several kilometers down are quite hot. To get at this heat, engineers drill at least two boreholes and inject cool water in one. The injected water flows around fractured hot rocks and rises through the other borehole as steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Some very preliminary figures suggest that it would cost around $3 billion for build a 1000 megawatt geothermal plant. Replacing 850 gigawatts of carbon-emitting power generation capacity with geothermal electricity would cost around $2.5 trillion over ten years.

Curiously, nowhere does the "N-word"—nuclear—appear in Gore’s speech. Currently, 104 nuclear power plants generate about 20 percent of America’s electricity. Once a nuclear plant is up and running, it is essentially carbon-free. Westinghouse claims that it can build a third generation 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant for around $1.4 billion. Assuming this estimate is right, all U.S. carbon-emitting electricity generation plants could be replaced with nuclear power at a cost of about $1.2 trillion by 2018.

One other issue: Just how does using renewable sources of energy to generate electricity free us from dependence on foreign oil when only a tiny bit of crude is burned to produce electricity? The vast majority of petroleum is turned into transportation fuels, while home heating accounts for around two percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. The answer, evidently, is a vehicle fleet powered by electricity. Although Gore doesn’t dwell on it, he does mention that we should help "our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars."

In 2006, a U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that if 84 percent of all cars and light trucks were plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), fueling them would not require any additional electric generation capacity. The study assumes that the PHEVs would travel an average of 33 miles per day solely on electric power and could be charged using off-peak power at night. PHEVs would cost between $6,000 and $10,000 more than conventional cars. Such a PHEV fleet could reduce oil consumption by 6.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 52 percent of our oil imports.

While the capital costs for current versions of renewable no-carbon electricity generation are high, one big advantage is that their fuel costs are low to non-existent. Gore is also probably right that the prices for renewable energy production technologies will fall in the future. However, his proposed crash program would put an immediate steep upward price pressure on the commodities—steel, concrete, silicon, copper—that go into building energy infrastructure. All of the rough calculations above are for generating capacity alone and do not include the costs of a $1 trillion smart grid upgrade for our creaky electric power distribution system. And does Gore plan to compensate the shareholders of conventional power generation companies when their assets are forcibly scrapped?

As a very rough low estimate, Gore’s 10-year no-carbon energy plan would cost about $300 billion per year for the next ten years. According to the Brattle Group consultancy, "new and replacement generating plants will cost about $560 billon through 2030, absent a significant expansion of energy efficiency programs or new climate initiatives." That comes to an average of about $25 billion per year over the next 22 years. Gore’s proposal is a "new climate initiative" that aims to spend twelve times more than the utility industry would otherwise annually invest in new and replacement generating capacity. Gore explicitly likens his scheme to NASA’s Apollo program, but reaching the moon cost only $150 billion (in current dollars) spent over eight years. In other words, getting to the moon cost half of what Gore wants to spend annually to realize his no-carbon energy vision.

"Of course there are those who will tell us this can’t be done," warned Gore. I am not one of those people. I am sure it can be done. But before embarking on his "generational challenge to re-power America," I would like the former vice-president to sketch out a few more details on how it’s going to be paid for and who’s going to be stuck with the bill. Without those answers, Gore’s bold challenge amounts to little more than hot air.

Tim Swanson makes the case for consumerism, not war:

The Australian government has decided to fight against energy consumption: by banning "most plasma and LCD HDTVs by the year 2011."

However, rather than punishing consumers and ultimately future innovators, if the goal of a government is to crack down on all "wasted" energy consumption, why not start with the highly unproductive and inefficient construction of military vehicles.

For instance, there are very few alternative uses for tanks during peace time, as tractors and bulldozers adequately satisfy consumer demand. Similarly, submarines are comparatively less-than-optimal at crab and shrimp fishing than their non-military counterparts (e.g., trawlers). And unless you plan on stowing away in the bomb bays, fighter jets are hardly the most effective mass transportation service.

Aircraft carriers and destroyers perhaps underscore this waste the best, as their designs consume vast swaths of natural resources that could have otherwise been used cultivating agriculture or constructing high-rise apartments.

In addition to consuming and diverting tremendous amounts of productive land, labor, and capital, the pollution caused by battles and wars can create long-lasting environmental hazards (e.g., lead poisoning, radioactive decay, unexploded munitions, land mines).

Therefore, why not criminalize the activities leading to environmental pollution... which are directly caused by government intervention?

Good question. Peter? Are the beds still burning?

A group of academics at the University of Chicago - you know, were economists like Milton Friedman started the neoliberal revolution - are opposing a Milton Friedman Institute to support economic research. Here is the delicious comment from John Cochrane:

As usual, academics need to waste two paragraphs before getting to the point, which starts in the first bullet. To really enjoy this delicious prose you have to first read it all in one place.

• Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University’s reputation in the face of its negative image. The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population, leading to the weakening of a number of struggling local economies in the service of globalized capital, and many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of “market democracy.”

Yes, there are people left on the planet who write and think this way, and no, I’m not making this up. Let’s read this more closely and try to figure out what it means.

“Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south, where they have often to defend the University’s reputation in the face of its negative image.”

If you’re wondering “what’s their objection?”, “how does a MFI hurt them?” you now have the answer. Translated, “when we go to fashionable lefty cocktail parties in Venezuela, it’s embarrassing to admit who signs our paychecks.” Interestingly, the hundred people who signed this didn’t have the guts even to say “we,” referring to some nebulous “they” as the subject of the sentence. Let’s read this literally: “We don’t really mind at all if there’s a MFI on campus, but some of our other colleagues, who are too shy to sign this letter, find it all too embarrassing to admit where they work.” If this is the reason for organizing a big protest perhaps someone has too much time on their hands.

“Global south”

I’ll just pick on this one as a stand-in for all the jargon in this letter. What does this oxymoron mean, and why do the letter writers use it? We used to say what we meant, “poor countries. ” That became unfashionable, in part because poverty is sometimes a bit of your own doing and not a state of pure victimhood. So, it became polite to call dysfunctional backwaters “developing.” That was already a lie (or at best highly wishful thinking) since the whole point is that they aren’t developing. But now bien-pensant circles don’t want to endorse “development” as a worthwhile goal anymore. “South” – well, nice places like Australia, New Zealand and Chile are there too (at least from a curiously North-American and European-centric perspective). So now it’s called “global south,” which though rather poor as directions for actually getting anywhere, identifies the speaker as the caring sort of person who always uses the politically correct word.

“The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades….”

Notice the interesting voice of the verb. Let’s call it the “accusatory passive.” “Has been put in place...” By who, I (or any decent writer) would want to know? Unnamed dark forces are at work.

“Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population... weakening … struggling local economies”

I can think of lots of words to describe what’s going on in, say, China and India, as well as what happened previously to countries that adopted the “neoliberal global order” like Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Billions of people are leading dramatically freer, healthier, longer and more prosperous lives than they were a generation ago.

Of course, we all face plenty of problems. I worry about environmental catastrophes, and their political, social and economic aftermath. Many people are suffering, primarily in pockets of kleptocracy and anarchy. Life’s pretty bleak about 5 blocks west of the University of Chicago. In my professional life, I worry about inflation, chaotic markets, and their possible death by regulation. There is a lot for thoughtful economists and social scientists to do. But honestly, do we really yearn to send a billion Chinese back to their “local economies,” trying to eke a meager living out of a quarter acre of rice paddy, under the iron grip of some local bureaucrat? I mean, the Mao caps and Che shirts are cool and all, but millions of people starved to death.

This is just the big lie theory at work. Say something often enough and people will start to believe it. It helps especially if what you say is vague and meaningless. Ok, I’ll try to be polite; a lie is deliberate and this is more like a willful disregard for the facts. Still, if you start with the premise that the last 40 or so years, including the fall of communism, and the opening of China and India are “negative for much of the world’s population,” you just don’t have any business being a social scientist. You don’t stand a chance of contributing something serious to the problems that we actually do face.

“the service of globalized capital..”

I was wondering who the subject of all these passive sentences is. Now I’m beginning to get the idea. This view has a particularly dark history. I’ll give you a hint: “Globalized capital” has names like Goldman and Sachs.

“many would question the substitution of monetization for democratization under the banner of `market democracy.’”

What a doozy! What can this actually mean? Given the counterpoint “market democracy” (what we live in, I presume) I suspect “democratic” here means “democratic” as in “people’s democratic republic”, i.e. the government runs everything. Monetization is democratization; it means things are accessible to anyone, not just the politically connected. That observation was, among many other things, Milton Friedman’s genius.

Once again, the verb tenses and subjects are telling. “The substitution.” Who did this substitution? Maybe globalized capital, or the international banking conspiracy? Maybe it’s the trilateral commission.

(...)

***

If it’s sad to see what 101 professionally distinguished minds at the University of Chicago think about free markets at all, it is to me sadder still how atrociously written this letter is. These people devote their lives to writing on social issues, and teaching freshmen (including mine) how to think and write clearly. Yet it’s awful.

The letter starts with two paragraphs of meaningless throat-clearing. (“This is a question of the meaning of the University’s investments, in all senses.” What in the world does that sentence actually mean?) I learned to delete throat-clearing in the first day of Writing 101. It’s all written in the passive, or with vague subjects. “Many” should not be the subject of any sentence. You should never write “has been put in place,” you should say who put something in place. You should take responsibility in your writing. Write “we,” not “many colleagues.” The final paragraphs wander around without saying much of anything.

The content of course is worse. There isn’t even an idea here, a concrete proposition about the human condition that one can disagree with, buttress or question with facts. It just slings a bunch of jargon, most of which has a real meaning opposite to the literal. “Global South,” “neoliberal global order,” “the service of globalized capital,” “substitution of monetization for democratization.” George Orwell would be proud.

I’m not a good writer. I admire great prose, and I attempt to fill the spaces between equations of my papers with comprehensible words. But even I can recognize atrocious prose when I see it. Really, guys and gals, if a Freshman handed this in to one of your classes, could you possibly give any grade above C- and cover it with red ink?

I was quoted as saying “drivel,” and I meant it, not as an insult but as a technically correct description of a piece of prose. We can – and should – happily disagree on all sorts of matters of fact and interpretation, clearly stated, and openly discussed. But there’s nothing here to discuss, it’s just mush. The saddest aspect of this whole sorry affair is that 100 faculty at such a distinguished institution can sign their names – and with them their intellectual reputations and their sacred honor -- to such utter drivel.

***

Milton Friedman stood for freedom, social, political, and economic. He realized that they are inextricably linked. If the government controls your job or your business, dissent is impossible. He favored, among other things, legalizing drugs, school choice, and volunteer army. To call him or his political legacy “right wing” is simply ignorant, and I mean that also as a technically accurate description rather than an insult. (Of course, he also has a legacy in the economics community as a first-rate researcher, which is what the MFI will do and honor.)

So here’s my question: If you’re embarrassed by this legacy, if you worry that it will tarnish the University’s reputation, just what is it that you good-thinking guys and gals have against human freedom?