Peter Lewin's thought for the day - remembering history

The reason why we (collectively) don't learn from history is that we don't live long enough to remember it.

Those alive today who are old enough to have actually experienced, as thinking adults, the Carter, Reagan,Thatcher administrations and the ascendancy of the ideas of Friederich Hayek and Milton Friedman - leading to the widespread discrediting of Keynesian economics - are in the ineffective minority. The knowledge that counts for economic policy is very much based on actual experience (you had to live through it); it is tacit in nature, very difficult to transmit to someone who did not share the experience. Written history is a pale substitute for the real thing, and it frequently distorts.

So, every generation seems doomed to find out for itself what it should not do by doing it again - just like every child in the process of growing up.

Some quotes from the NYRB

Paging through my latest copy of the NYRB I came across these two quotes.

The first is from an article by Tony Judt - maybe one of his last before his recent death on August 6. Judt was a widely read and very popular historian and commentator who first came to my attention because of his writings on Israel. Though he lived for a time in Israel he became openly hostile to the whole idea of a Jewish state and was one of the first of the now legion leftist intellectuals calling for the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of a single Israel-Palestine. Of course he must have realized what this would imply for the Jewish minority who lived in such a state - if any remained.

Interestingly, his position on America and the world was equally provocative. He was clearly an uncompromising opponent of anything that smacks of Capitalism. What strikes me about this quote, and I realize it is only one quote, is its sheer incoherence and the abysmal ignorance it reveals. Clearly Judt was never burdened with the education of even the most basic of economic principles. He does not know how markets work (clearly does not want to know) deriving satisfaction from unselfconsciously and arrogantly spewing these meaningless ideological phrases to the tumultuous applause of his sycophantic audience.

Judt is now gone. He was notable, but he was not unique. His kind abound. They are revered as intellectuals, as insightful interpreters of current trends and events. But, in truth, many of them are very, very ignorant.

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

The second quote illustrates this as well. It is from an article by Arnold Relman commenting on an analysis of Obamacare by John Weinberg. My temptation is to just say, "what an idiot" and move on; but this stuff is taken seriously by apparently intelligent people. Like his suggestion that when we start treating health care as a right rather than as a business, like other countries do, we will be able to control costs. Yes, and the world is flat.

Wennberg’s painstaking documentation of overuse as a cause of excessive costs greatly helps our understanding of the US health care problem because it shows that costs could be controlled by eliminating unnecessary care, without rationing medically appropriate services. The clear implication of his work is that we could afford good care for all if we made our medical system more efficient and less wasteful.

What he does not emphasize is that to produce such change will require elimination of the economic forces that have made medical care a commodity in trade instead of a social service, and have transformed our health care system into a profit-seeking industry. Until we join other advanced countries in treating medical care as a right and not a business, we will have to wait for control of health costs.

Skip the lectures on Israel's ‘risks for peace’

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

HT: Lawrence Rosenbloom.

Jewish World Review August 19, 2010/ 9 Elul, 5770

Skip the lectures on Israel's ‘risks for peace’

By George Will

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | JERUSALEM ---

In the intifada that began in 2000, Palestinian terrorism killed more than 1,000 Israelis. As a portion of U.S. population, that would be 42,000, approaching the toll of America's eight years in Vietnam. During the onslaught, which began 10 Septembers ago, Israeli parents sending two children to a school would put them on separate buses to decrease the chance that neither would return for dinner. Surely most Americans can imagine, even if their tone-deaf leaders cannot, how grating it is when those leaders lecture Israel on the need to take "risks for peace."

During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as "willing to take risks for peace." There was a time when that meant swapping "land for peace" -- Israel sacrificing something tangible and irrecoverable, strategic depth, in exchange for something intangible and perishable, promises of diplomatic normality.

Strategic depth matters in a nation where almost everyone is or has been a soldier, so society cannot function for long with the nation fully mobilized. Also, before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel within the borders established by the 1949 armistice was in one place just nine miles wide, a fact that moved George W. Bush to say: In Texas we have driveways that long. Israel exchanged a lot of land to achieve a chilly peace with Egypt, yielding the Sinai, which is almost three times larger than Israel and was 89 percent of the land captured in the process of repelling the 1967 aggression.

The intifada was launched by the late Yasser Arafat -- terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner -- after the July 2000 Camp David meeting, during which then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede control of all of Gaza and more than 90 percent of the West Bank, with small swaps of land to accommodate the growth of Jerusalem suburbs just across the 1949 armistice line.

Israelis are famously fractious, but the intifada produced among them a consensus that the most any government of theirs could offer without forfeiting domestic support is less than any Palestinian interlocutor would demand. Furthermore, the intifada was part of a pattern. As in 1936 and 1947, talk about partition prompted Arab violence.

In 1936, when the British administered Palestine, the Peel Commission concluded that there was "an irrepressible conflict" -- a phrase coined by an American historian to describe the U.S. Civil War -- "between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country." And: "Neither of the two national ideals permits" a combination "in the service of a single state." The commission recommended "a surgical operation" -- partition. What followed was the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations recommended a partition plan. Israel accepted the recommendation. On Nov. 30, Israel was attacked.

Palestine has a seemingly limitless capacity for eliciting nonsense from afar, as it did recently when British Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Gaza as a "prison camp." In a sense it is, but not in the sense Cameron intended. His implication was that Israel is the cruel imprisoner. Gaza's actual misfortune is to be under the iron fist of Hamas, a terrorist organization.

In May, a flotilla launched from Turkey approached Gaza in order to provoke a confrontation with Israel, which, like Egypt, administers a blockade to prevent arms from reaching Hamas. The flotilla's pretense was humanitarian relief for Gaza -- where the infant mortality rate is lower and life expectancy is higher than in Turkey.

Israelis younger than 50 have no memory of their nation within the 1967 borders set by the 1949 armistice that ended the War of Independence. The rest of the world seems to have no memory at all concerning the intersecting histories of Palestine and the Jewish people.

The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene.

The policy reaction by our government to the economic downturn is like a wealthy man going broke to impress his fleeting girlfriend.

From my friend Alan Imberman:

The policy reaction by our government to the economic downturn is like a wealthy man going broke to impress his fleeting girlfriend. The man (i.e. our government) sees the woman (i.e. economy) is no longer interested and decides to lavish her with gifts. This excites the girl for a few months but she knows he can not keep spending at this rate and the gifts will soon disappear. The wealthy man does end up going broke but not until he puts himself into a massive amount of debt exhausting all his options to keep the woman by his side. Now the man, once wealthy and powerful is weak and the woman has moved on. Her lifestyle is not as lavish as before but she realizes that she is happy just living within her means. In the end, the two would have been better had they faced the music and let the relationship end abruptly when signs pointed to an end.

From all the rumors flying out of Washington, it sounds like our government has decided that it needs to shower the economy with more gifts to keep it steady. This will just cause a repeat of what already happened but with more unintended consequences as many including the author below explained.

Good time to be a stock picker. Bad time to be just about anyone else.

Look at it the other way

Most readers will be familiar with the claim, recently circulating in the media, that Israel’s recalcitrance in the conflict with the Palestinians, is something that compromises American foreign policy and endangers the lives of American soldiers and diplomats. Most simply it is claimed that our alliance with Israel is a foreign policy liability, something inflicted on us by the excessive power of the “Israel Lobby.” This is a refrain that is eagerly embraced by anti-Semites (both polite and crude), and something that has lately also appealed to more rational, objective thinkers, many of them Jewish. It is a seductive idea, but it is also insidiously subversive of careful, rational thought. To argue that somehow Americans would be safer if America abandoned Israel seems to me like a desperate stretch – one for which little supporting evidence can be found. And in the bigger perspective Israel and America (their citizens) share common norms and values worth preserving and defending and these critics sometimes forget that.

The question of optimal American foreign policy is another matter. Foreign aid, drawn from taxpayer money, deserves to be carefully and critically examined all round. I am not knowledgeable on foreign policy, but I suspect a lot depends on one’s perception of the real dangers to American citizens. So, I am not defending any particular level or configuration of support nation to nation. I want here to make a different point.

I want to suggest that maybe the direction of causation goes the other way, namely, that America’s foreign policy actions may be hurting Israel. There is much evidence to suggest that American foreign policy incursions, whatever their motivations, tend to end up counterproductive and cause a huge amount of collateral damage – some obvious, some hidden. These wars in pursuit of “democratic” ideals and pre-emptive neutralization of foreign threats, arguably make things worse by impoverishing economies and radicalizing insurgents. They are cases of overreach. In so doing they may provide additional support for those in Israel’s neighborhood who are working toward her destruction.

Israel’s position is very different from America’s. America is huge and remote from its enemies. Even the internal terrorist threats, while very emotionally unsettling and potentially disruptive, are not existential threats. The American nation state and civilization is not yet threatened by them. Tempered vigilance would seem to be the correct response. Israel, on the other hand, is tiny and in very close proximity to powerful organizations that proclaim their credible intention to destroy her – to destroy the Jewish state and establish a Muslim state in its place. Israel is in the middle of a neighborhood that religious Muslims regard as reserved for Muslim rule. Sixty years of history has proven that efforts at placating these organizations are futile. It is not what Israel does, it is what Israel is, that matters to them. When American foreign policy alienates potentially moderate Muslim allies, this gives succor to Hamas and Hezbollah and other radical groups working in the area.

For this reason it is probably not surprising that Israelis were secretly (and some openly) ambivalent about the American invasion of Iraq– fearing the absence of a viable exit strategy and the occurrence of many undesirable unintended consequences. [For an explanation of why war is a likely to produce unintended consequences see here.] And this is something that may make Israel’s very real perpetual struggle to survive just that much more difficult. The Afghanistan war may be even more disastrous in the long run– leaving the country much worse off, potentially beyond remediation. From Israel’s perspective a smaller, more focused, more efficient American footprint in the world would probably be preferable. From America’s perspective a foreign policy aimed at doing what is realistic and is necessary to keep America safe should be the focus. America’s foreign policy critics should focus on this, not on the alliance with Israel.

From George Will in Jerusalem

HT: Lawrence Rosenbloom:

Jewish World Review August 12, 2010/ 2 Elul, 5770

Israel's anti-Obama

By George Will

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com/

JERUSALEM — Two photographs adorn the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist.

One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national homeland.

The other photograph is of Winston Churchill, who considered himself "one of the authors" of Britain's embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.

Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran, honors Churchill because he did not flinch from facts about gathering storms. Obama returned to the British Embassy in Washington the bust of Churchill that was in the Oval Office when he got there.

Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, courting the Arab world, may have had measurable benefits, although the metric proving this remains mysterious. The speech — made during a trip when Obama visited Cairo and Riyadh but not here — certainly subtracted from his standing in Israel. In it, he acknowledged Israel as, in part, a response to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Then, with what many Israelis considered a deeply offensive exercise of moral equivalence, he said: "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

"On the other hand"? "I," says Moshe Yaalon, "was shocked by the Cairo speech," which he thinks proved that "this White House is very different." Yaalon, former head of military intelligence and chief of the general staff, currently strategic affairs minister, tartly asks, "If Palestinians are victims, who are the victimizers?"

The Cairo speech came 10 months after Obama's Berlin speech, in which he declared himself a "citizen of the world." That was an oxymoronic boast, given that citizenship connotes allegiance to a particular polity, its laws and political processes. But the boast resonated in Europe.

The European Union was born from the flight of Europe's elites from what terrifies them — Europeans. The first Thirty Years' War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ratified the system of nation-states. The second Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1945, convinced European elites that the continent's nearly fatal disease was nationalism, the cure for which must be the steady attenuation of nationalities. Hence the high value placed on "pooling" sovereignty, never mind the cost in diminished self-government.

Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit. It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves — with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel United Nations and Russia — as part of the "quartet" that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians.

Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel's history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well.

The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of "the confirmed unteachability of mankind." Nevertheless, a display case in Netanyahu's office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old — 200 years younger than Jerusalem's role as the Jewish people's capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu.

No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Netanyahu, whom no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policymakers who hope to make Netanyahu malleable: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."

Its bad economic policy stupid!

From Pete Boettke (at Coordination Problem):

Bottom line, it is policy that is causing the slow adjustment of the market to changing circumstances, not market forces  themselves.  All readers must remember Adam Smith's words:

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.

When this doesn't happen, we need to ask about the thousands of impertinent obstructions that are incumbering the adjustment path.

Some of the most powerful and important ideas are the simple ones.

Watch this short video, its mandatory.

The Broken Window Fallacy

Thinking about the belief in God.

Most people I know, in my rather special little community, believe in God - the supernatural variety, "old man in the sky" type god.

People who are otherwise arch-skeptics believe that the scriptures were "revealed" at Sinai in front of millions of witnesses by a supernatural god who expects us to sing his praises every day, at appointed times, and cares what we eat, or what we do between the sheets. Not to mention that since he created us, and knows all things large and small, and moreover knows what will happen in time to come, therefore also knows exactly what we will choose to eat and everything else; suggesting that it is not really our choice - we have been created to make the very choices we do. Yet we are judged by him for doing so? And if he created everything that exists, he also created evil. So how does this square with his being the perfect, "all-good" creator of the universe; implying that evil is either imagined or God is not all-good and/or all-powerful. It all seems very silly.

Of course, these are familiar well-rehearsed arguments for which no answer exists - the problems of free-will and of evil (theodicy). What surprises me is how they are so routinely ignored by so many including our media commentators of varying degrees of intelligence and erudition. An example: Dennis Praeger, arguing with Sam Harris, when challenged to justify his beliefs (in creation and revelation) answers, in effect, that he believes because he sees no viable alternative explanation for the world as we know it (a variant of the argument from order), and that, in any case, religious people are generally more moral than non-believers. I think this may take the record for the number of implicitly false syllogisms, and circular arguments, contained in a short space. Most of this stuff is just noise. But people eat it up.

Sam Harris, for his part, making the atheist's argument, makes some errors as well, that unnecessarily polarize the discussion. While his analysis of, and denunciation of, most of organized religion is compelling (at least to me), he then comes to the alternative - which is some sort of scientifically designed morality and this collapses quickly under its own weight. Let me try and explain.

I am not a philosopher, nor a theologian, but it seems to me that both those arguing for and those arguing against the belief in God make two crucial errors, namely, the pretense of knowledge and the violation of Hume's fork.

On the matter of the pretense of knowledge it seems to me foolish to deny that there are many things in this universe that we do not know, and may never know. With the science we have we can speculate about the beginning of the universe, and come up with a more or less satisfying explanation, but in the end we cannot answer the question "how was matter created?" Similar questions come to mind: "What was there before the Big Bang?" "What was there before time?" Indeed these questions do not even appear self-evidently coherent. Physics becomes metaphysics. Why should it be surprising to find out that we human-beings, even being the marvelous creatures we are, are probably very limited in what we can perceive? After all, we have only five physical senses. How many other dimensions of perception might there be? Likewise we cannot simply rule out what appears to us to be in the realm of the supernatural, or the extra-sensory. In many respects we are bound to respond simply "we do not know." (This is probably the only thing on which Bill Maher and I agree.)

The religious think they provide an answer when they say "God created the universe." A superior, indeed perfect intelligence, created these things beyond our perception and understanding. Well, what does this mean? Why do they think this is an answer? It merely provides a story with no explanation of its own. Who created God? I might as well say "its all magic." What I am actually saying when I say God created the universe is "I don't know how the universe came to be or even what that means." The religious person has no more knowledge than the pretentious scientist.

We should note in passing that belief in creation does not get us to revelation and acceptance of all the commandments allegedly revealed thereby. This requires another giant fantastical leap.

On the matter of the second crucial error, the violation of Hume's fork, David Hume argued, (for me decisively) that there are two unbridgeable realms of human discourse - the moral and the factual - the ethical and the scientific. The latter, the factual-scientific realm, concerns what is. The world is round. My weight has increased in recent years. Spain won the world cup in 2010. These are factual matters about which scientific investigation can be made. To be sure, subjective perception is still required on the way to a consensus - there is no escaping this. But, in the normal meaning of the word, these are matters of objective truth or falsity. They can be verified or (sometimes only) falsified.

The former type of discourse - the moral-ethical - is another matter completely. This concerns what ought to be (as opposed to what is) and, as Hume pithily put it, you cannot get an "ought" from an "is." "Ought" implies personal valuation and this is not a matter of verification. Good and bad, morally speaking, are not matters subject to scientific investigation. They are rather matters of personal valuation, matters of taste or moral belief. This is a type of "knowledge" completely different from factual knowledge.

To be sure, moral precepts, rules of conduct, etc. can and are influenced by facts, by circumstances. Some rules are judged good or bad in terms of their contribution to some other more ultimate good or bad. But the most ultimate, the most fundamental, values are good or bad in themselves - just because they are. It is a matter of "faith." I cannot prove that torture is bad by any scientific investigation (though I may prove that it is ineffective, which is another matter). I cannot prove that individual freedom is good, that slavery is bad. But I certainly believe they are with every fiber of my being.

Now both Harris and Praeger deny Hume's fork. Praeger believes good and bad are in the same realm as scientifically true and untrue. They are subject to God's rules in the same way that physical laws are. Its simple. If God wants it, it is good. If God does not want it, it is evil and we can investigate this in the scripture. (Problem: as Harris points out; how do you know which scripture is the valid one?).

Harris believes that we can use logic and fact to fashion a superior morality - that we can derive morals from science and logic.

Both are wrong.

The truth is more simple and less polarizing.

One: We don't know many things. We should loudly proclaim this.
How was the world created?
I don't know and nor do you?

Two: We all employ a type of "faith" to decide how to behave.
The religious seem to think that this is more arbitrary than asserting some kind of revelation - that a morality based on a revealed scripture is less subjective than resort to individual conscience.
Newsflash: Conscience is all we have in matters of morality. For some their conscience tells them to obey the revealed word, for others it tells them the revealed word is sometimes contrary to morality. You have to decide what you really believe. And, belief is not a matter of simple choice. Sometimes I wish I could believe in a system of revealed laws proclaimed by an infallible leader and savior. I can pretend that I do, but I cannot simply choose to. You can't believe what you don't believe. And what you do believe about morality, about good and bad, is always a matter of individual "faith."

Americans, being pragmatic, have sometimes unconsciously taken this realization and molded it into organized religion. The rules, rituals, festivals, and aesthetics of received religion have been retained, but their significance has morphed from the literal into the symbolic in the service of community coherence - the practice of compassion, charity, celebration, and comfort. Revelation itself is seen as a symbol for some sort of "inner revelation" - the conscience talking to us.

This approach creates a wide tent. Is it wide enough to accommodate the likes of both Harris and Praeger?

For similar musings see here and here.

And now the union card.

"I told you so"s are obnoxious. But I can't resist.

Among the posts in this blog's archives are numerous warnings and predictions about just how bad a president candidate Obama would be. I worried about many things, including what has now become Obamacare, Obama financial reform, Obama foreign policy all of which have made Americans poorer and more vulnerable.

I also warned about Obama's agenda to increase the power of labor unions. Mostly this escaped the radar, even of many of his critics, but it is now apparent that this is a major part of his social reform agenda and an incredibly dangerous one.

Obama, as a senator, was an enthusiastic supporter of a bill, still pending, to scrap the secret ballot requirement for union organization - effectively making it easier for union organizers to intimidate workers into agreeing to the formation of a union. His presidency thus far has shown how far he is willing to go to support existing unions and encourage new ones (see here for the latest on this) - most egregiously his support of the powerful teachers unions that are responsible for the high cost and low quality of America's failing public education system. To support their extravagant benefits and yearly wage-increases, the teachers' unions are holding America's children hostage in failing, dangerous schools.

Union support goes hand in hand with the Obama administration's alliance with workers in the public sector at all levels of government. The extent of unionization in the American economy is relatively low, by comparison to other industrialized economies, and many of our unions are in the public sector. We all know that unemployment remains very high at around 10% - 15 million unemployed people, and many more who have given up looking for jobs. What many may not know is that employment in the public sector has gone up and so have wage levels. While the rest of the economy struggles to maintain employment and earnings levels, government workers expand in numbers and receive higher wages. The only way this can happen is by increasing taxes (now or in the future) to pay for them. Increased union formation would add fuel to this destructive process.

You might be tempted to ask, "What's wrong with union's? Don't they help workers?" There is a robust mythology surrounding the union mystique - folklore, nostalgia, loyalty and so on. But the sad truth is that unions are an economic curse. They are, in effect, legal labor monopolies that force the employers in an industry to deal only with the union - to employ only union members - and thereby to protect union members from competition for jobs. Unions are able to benefit their members by raising their wages and reducing the number of workers employed. They increase the cost of the payroll, reduce profits and investment in the industry, raise product prices and reduce wages elsewhere. Union members gain at the expense of non-union workers, and the rest of society.

This kind of monopoly power in the hands of any corporation would be greeted with righteous condemnation, but, somehow, in the hands of unions it is often regarded as justified. One explanation is that unions support workers who are relatively powerless compared to corporations. This assertion betrays a lack of understanding of how markets and competition work to protect all parties. But, even taken on its face, if this were ever relevant in the past, it is not relevant now. Current unions do not, for the most part, contain "powerless" blue-collar workers. Instead they are made up of professionals - articulate, educated, affluent - like teachers, pilots, health-care workers, skilled craftsmen, civil servants and so on. And the businesses that suffer (directly and indirectly) most from their successes are not the large powerful corporations, but rather the small businesses that are the economic backbone of the American economy, the engines of thrift and innovation.

Union power subverts creative economic activity. It is predicated on special protections from competition and it results in a stultifying and often violent bureaucracy. Historically it has been responsible for the crippling of whole economies, in Britain, in Israel and in many European countries. Add this to the list of horrors that this administration has unleashed upon us. How long will this nightmare endure?

July fourth and the danger within.

This July Fourth I rededicate myself to the idea and the cause of Freedom.

The Founding Father's were not paragons of virtue, they were fallible human beings. But they were remarkable human beings, to a man (and the odd woman, like Abigail Adams), the likes of which we are not likely to see among the ranks of politicians ever again. They knew exactly what they were doing and they even anticipated the greatness to which it might lead and the obstacles along the way. They faced grave risks to their persons should they fail and uncertain rewards should they succeed. They believed in what they were doing and that is why they did it.

Their actions and their achievements are all the more remarkable considering that they were breaking new ground at every turn. The United States of America is the longest surviving republic in history. The ideas upon which it was founded, though widely circulating at the time, were revolutionary. The idea that individuals could and should be masters of themselves, and their property, and beholden to none save those to whom they voluntary chose to be, was explosively subversive to the prevailing political order everywhere. The truths they articulated were by no means "self-evident" to the monarchs of Europe, or to dynastic rulers and dictators anywhere. That they seem self-evident to us, indeed, that we so dangerously take them for granted, is in no small measure due to that Revolutionary generation and its achievements.

Yet, as we often hear, and as Thomas Jefferson said, "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance" and we have not been vigilant enough. I think that Jefferson (and his compatriots) understood clearly that the threat to liberty, to individual freedom, comes not so much from external dangers as great at they may be, and, indeed are today. Rather, the real and essential danger comes from inside our own society. The challenge we face is the inculcation anew in each generation of the importance of individual liberty and private property and of the need to safeguard these principles from corruption. Societies based on some form of representative democracy are always in grave danger of gradually imploding as interest groups and coalitions seek to use the political system to cannibalize the fruits of the remarkable value creation that individual freedom brings with it. And the only real safeguard against this is a set of constitutionalized principles beyond the reach of political process.

Only if we succeed in preserving individual liberty through vigorous dedicated efforts will we be able to counter those more obvious threats to freedom that come from those who violently denounce us and our values and vow to destroy us by any means no matter how vile. America is strong because it is free, it is not free because it is strong. Freedom leads to material and spiritual riches that provide the wherewithal for a principled defense. We need to be ready to defend freedom at home as well as abroad.
America has succeeded remarkably well in this, all things considered, resisting implosion in spite of grave challenges, so far. Once again we find ourselves, our core principles, facing a formidable challenge in the form of an overreaching government. Can we, will we, pull back and go some ways to reverse the damage. I know we can and I believe we will.

Happy Holiday, Yours in Freedom.

Missed opportunity?

OK, so now the question of whether Bradley made a big mistake by putting Clark in has to be considered.

I mean why start with an experimental lineup, why start with such a gamble in arguably the most important match of the tournament up till that point; especially when the U.S. had such a great draw and could plausibly have made it all the way to the semi-finals? Just a year ago they made it to the finals of the Confederation Cup after beating Spain and this was a much easier draw.

Feilhaber galvanized the team when he came in. But by then they were already 1-0 down and could never recover. Might have been a great opportunity lost - an opportunity to capitalize on the growing interest in the sport in this country.

It may cost him his job. If so, a pity, he has taken the team a long way in the short time he has been there.

The President wants to be more European than the Europeans!

Unbelievable! That great sage of economic wisdom, Barak Obama, has taken it upon himself to write a letter to the EU, advising them not to abandon their fiscally irresponsible policies for fear of prolonging the recession. He didn't actually use those words of course. Its back to "stimulus" talk. 

Finally, backs to the wall, the most fiscally irresponsible countries of Europe are edging towards cutting government spending and deficits, raising retirement ages, reducing union power, and other sorely needed and overdue steps. If they follow through these will bear dividends. Private investment will rise, unemployment will fall and economic growth will return. How ironic that it is the president of the United States, historically the more fiscally responsible party, that is now urging Europe not to abandon the very behavior that got it into trouble and that is getting us into the same trouble. Obama, and his acolytes want us to be more like Europe, they don't want Europe to be more like we used to be. Maybe they want us all to sink together.

This is the worst American president in my memory. An anti-American, American President. Go figure!

A useful crisis?

Rahm Emanuel famously advised that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. 

So now it appears Barak Obama is trying to use the BP spill as leverage for his anti-oil energy agenda. This one the central message of his recent infantile TV broadcast.

Lest there be any misconceptions on the issue it should be realized that:

1. This has nothing to do with replacing oil as our main fuel source and everything to do with a way to give politically advantageous subsidies to big companies to "research" alternative fuels. The taxpayer funded "research" has been going on for 40 years. As long as oil is cheap, its a joke, an expensive one.

2. Ten to one Obama knows that this is all rhetoric. The rhetoric notwithstanding, the longstanding alliance between Big Oil and Big Government is not about to be jeopardized. Fortunately, for him and for the nation, there is no way Congress will pass his energy bill.

What is really interesting about all this is the flack he is getting from the liberals who have always thought he could walk on water, so why not miraculously stop the oil. Their disillusionment is comical and well-deserved.

The crisis may not be waisted after all.

It did not work, lets do more of it.

I am not one of those economists who likes to predict things. That is why they don't pay me the big bucks. There are some things, however, that are easy to predict and about which I can now say "I told you so."


Concerning the Obama stimulus package, for example, I said more than once that it would not work, and that unemployment would not fall. Amazingly, people are surprised to find very few jobs being created and the unemployment rate stubbornly remaining very high. There are 15 million people unemployed. The Obami predicted that the stimulus would create upwards of 4 million jobs. It has created about zero. Actually, the whole package probably destroyed jobs. Absent the bail-outs, stimulus packages, public sector union wage increases and assorted regulatory initiatives, like the health-care socialization bill, we might not still be in a recession. Instead the public sector is growing at the expense of the private sector and the total number of jobs in the economy is stuck.

The economy is not doing badly all things considered. This is in spite of and not because of anything the Obami have done.

The response is predictably frustrating. In the face of failure Obami spokesmen maintain that "more needs to be done." That is, we need more stimulus, more deficits, more, more, more.

Now it’s the American people who will decide.

Judt on Juden in the New York Times

This guest op-ed was published yesterday in the NYT by Tony Judt, a long-time provocative critic of Israel. He has the usual LIberal presuppositions. He writes well and he is influential. This article will cause a bit of a stir.

It is, however, not without elements of truth of interest to both critics and defenders of Israel. In fact, it probably contains more that is true that not. This is very clever, maybe unintentionally so. I suspect he believes what he says. But the part that is not true is toxic.

So, it is much easier for me to alert you to those parts and concede the rest and recommend it to your attention.So I have underlined parts of his article and inserted my comments on those underlined sections underneath them in italics - I have also inserted my initials. I hope your browser preserves the format. Make sure you read all the italicized material.

PL.

June 9, 2010

Israel Without Clichés

By Tony Judt
THE Israeli raid on the Free Gaza flotilla has generated an outpouring of clichés from the usual suspects. It is almost impossible to discuss the Middle East without resorting to tired accusations and ritual defenses: perhaps a little house cleaning is in order.

No. 1: Israel is being/should be delegitimized

Israel is a state like any other, long-established and internationally recognized. The bad behavior of its governments does not “delegitimize” it, any more than the bad behavior of the rulers of North Korea, Sudan — or, indeed, the United States — “delegitimizes” them. When Israel breaks international law, it should be pressed to desist; but it is precisely because it is a state under international law that we have that leverage.

Some critics of Israel are motivated by a wish that it did not exist — that it would just somehow go away. But this is the politics of the ostrich: Flemish nationalists feel the same way about Belgium, Basque separatists abo ut Spain. Israel is not going away, nor should it. As for the official Israeli public relations campaign to discredit any criticism as an exercise in “de-legitimization,” it is uniquely self-defeating. Every time Jerusalem responds this way, it highlights its own isolation.

PL. This obviously is a matter of opinion and of strategy. It concerns the magnitude of the existential threat to Israel. Is it just rhetoric, or does it have real teeth? And will a PR campaign and expose' against it be effective or counterproductive. I think it is very serious, especially in Europe and that Americans need to know that Israel urgently needs their support against this conscious delegitimization. But we should be glad to hear the Judt accepts Israel's existence as a fait accompli - though notice he does so with patent lack of enthusiasm. Its not something he likes, but he has to live with it.

No. 2: Israel is/is not a democracy

Perhaps the most common defense of Israel outside the country is that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” This is largely true: the country has an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today. The expression of strong dissent from official policy is increasingly discouraged.

But the point is irrelevant. “Democracy” is no guarantee of good behavior: most countries today are formally democratic — remember Eastern Europe’s “popular democracies.” Israel belies the comfortable American cliché that “democracies don’t make war.” It is a democracy dominated and often governed by former professional soldiers: this alone distinguishes it from other advanced countries. And we should not forget that Gaza is another “democracy” in the Middle East: it was precisely because Hamas won free elections there in 2005 that both the Palestinian Authority and Israel reacted with such vehemence.

PL. This is a nice little trick. He confuses political democracy - some kind of right to vote - with liberal democracy - the existence of civil rights, like freedom of speech, movement, trade, and, of course, religion. Polls suggest that people in Gaza are increasingly inclined to blame Hamas - a repressive, brutal dictatorship - for the blockade together with Israel. If it were really a democracy, like Israel, there would, as the cliche he debunks suggests, be no war between Gaza and Israel. That is the relevance that eludes him. Also the double standards to which Israel is held because it is a democracy. I don't see Judt rushing to condemn the brutalities of the Arab dictatorships committed daily all around the Middle East.

No. 3: Israel is/is not to blame

Israel is not responsible for the fact that many of its near neighbors long denied its right to exist. The sense of siege should not be underestimated when we try to understand the delusional quality of many Israeli pronouncements. Unsurprisingly, the state has acquired pathological habits. Of these, the most damaging is its habitual resort to force. Because this worked for so long — the easy victories of the country’s early years are ingrained in folk memory — Israel finds it difficult to conceive of other ways to respond. And the failure of the negotiations of 2000 at Camp David reinforced the belief that “there is no one to talk to.”

But there is. As American officials privately acknowledge, sooner or later Israel (or someone) will have to talk to Hamas. From French Algeria through South Africa to the Provisional I.R.A., the story repeats itself: the dominant power denies the legitimacy of the “terrorists,” thereby strengthening their hand; then it secretly negotiates with them; finally, it concedes power, independence or a place at the table. Israel will negotiate with Hamas: the only question is why not now.

PL. It is probably true that the behavior of Israel's enemies has strengthened the hand of the military and those inclined to military solutions. But this paragraph is just plain wrong. There is no similar example in history of a besieged people that has been more willing to give non-violence a chance. And even now crave a credible offer to do so. The comparison with the ANC and the IRA is disingenuous. The ANC never desired to destroy South Africa and preached a western style inclusive ideology. The IRA did not want to destroy England and there was no talking to them until they abandoned their campaign of terror. Why does Judt assume that Israel will have to talk to Hamas? Why not campaign against Hamas to either abandon its Islamist position (hard to see how they can do this) or be crushed. Does he think that the U.S. should talk to Al Queda? What is the difference?

No. 4: The Palestinians are/are not to blame

Abba Eban, the former Israeli foreign minister, claimed that Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. He was not wholly wrong. The “negationist” stance of Palestinian resistance movements from 1948 through the early 1980s did them little good. And Hamas, firmly in that tradition though far more genuinely popular than its predecessors, will have to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

PL. Is this really realistic? I would be happy to be proven wrong.

But since 1967 it has been Israel that has missed most opportunities: a 40-year occupation (against the advice of its own elder statesmen); three catastrophic invasions of Lebanon; an invasion and blockade of Gaza in the teeth of world opinion; and now a botched attack on civilians in international waters. Palestinians would be hard put to match such cumulative blunders.

PL. This seems to me to be nonsense, but it is based on a particular reading of history.

Terrorism is the weapon of the weak — bombing civilian targets was not invented by Arabs (nor by the Jews who engaged in it before 1948). Morally indefensible, it has characterized resistance movements of all colors for at least a century. Israelis are right to insist that any talks or settlements will depend upon Hamas’s foreswearing it.

PL. Good, this is very important. So what is left then?

But Palestinians face the same conundrum as every other oppressed people: all they have with which to oppose an established state with a monopoly of power is rejection and protest. If they pre-concede every Israeli demand — abjurance of violence, acceptance of Israel, acknowledgment of all their losses — what do they bring to the negotiating table? Israel has the initiative: it should exercise it.

PL. This seems to contradict the preceding paragraph. What is Israel supposed to do if its enemies do NOT foreswear violence or recognize its legitimacy? How can he say she has the initiative? That makes no sense.

No. 5: The Israel lobby is/is not to blame

There is an Israel lobby in Washington and it does a very good job — that’s what lobbies are for. Those who claim that the Israel lobby is unfairly painted as “too influential” (with the subtext of excessive Jewish influence behind the scenes) have a point: the gun lobby, the oil lobby and the banking lobby have all done far more damage to the health of this country.

But the Israel lobby is disproportionately influential. Why else do an overwhelming majority of congressmen roll over for every pro-Israel motion? No more than a handful show consistent interest in the subject. It is one thing to denounce the excessive leverage of a lobby, quite another to accuse Jews of “running the country.” We must not censor ourselves lest people conflate the two. In Arthur Koestler’s words, “This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-onfidence.”

PL. OK, free speech. What about criticizing the excessive leverage of the Arab lobby and the Saudi influence? In the end the Israel lobby may be powerful because its message is powerful, not the other way round.

No. 6: Criticism of Israel is/is not linked to anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews, and Israel is a Jewish state, so of course some criticism of it is malevolently motivated. There have been occasions in the recent past (notably in the Soviet Union and its satellites) when “anti-Zionism” was a convenient surrogate for official anti-Semitism. Understandably, many Jews and Israelis have not forgotten this.

But criticism of Israel, increasingly from non-Israeli Jews, is not predominantly motivated by anti-Semitism.

PL. How does he know this? It seems to me a lot of it cannot be explained in any other way.

The same is true of contemporary anti-Zionism: Zionism itself has moved a long way from the ideology of its “founding fathers” — today it presses territorial claims, religious exclusivity and political extremism. One can acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and still be an anti-Zionist (or “post-Zionist”). Indeed, given the emphasis in Zionism on the need for the Jews to establish a “normal state” for themselves, today’s insistence on Israel’s right to act in “abnormal” ways because it is a Jewish state suggests that Zionism has failed.

PL. There are aspects of Zionism that have failed - the socialist aspects. And their are aspects that are repugnant - the religious aspects. And Zionism can be a combustible word. I like Capitalist Zionism or free market Zionism. That is what will make, is making, Israel a remarkable "normal" state.

We should beware the excessive invocation of “anti-Semitism.” A younger generation in the United States, not to mention worldwide, is growing skeptical. “If criticism of the Israeli blockade of Gaza is potentially ‘anti-Semitic,’ why take seriously other instances of the prejudice?” they ask, and “What if the Holocaust has become just another excuse for Israeli bad behavior?” The risks that Jews run by encouraging this conflation should not be is missed.

PL. There is another risk. That the world will forget. There is also something that Judt ignores - European guilt! European liberals are overwhelming anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. The memory of the Holocaust surely has something to do with this - look at these Jews, they cry about the Holocaust but oppress the Palestinians, they act like the Nazis that oppressed them, they are not worthy of our sympathy. The cynical invocation of Nazi symbols and terminology is very real and hard to explain without reference to the Holocaust. The Jews are not the victims you may think they are and we Europeans are not the monsters we were made out to be. Does Judt not see this?

Along with the oil sheikdoms, Israel is now America’s greatest strategic liability in the Middle East and Central Asia. Thanks to Israel, we are in serious danger of “losing” Turkey: a Muslim democracy, offended at its treatment by the European Union, that is the pivotal actor in Near-Eastern and Central Asian affairs. Without Turkey, the United States will achieve few of its regional objectives — whether in Iran, Afghanistan or the Arab world. The time has come to cut through the clichés surrounding it, treat Israel like a “normal” state and sever the umbilical cord.

PL. "Israel is now America's greatest strategic liability" - there it is again. It is amazing how some phrases just catch on. So evocative. As I have said repeatedly this is as dangerous as it is patently false. It has been disproved using historical evidence by Alan Dershowitz and it is quite implausible, unless one is very ignorant of the history and the reality of the Middle East. (It is not Israeli's fault that America is losing Turkey, it is Turkey's fault. This started long before the current tiff with Israel.) But it is now the leitmotif of the Obama administration that is probably responsible for its increasing use. It is the weapon of choice in the campaign to drive a wedge between Israel and America and it needs to be forcefully resisted and debunked.

PL. By the way what does this have to do with Israel's legitimate interception of the flotilla? What sould Israel have done? If no one had been killed or hurt, would it have been ok?

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Tony Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Ill Fares the Land.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 10, 2010

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.