Friday, September 19, 2003
AS PROMISED, IT’S A TAKEDOWN OF THE AUTHOR OF THE DMRWCE
The author of the Des Moines Register’s Worst Column Ever is at it again. Lately she’s in ecstasy over the fact that the Democrats have turned hard left:
At a time when the country has most needed an alternative to the divisive, bankrupting, internationally isolating policies of this Republican administration, the Democrats were afraid to sound like Democrats.
Driving the Taliban from Afghanistan, Hussein from Iraq, and keeping al Qaeda on the run. Yep, what an awful foreign policy? And whom in the international community have we isolated ourselves from? France and Germany? Two nations that can’t find their collective asses with both hands. Yeah, we should be real worried about alienating them.
Too many signed off on the president's tax cuts for the rich while poor families went into a free-fall.
Actually, those tax cuts went to everyone who paid income taxes, Rekha, not just the rich. You could look it up. The poor are not in a free fall. The most recent poverty statistics show that poverty in the U.S. fell from 11.9% in 2000, to 11.6% in 2001, during the recession. You could look that up too.
As air- and water-quality rules were downgraded to suit business, and civil rights and labor rights were eroded in the name of nabbing terrorists, and as the national deficit ballooned into unprecedented proportions to fight a war launched on myths, they hardly put up a fight.
And what myths are those Rehka? Saddam Hussein as a brutal tyrant? Guess all those mass graves are a myth. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Guess all those gassed Kurds are a myth.
Most were watching President Bush's high poll numbers, and letting right-wing talk show hosts such as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity characterize them as the reckless tax-and-spenders. Many Democrats were running away from their own legacy in office.
Until last weekend. In a muddy Indianola field, the Democrats came back with a collective roar.
And the nation responded with a collective yawn.
Appropriately enough, The Rolling Stones" "Start Me Up" was being played when Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fisher introduced seven of the nine candidates at Tom Harkin's annual steak fry. It was a moment millions of Americans have been waiting for.
Yes, that’s true; but only the millions who constitute the hard-core Democrats. The remaining millions in the U.S. could not have cared less.
While politicians have had their eyes on the polls, ordinary Democrats have been hungry for someone to frame and lead the opposition to the Bush agenda. So hungry that at candidate debates, someone like Al Sharpton, who has little credibility and even less hope of winning the nomination, draws the greatest applause.
And does Rekha see that such a fact portends disaster for the Democrats in next year’s election? I’m joking of course:
"He brought us peace and prosperity," Carol Moseley Braun said of Clinton. "The Bush crowd has brought us depression and war."
Depression!?!? I didn’t know we were in a depression. Guess that’s why she had the nickname Senator Measly Brain when she was in Washington. Leave it to Rekha to approvingly quote her.
And guess who else she approvingly quotes?
Charging that Americans' health-care bills are going to pay for stock options and corporate welfare, Dennis Kucinich urged "health care for people, not for profit," pledged to cancel NAFTA and bring "a return to human rights, workers' rights and conditions on bilateral trade." On Iraq, he chanted, "U.N. in, U.S. out!"
Dennis Kucinich, the poster boy for Crazy Uncles Locked Away In The Attic Anonymous.
How things have changed. Mainline Republican philosophy was once all about practicality, like balancing the budget and keeping government from meddling in people's lives. At their best, Democrats were the ideological ones: for human rights, diversity and inclusion, civil liberties and protecting the vulnerable.
Yep, appeasement of the Soviet Union and other communists was great for human rights, political correctness is great for diversity and inclusion, and civil liberties, and welfare has been great for the vulnerable.
The new Republicans brought massive deficits and put government in people's bedrooms. And after Sept. 11, 2001, Democrats were cowed into submitting to Republican excesses.
I didn’t know that a military man was in my bedroom! I’ll have to say “Hi” to him before I turn in tonight.
You might well have wondered if there were major differences between the parties.
Saturday put that question to rest. The Democrats sounded like Democrats again.
Yep, and the election of 2004 will put to rest which party the American public likes best. Anyone wanna bet it isn’t the Democrats? Maybe Rekha would bet that it is? That’s the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who flits around left-wing fantasyland.
UPDATE: Royce Dunbar has more. And boy, it is good.
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A TWO-FER!
Yesterday the author of the DMRWCE did a bit of gender and racial bean counting. No surprise there, but then I spotted this line:
you'd hope that where possible, the college would seize the opportunity to show it's not an old-boy network, and that routes of advancement are equally open to women.
Given that institutions of higher learning are often bastions of fashionable leftism, does anyone really believe that they have old-boy networks? Does Rekha have a clue what’s been happening at universities and colleges over the last 20 years? No, because she doesn’t have a clue, period.
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STAY TUNED
Takedown of Rekha Basu’s recent column is coming later.
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
CONDOLEEZA, MARRY ME!
In what is another obvious attempt to hurt the Bush Administration, the New York Times ran a frontpage article hyping intelligence reports that show ordinary Iraqis resent the U.S. presence. The only thing good about it was this set of quotes from Condoleeza Rice:
Ms. Rice said that it was "simply naïve" to believe that Iraq today was more of a haven for terrorists than it was before Saddam Hussein was ousted from power.
"There is almost a sense that they were sitting someplace minding their own business — drinking tea, having meetings" and then decided to come to Iraq only after the American military rolled into Baghdad.
"These are fighters, they are jihadists," she said. "They would be fighting someplace. Maybe they would be fighting in the Gulf. Maybe they would be fighting in Southeast Asia. Maybe they would be fighting, or trying to fight, in the United States."
And she’s single too!
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LIKE PAVLOV’S DOG
The Des Moines Register ran an editorial that began:
Now Americans have their money, their life savings, in the stock market. In companies. In the hands of money managers. Now investing money means having to stomach the scandals.
So Enron, last year, was a blow to investor confidence. The company misstated its earnings by $600 million over four years, hid corporate debt, favored insiders and lied to investors. Then news of WorldCom with miscalculations in earnings six times the size of Enron's shook investors. Add to that ImClone, Health South and Rite Aid.
The message was the same: The investor gets the shaft. The little guys "out here" have no idea what the big fish "in there" are doing.
It ended:
The funds must be trustworthy. Improper trading must be curbed. The industry must be closely regulated. Average investors, some 95 million Americans, should feel confident about getting a fair shake in a savings system they're trusting with their money and their future.
How did I know it would end thus? Yes, more government regulation, that will surely solve more problems than it will create.
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9TH CIRCUIT NOT THAT LIBERAL?
Professor Yin thinks the 9th Circus Court of Appeals is getting a bad rap. I dunno. When you rule the the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional and the recall election has to be postponed, I think you deserve whatever rap you get.
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WHO NEEDS MORE MONEY?
Tusk and Talon has this interesting post on education spending.
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Wednesday, September 17, 2003
MORE REGULATORY MASSAGE
The American Prowler received a letter to the editor from a gentleman named Richard McEnroe on my column making light of Iowa’s legislators urge to regulate. I’m reprinting parts of it here with my responses:
Mr. Hogberg is always at liberty to rewire his house with the assistance of an unlicensed electrician or local handyman, find some college freshman with a copy of Quicken to do his taxes for pizza money, or trust his person and his family to the professionalism of a gypsy cabdriver. I should be surprised to find out he does so.
I rent an apartment, so the question of wiring my house is moot. I have a licensed CPA do my taxes; as for a gypsy cab driver, well, given my experience with licensed cab drivers, I can’t imagine that a “gypsy” would be any worse.
But what I do is completely beside the point. What is at issue is what I should be free to do. If I want to hire a college kid to do my taxes, why shouldn’t that be my choice? Yes, it is arguably stupid to do so, but Mr. McEnroe assumes that it is the business of government to protect me from my own stupidity. And, actually, I’m not at liberty to do the things that Mr. McEnroe suggests, because hiring a gypsy cab driver or a student to do my taxes can get those people in trouble with the law.
Next,
unqualified athletic trainers can cripple you, incompetent accountants can cost you your home and send you to jail, inept landscape artists can literally bury you, unskilled hearing aid dealers can cost people their hearing, and so on…And while it may be entertaining to rail at the over-regulation of barbers and cosmetologists (the history of barbering suggests that, were we to take it back to first causes, we should explore the controversial Big Bangs theory), these are people who are flailing about your head with sharp blades, heated metal rods, and caustic chemicals. Silly as it seems at first glance, it is probably worthwhile to cock the occasional eye at their doings.
An unskilled hearing aid dealer can cost someone his hearing? That seems like a stretch. I’d really like to know how many more injuries, encounters with the law, etc., occur under an unregulated system vs. a regulated one. I’m willing to bet that it is not that much greater in an unregulated system, and probably not enough to justify government regulation. Furthermore, such regulation can cause more harm than it prevents. According to economist Walter Williams:
licensing may lower the received quality of the service in question because by making entry costs higher, there are fewer practitioners. Fewer practitioners mean the cost of the service is higher, and as a result of the higher cost, some consumers resort to do-it-yourself methods, which may result in a lower quality actually received. For example, several economists have found that in jurisdictions where there is strict licensing of electricians, there is a higher incidence of fires of an electrical origin. Many people can't afford the high services of electricians, so they jury-rig wiring themselves and use extension cords, thereby increasing the risk of fire.
Of course, consumers are willing to engage in do-it-yourself schemes because the price of hiring someone it too high. But Mr. Cohen dismisses the notion that licensing causes higher prices:
But the idea that licensing causes higher prices for consumers is too much of a stretch for me.
I don’t know why. It should be obvious. That it’s not is probably a tribute to the very poor quality of economic education in our public schools. But it is simple: prices are determined by supply and demand. If the supply of a good or service is made artificially lower than it would be naturally—as licensing requirements do—and demand remains constant, then the price goes up.
Insisting that people who trade in these professions meet a certain minimal standard of competence and accountability is not, I would think, unreasonable.
Of course it is not unreasonable. That’s not the issue. The issue is should the government be the one enforcing such standards? Why not professional organizations? They could license people in their professions, and then I could be free to choose a licensed professional or an unlicensed one. Or we could have a system of certification, where a professional takes an exam, and is then given a score. I can then decide to hire someone with a 90% score, or an 80% score, or someone who hasn’t taken the exam at all. It would be my choice.
I will grant that both the idea of the state theater and licensing interior decorators leap gracefully onto the floodlit stage of folly, since they mandate, as all such programs do, the attempted legislation of subjective taste.
I wonder, why does Mr. McEnroe think that legislators are willing to regulate a profession like interior decorators? Just a fluke? More likely, there are two reasons. The first is that legislators have become accustomed to micro-managing other people’s lives. The second is that there is probably pressure from interior decorators to pass such laws. Again, Walter Williams:
The self-interested behavior behind the advocates of occupational licensing is evident. Partial evidence of this is that most licensure laws are the result of the intense lobbying, not by consumers, but by incumbent practitioners. When incumbents in an unlicensed trade lobby for licensing, or when the already existing incumbents in a licensed activity lobby for higher entry requirements, they virtually always seek a grandfather clause that exempts them from meeting all the requirements of the licensing. The burden of higher entry costs is borne by the new entrants. The violation of licensing codes by practitioners, such as price cutting and extra hours, are nearly always reported to a licensing board by incumbent practitioners — not by irate customers complaining about too low a price.
In the case of Iowa, interior decorators hope to use the legislative process to restrict access to their profession. In so doing, they can reduce competition and charge higher prices.
Mr. McEnroe justifies government licensure requirements as necessary to preserve safety. In reality, they are often little more than a sop to interest groups.
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THANK GOD FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
One of my first stops each morning on the information superhighway is the New York Times; thus, it is often soothing to the poor nerves that my second stop is the Washington Post.
Yes, I know it is still a liberal paper, but it’s not possessed of the loony-ness of the Times. Yesterday the Post bemoaned the collapse of the trade talks in Cancun. In the middle of the editorial there was this wonderful passage:
In the wake of the collapse of talks, some trade activists were even photographed celebrating this so-called victory over the developing world. This was shortsighted, not to say grossly irresponsible: Trade is not a zero-sum game but rather a way of facilitating growth across the board. As the economic history of the past half-century has proven, countries with more open borders become richer faster: Refusal to cooperate hurts no one more than the poor themselves.
Yeeeesss!!!!!
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Tuesday, September 16, 2003
NY TIMES MALIGNS 9/11
My new column at the American Prowler.
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BUSH AS NAZI, PART MMCCLXIV
In an unhinged rant in yesterday’s New York Times, Frank Rich sputtered out this line:
Showtime, the cable network, boasts that no fewer than three journalists, including the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, were involved in assuring the accuracy and balance of the docudrama "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis," first shown last Sunday while the actual George W. Bush was addressing the nation. But this film, made with full Bush administration cooperation (including that of the president himself), is propaganda so untroubled by reality that it's best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl.
Yep, and Frank Rich is best viewed as a fool.
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THANKS FOR TREATING ME LIKE A CHILD
In an editorial decrying how difficult it will be to establish democracy in Iraq, the Des Moines Register began as follows:
Seeing how difficult it is to create a democracy in Iraq should instill in Americans a renewed awareness of just how remarkable our form of government is.
Gee, thanks for the condescending pat on the head! Do the Register editorialists really think that the average American has little to no appreciation how remarkable this country is?
Oh that’s right. Like so many good liberals, they think that the rest of can’t function without their brilliant insights.
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SPENDING ON WHAT?
In another one of there “we need government-run health care because health care is so expensive in the United States” editorials, the Des Moines Register had this “interesting” line:
Americans utilize thousands of different health-care plans. The industry is motivated by profits. Other countries with government-sponsored systems spend their money directly on the health care of their people, while Americans spend it on administration.
Spend it “directly”? Has the Register never heard of government bureaucrats? Or do they not exist in other countries?
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Sunday, September 14, 2003
BACK ON TUESDAY
Cornfield Commentary will start up on Tuesday. I had too much fun this weekend to blog.
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