Friday, October 31, 2003
DRUG REIMPORTATION
My new column at the Spectator.
. . .
Thursday, October 30, 2003
SCENES FROM THE WHIMPER-NOT-A-BANG PROTESTS
Belligerent Bunny has pictures and running commentary from the Washington, D.C. protest this last weekend. Is she the first to use the phrase “MasterCard Marxist”? Just curious.
And Commiewatch has the San Francisco protest covered.
. . .
THEY PRINTED IT!
On Monday, the Des Moines Register finally printed my letter to the editor about state spending. So kudos to the Register, for once. Now back to regularly scheduled Register bashing.
. . .
PLEASE LEARN SOME ECONOMICS
The Des Moines Register thinks that Americans are being scammed because companies charge lower prices in Canada not only on prescription drugs, but on a host of other products as well:
Everybody knows prescription drugs identical to those sold in the United States sell for much lower prices in Canada.
A similar rip-off of U.S. consumers might be happening in automobiles. Des Moines lawyer Roxanne Conlin has filed a lawsuit similar to suits filed in a number of other states. It alleges that U.S. manufacturers sell their cars for about 10 percent less in Canada and have engaged in a price-fixing conspiracy to prevent the lower-priced cars from being reimported.
That first sentence is a bit misleading, since it implies that drug companies deliberately sell at a lower price, when in fact there are price controls on drugs in Canada.
So why do other industries sell at lower prices in Canada? This presentation from Industry Canada offers a pretty big clue. Page 3 shows that in 1998, Canada’s standard of living was much below that of the U.S. Real per-capita income was 25% to 30% lower in Canada. Interestingly enough, that same page shows that the best-selling car sold for $15,700 in Canada, while in the best-selling car in the U.S. sold for more than $21,000.
It’s pretty simple when you think about it: If a people have less income, then you have to charge them lower prices to get them to buy your product. The Register, of course, would rather chase after conspiracies hatched by insidious corporations. Unfortunately for them, it’s not that complicated. It’s just simple economics.
. . .
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!
Paul Krugman used his column yesterday to defend his column from over a week ago in which he excused Mahathir’s anti-Semitism. Big surprise, it was a self-serving, sanctimonious distortion fest:
Last week I found myself caught up in that struggle. I wrote about why Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's prime minister — a clever if loathsome man who adjusts the volume of his anti-Semitism depending on circumstances — chose to include an anti-Jewish diatribe in his speech to an Islamic conference. Sure enough, I was accused in various places not just of "tolerance for anti-Semitism" (yes, I'm Jewish) but of being in Mr. Mahathir's pay. Smear tactics aside, the thrust of the attacks was that because anti-Semitism is evil, anyone who tries to understand why politicians foment anti-Semitism — and looks for ways other than military force to combat the disease — is an apologist for anti-Semitism and is complicit in evil.
Now Krugman admits that Mahathir is loathsome. Well, it’s about time.
Distorting again: Don Luskin did not accuse Krugman of being in the pay of Mahathir; he asked questions about it:
And who paid for Krugman's airfare? His hotel? His meals? Were there perks involved? Was there an honorarium? Was he on Mahathir's "advisory board"?
And Luskin is definitely right to raise such questions, given Krugman’s lack of disclosure on the matter of being in Enron’s pay.
And don’t you just love how he says he just trying to “to understand why politicians foment anti-Semitism”? Yes, he was trying to understand it in such a way that he could blame Bush’s foreign policy. Funny how he leaves that out.
Krugman also indulges the left’s penchant for victimhood; specifically, he wallows in the “pro-War crowd is using 9-11 to trample my freedom of speech” canard:
Surely it's important to understand how others see us, but a new, post 9/11 version of political correctness has made it difficult even to discuss their points of view. Any American who tries to go beyond "America good, terrorists evil," who tries to understand — not condone — the growing world backlash against the United States, faces furious attacks delivered in a tone of high moral indignation…
Which brings me back to my starting point: we'll lose the fight against terror if we don't make an effort to understand how others think. Yet because of a domestic political struggle that seems ever more centered on religion, such attempts at understanding are shouted down.
First of all, Americans don’t have any problem trying to understand why they hate us. I don’t recall any outrage over this article in the Village Voice, barely one month after 9/11. Nor do I recall any anger over this piece by Michael Ledeen. What gets folks’ dander up is when that “understanding” is used to blame America. The reason we were upset at Krugman is that he was using his “understanding” to excuse anti-Semitism. To portray it as intolerance among Americans is both insulting and disingenuous.
Finally, listening to all this whining about “being silenced” is getting old. To all of those who keep plugging this nonsense, I say “GET OVER YOURSELVES!” A determined self-image of moral superiority does not mean you have a right to not be criticized. Those who argue that they are being silenced are trying to ride a guilt trip on those who are criticizing them. Hopefully the criticizers will be shamed into thinking that they really are threatening these folks freedom of speech and will, thus, stop criticizing them. It’s a great irony: those who loudest yelp about being silenced are themselves hoping to shut up the voices of their critics.
. . .
WHILE I’M ON THE SUBJECT…
Don Luskin has this nifty catch (thanks to reader Patrick Sullivan) showing that Krugman was willing to indulge unilateralism during the Bosnia conflict. What I find interesting about the Slate article is this passage:
The answer to your chicken-and-egg question is probably, alas, both. That is, you can't sustain democracy without a more or less marketized system; it's hard to have a free press when the government controls the paper supply; and you can't have a well-functioning market without a somewhat democratic rule of law--otherwise banks end up being devices to allow the minister's nephew to gamble with the public's money. (Italics mine.)
Let’s go back to Krugman’s column from May 13:
Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or — for another example — Israel. (Italics mine.)
Back in 1999 the press couldn’t be free if owned by the government. But in 2003, the media is freer to smack around the government if it is owned by the government. As I wrote back then, “I’m not going to bother explaining what’s wrong with that as it should be obvious.” Boy, what having a Republican in the White House can do to some people.
. . .
FRIEDMAN VS. KRUGMAN
Don Luskin had a great KTS column in the NRO yesterday. Choice quote:
Ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member Patrick Sullivan pointed out in an e-mail that Nobel laureate Milton Friedman handled himself very differently when he advised Chile on how to successfully overcome its hyperinflation in the early 1970s. Friedman did not attend any public dog-and-pony shows with Chile's fascist leader, Augusto Pinochet. And while in Chile, Friedman actively spoke out against political repression, as detailed in Friedman's autobiography, Two Lucky People .
But Friedman — a conservative economist then associated with Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon — was pilloried in the pages of (yes!) the New York Times for his supposed complicity in fascism, both in news stories and in the op-ed columns of the Paul Krugman of the day, Anthony Lewis. After that barrage, Friedman had to endure a decade of leftist protests, including the disruption of his Nobel Prize award ceremony in Sweden.
. . .
WISH I’D SAID THAT
Saul Singer, in NRO, on Mahathir Mohamad:
Those who see Mahathir as a moderate are confusing the trappings of modernization with the modernization of the mind. Muslims, including the most fundamentalist variety, would be happy to embrace a very modern device, the nuclear bomb, in the service of an aim as primitive as the caveman’s club.
Go read the whole thing.
. . .
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
INFLUENTIAL BOOKS
John Hawkins took a poll of right-leaning bloggers about which books most influenced them. I will let you know which books I chose if I can find the email.
UPDATE: Thanks to Johh Hawkins for sending back my emails in which I listed my choices. Okay, here is the books I said most influenced me:
Second Treatise of Government – John Locke
Treatise on Rhetoric – Aristotle
Reflections on the Revolution in France – Edmund Burke
Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies – Edmund Burke
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith*
The Federalist Papers*
The Road to Serfdom – F.A. Hayek*
The Law – Frederic Bastiat
History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides*
Losing Ground – Charles Murray
On Liberty – John Stuart Mill
Democracy in America – Alexis De Tocqueville
Illiberal Education – Dinesh D’Souza
The Logic of Collective Action – Mancur Olson
The Hollow Men – Charles Sykes
Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman*
Radical Son – David Horowitz*
Destructive Generation – Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Congress: The Electoral Connection – David Mayhew
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass - Theodore Dalrymple
By my count, six books I chose—the ones marked with asterisks—made the final list. Not bad for this type of endeavor, I suppose. Some, like those by David Mayhew and Mancur Olson, are largely political science books, so I did not expect them to make the cut. Yet, looking at the list I’m a bit surprised that nothing by Edmund Burke, John Locke, Frederic Bastiat, nor anything by an ancient Greek save Thucydides made the list. And Ann Coulter (Treason) makes the list but Charles Murray and Theodore Dalrymple are slighted? Sigh. I guess even conservatives are not immune to the seductions of trendiness.
. . .
24 HAS A BIG PROBLEM
My review of season two over at Blogcritics.
. . .
Monday, October 27, 2003
AN EXCHANGE ABOUT YOU-KNOW-WHO
In the letters section of the Spectator, there is a letter about my column on Krugman last Thrusday, and my response.
Also see Luskin's latest.
. . .
IDENTITY POLITICS GONE REAL BAD?
Don Luskin tells Eric Alterman where he can put his speculation as to whether Luskin is Jewish. However, I can’t help but think there is a rather unnerving implication in this Alterman sentence:
Anyway, I don’t know if Donald Luskin is Jewish, and I guess I don’t even know if Paul Krugman is, but I do know this is a slimy, intellectually fraudulent attack, designed to silence the man he terms “America’s most dangerous liberal pundit.”
Is Alterman hinting that it is Luskin’s supposed Jewish-ness (I don’t know if he is one either, and I don’t care) that leads to a “fraudulent attack”? That if someone is a Jew he is more likely to respond in an inappropriate manner toward a column like Krugman’s? I’ll leave that open for discussion (please post a comment if you like.) But, assuming that it is, it leads to another question: Is that the logical, but seamy, endpoint of identity politics?
. . .
KRUGMAN'S JOBS PROGRAM?
Well, Paul Krugman is back to his usual litany of distortions and half-baked policy ideas. Of particular note in last Friday’s column is this passage:
I know, I know, the usual suspects will roll out the usual explanations. It is, of course, Bill Clinton's fault. (Just for the record, the average rate of job creation during the whole of the Clinton administration was about 225,000 jobs a month. Mr. Clinton presided over the creation of 11 million jobs during each of his two terms.) Or maybe Osama bin Laden did it.
But surely there must be a statute of limitations on these excuses. By the time of the election, Mr. Bush will have had almost four years to deal with the legacy of the technology bubble, and more than three years to deal with the economic fallout from 9/11.
The man who has no problem finding excuses for Mahathir’s anti-Semitism can’t give Bush the benefit of the doubt on the economy. Just for the record, Clinton entered office well after a recession had ended, and job creation had begun about ten months before his first term began. By comparison, the tech bubble had burst before Bush entered office, and the recession began just as he had begun his term (and before he had enacted an economic policy). That was followed by 9/11 and corporate accounting scandals, both of which had roots in the years before Bush became President. Not cutting Bush some slack on the economy is a bit like saying, “You know, Johnny has no excuse for not throwing the ball as far as Timmy, even though he has a sprained wrist, three cracked ribs, and a pulled hamstring.”
Next,
And Congress has given him everything he has wanted in terms of economic policy, even though that has led to a frightening explosion in federal debt: in the current fiscal year the Bush tax cuts will account for almost $300 billion of a deficit expected to top $500 billion. (If that $300 billion had been used to employ workers directly — a new W.P.A., anyone? — it would have created six million jobs.)
First, it’s not true that Congress has given the President “everything he has wanted in terms of economic policy.” In 2001 Bush wanted a tax cut of $1.6 trillion; Congress gave him $1.35 trillion. Earlier this year Bush wanted a tax cut of $726 billion; Congress gave him $420 billion. Bush also wanted to eliminate the tax on dividends; Congress reduced it to 15%.
Second, the source for Krugman’s assertion that $300 billion of the $500 billion deficit is due to the tax cuts is the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. (Thanks to Don Luskin) However, not all of that $300 billion is exactly a “tax cut.” As the CBPP states in footnote 3,
the $300 billion figure includes some expenditure programs such as the state fiscal relief enacted as part of the most recent tax cut, and more than $20 billion in 2004 interest costs generated by higher federal debt resulting from lower federal revenues caused by the tax cuts.
Furthermore, it is bit unwise for Krugman to assume that the 2004 deficit will be nearly $500 billion after the 2003 budget deficit turned out to be about $25 billion less than anticipated. The likely reason is that the Congressional Budget Office projections are based on static analysis which assumes that tax cuts have no effect on economic growth. But the 2003 tax cuts are resulting in higher economic growth and that means more revenue for the treasury. Thus, the $500 billion figure ($480 billion, actually) will very probably turn out to be high.
Finally, I have to wonder if Krugman is serious about the Works Project Administration suggestion. If the government could simply create six million jobs (at $50,000 per job) by just spending $300 billion, why not lower the wage some, to $30,000? Then you could create 10 million new jobs! As an economist, surely Krugman has heard of opportunity costs? That is, what opportunities—more specifically, job creation—would the private sector be giving up if the government spent that $300 billion? That has to be factored into any government program to create jobs. Another thing that has to be factored in—and another thing that Krugman has surely heard of—is a displacement effect. Unless the government just creates a lot of make-work jobs, it will surely displace some jobs in the private sector by hiring away from the available pool of labor, construction being the most obvious type of industry in which this would happen. In the end, the total number of new jobs created would be considerably less than 6 million.
Another thing to consider is how long will this new W.P.A. last. Just one year? Then at the end of that year we will have 6 million unemployed again. More likely, the workers will be unionized by AFSCME, and will put pressure on legislators to keep the program running. Assuming that the program lasts for ten years, with no increase in pay or benefits (a titanic assumption), it will cost $3 trillion. I’m pretty sure that exceeds the cost of the Bush tax cut.
Such objections should be pretty obvious to an academic. But it is easy to overlook the obvious when you are posessed of a pathological hatred, as Krugman is of Bush.
. . .
MISLEADING THE PUBLIC ON SCHIAVO
In their editorial supporting the right of Terri Schiavo’s husband, Michael, to remove Terri’s feeding tube the Des Moines Register portrays the case as a matter of the government intruding where it should not:
When the Florida legislature and Gov. Jeb Bush ordered the feeding tube back into Terri Schiavo, they intruded on a family's crisis where they don't belong.
Schiavo has been in a vegetative state for 13 years. She needs a feeding tube to remain alive. After winning numerous lawsuits, her husband was finally granted the court order to remove her feeding tube. It was removed last week. Days later, lawmakers gave Governor Bush authority to reinsert it.
Yet this case is not as simple as it sounds since Michael Schiavo is not exactly a mere grieving husband. He has a fiancé with whom he has one kid and another on the way. He plans to marry her as soon as Terri dies. When she dies, he stands to inherit $750,00 that was supposed to be used for Terri’s long-term care. For more, go here.
The Register has a duty to inform the public of such facts. To omit them is to mislead its readers.
. . .
|
. . .
|
