The Dangerous Dog Days of Summer
by Victor Davis Hanson

Historian Barbara Tuchman characterized the events leading up to World War I as the “Guns of August.”While there is no statistical evidence that wars break out any more often in late summer than in other seasons, the world was torn apart twice during the 20th century: in early August 1914, and then again on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, leading to an American-led air campaign and ground war in early 1991 that demolished the Iraqi army. On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 radical Islamic terrorists took down the World Trade Center complex and hit the Pentagon — the worst foreign attacks on the continental United States since the British burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814.

What can we learn from these dog-day cataclysms?

First, for all the rising prewar tensions, the general slaughter to follow was mostly unforeseen. Experts thought August 1914 would lead only to a war “over by Christmas” — not 500 miles of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and 8 million combat dead by 1918. Even after Hitler invaded Poland in a lightning strike, no one dreamed that more than 50 million deaths would follow.

Second, these late-summer bloodbaths usually followed from the initial impression of aggressors that they would face few consequences. After the Munich Agreement, Hitler had no reason to believe that gobbling up Poland would lead to a world war rather than more of the same appeasement. Saddam Hussein had no idea that the United States would react to a far-away border dispute by mobilizing a global coalition against him, and by bombing large swaths of Baghdad. Likewise, few imagined that nine years after 9/11, American troops would still be fighting in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban — the former hosts of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda — from returning to power.

In short, grand professions of peaceful intent in the face of global tensions, or even noble indifference to dictatorial aggression, instead ensure that war follows.

Finally, in the ensuing wars the United States lost thousands of soldiers when it was not well prepared — and far fewer when it was. There was almost no American military in 1914 and little more when we declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungry in 1917.

America was once again woefully unarmed in 1939, when Germany started the European war, and not in much better shape when attacked by the Japanese in December 1941. As a result, in both of its victorious world wars the United States lost tens of thousands of troops.

A fully armed and mobilized volunteer American military forced Iraqi forces out of Kuwait with relatively few losses. And even in the long current slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan — for all the heartbreak of their terrible human costs — fewer American soldiers have died than in single past battles like the Meuse-Argonne or Iwo-Jima. In short, America never went to war regretting that it was overarmed and overprepared.

We should keep such bothersome late-summer history in mind this August. The world is once again heating up with the weather. Iran boasts of its new nuclear reactor — with more to come. A nuclear North Korean keeps threatening South Korea. Hezbollah and Syria are arming to teeth with new missiles. And an assurgent Turkey is seeking an updated version of its Ottoman imperial past. Meanwhile, the United States has unsuccessfully reached out to firebrand leaders such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Syria’s Bashar Assad, while drifting away from its Indian, Israeli and European allies.

More worrisome, in times of 1939-like recession and staggering deficits, the United States is understandably talking of massive cutbacks in its military. Nations never reduce defense expenditures because they want smaller militaries, but because in tough times the public shortsightedly thinks that money is better spent on social programs at home.

The combination of provocative rivals abroad, our president’s constant assurances that the United States has been at fault in the past and wants to reach out to enemies in the future, and probable defense reductions should remind us to tread carefully this late summer.

Unfortunately, the past Guns of August teach us that war may be looking for those who are not looking for war.

Seven Huge Flaws in the Way Liberals Think
by John Hawkins

1) Liberals believe they can change human nature. Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they’re having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We’re just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to “fix” it.

2) Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies. One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we’re good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, “Why do they hate us?” The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don’t even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we’re nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can’t be reasoned with.

3) Liberals don’t have enough respect for our culture and traditions: To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that’s not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say, our wisdom is often no match for the “distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.” Truly wise people are aware that there is a great deal that they do not know.

4) Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy. Ironically, given all their talk about “shades of gray,” liberals have a very Manichean view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an “anything goes” mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a “living constitution,” politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they’re politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, “For them, the end always seems to justify the means.”

5) Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people. Liberals who’re obsessed with money think they’re compassionate because they give away other people’s tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they’re smarter than most other people because they’re liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

6) Liberals have too much faith in government. Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don’t believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they’ll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge, government won’t be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they’re wrong about that.

7) Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not. To most liberals, whether a government program betters people’s lives is completely irrelevant to whether they’ll support it. A program that doesn’t work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no “common sense” is much easier to understand.

The Pretense of Knowledge
by Walter E. Williams

The ultimate constraint that we all face is knowledge — what we know and don’t know. The knowledge problem is pervasive and by no means trivial as hinted at by just a few examples. You’ve purchased a house. Was it the best deal you could have gotten? Was there some other house you could have purchased that 10 years later would not have needed extensive repairs or was in a community with more likeable neighbors and a better environment for your children? What about the person you married? Was there another person who would have made for a more pleasing spouse? Though these are important questions, the most intelligent answer you can give to all of them is: “I don’t know.”

Since you don’t know the answers, who do you think, here on Earth, is likely to know and whom would you like to make these decisions for you — Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, a czar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? I bet that if these people were to forcibly make housing or marital decisions for us, most would deem it tyranny.

You say, “Williams, Congress is not making such monumental decisions that affect my life.” Try this. You are a 22-year-old healthy person. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 a year for health insurance, you’d prefer investing that money in equipment to start a landscaping business. Which is the best use of that $3,000 or $4,000 a year — purchasing health insurance or starting up a landscaping business — and who should decide that question: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, aczar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? How can they possibly know what’s the best use of your earnings, particularly in light of the fact that they have no idea of who you are?

Neither you nor the U.S. Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what’s best for you. The difference is that when individuals make their own trade-offs, say between purchasing health insurance or investing in a business, they make wiser decisions because it is they who personally bear the costs and benefits of those decisions. You say, “Hold it, Williams, we’ve got you now! What if that person gets really sick and doesn’t have health insurance. Society suffers the burden of taking care of him.” To the extent that is a problem, it is not a problem of liberty; it’s a problem of congressionally mandated socialism. Let’s look at it.

It is not society that bears the burden; it is some flesh and blood American worker who finds his earnings taken by Congress to finance the health needs of another person. There is absolutely no moral case, much less constitutional case, for Congress forcibly using one American to serve the purposes of another American, a practice that differs only in degree from slavery, which we all should find morally offensive.

Whether it is health care, education, employment or most other areas of our lives, I ask you: Who has the capacity to master all the complexity to make choices on behalf of others? Each of us possesses only a tiny percentage of the knowledge that would be necessary to make totally informed decisions in our own lives, much less the lives of others. There is only one reason for the forcible transference of decision-making authority over important areas of our private lives to elite decision-makers in Congress and government bureaucracies. Doing so confers control, power, wealth and revenue to society’s elite. What’s in the best interests of individual members of society, such as a person who’d rather launch a landscaping business than purchase a health insurance policy, ranks low on the elite’s list of priorities.

An Insufficiency of Fear
by George Will

The president, convinced that the only thing America has to fear is an insufficiency of fear, has warned that “disaster” and “catastrophe” are the certain alternatives to swift passage of the stimulus legislation. One marvels at his certitude more than one envies his custody of this adventure.

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor — on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else — will completely pay for itself. For liberals, “stimulus spending” is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative.

At Yale’s 1962 commencement, President John Kennedy expressed Washington’s recurring confidence in the ability to supplant politics with expertise. As is traditional, Kennedy deplored “traditional labels” and insisted that “differences today” involve not clashes of principles but only “matters of degree.” Kennedy argued that “the practical management of a modern economy” is “basically an administrative or executive problem.” Congress need not intrude. Because policy issues are “sophisticated and technical questions,” demanding “technical answers, not political answers,” laypersons could hardly participate in the debate.

In December 1965, John Maynard Keynes, although 19 years dead, was, as today, enjoying one of his recurring resurrections as vindicator of government management of the economy by manipulating “aggregate demand.” Keynes’ visage was on Time magazine’s cover and the accompanying story said that happy days were here again and here to stay.

President Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, “have used Keynesian principles” to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price stability: “Washington’s economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes’ central theme” that a modern economy can operate at “top efficiency” only with government “intervention and influence.” So, “economists have descended in force from their ivory towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called upon to forecast, plan and decide.” Ten years later, the “misery index” — the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate — was 19.9, heading for 22 percent in 1980.

Today, again, we are told that “politics” has no place in the debate about the tripartite stimulus legislation, which is partly a stimulus, partly liberalism’s agenda of social engineering, and partly the beginning of “remaking” the economy. Gary Wolfram of Hillsdale College notes that the size of the stimulus — the House-Senate compromise bill is $789 billion — is just slightly less than the amount of all U.S. currency in circulation, and is larger than the entire federal budget was until 1983. Yet it is said that in the debate about this encompassing legislation — which concerns what government can and should do, and ultimately what kind of regime America shall have — people should “transcend” (so says Larry Summers, the president’s economic adviser) politics. What, then, would be left for political argument to be about?

It is said that the negligible Republican support for the stimulus legislation means that bipartisanship is dead. But what can “bipartisanship” mean concerning legislation that concerns almost everything?

John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as “generational theft.”

The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say “oops” and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the “disaster! catastrophe!” stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, “The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.”

Not yet a third of the way through the president’s “first 100 days,” he and we should remember that it was not FDR’s initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase “100 days” into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon’s frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.

Charting a New Course in the New Year
by Ken Connor

“Out with the old, in with the new!”

Rarely have those words been uttered with more enthusiasm than at the beginning of 2009.

2008 was an historic and unsettling year. Our economy imploded, the President abandoned free market principles “in order to save the free market system,” and government assumed an unprecedented role in financing our economy. Business magnates, from bankers to automakers, pleaded for a bailout—and got one from Uncle Sugar. Gas prices took a roller coaster ride, soaring, then plunging in the second half of the year. Political and celebrity scandals abounded, from John Edwards’ and Eliot Spitzer’s infidelities to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s pay to play scandal to Britney Spear’s meltdown and resurgence. Things were so chaotic on the domestic front that some almost forgot that there was a war going on. Not surprisingly, Americans voted for “change” and elected their first African-American as President. The Democrats took control of both houses of Congress and Republicans were kicked to the curb.

But rather than dwell on the best and worst of 2008, it may be a better use of our time to look ahead to what’s in store for our country in the new year.

The dawning of a new year is always an exciting time. We celebrate it by popping corks on champagne bottles, lighting sparklers, and watching the big ball drop in Times Square. We get together with friends and loved ones and count down the hours, minutes, and seconds until the new year. The celebration is important, for the advent of a new year is a symbol of what is to come, of new beginnings, resolutions, renewal, and the hopes of all to be better and to live better in the year to come.

This new year provides us with a new opportunity to improve on the sorry state of politics and the economy in our country. Our culture’s character was on display during 2008. We paid a high price for the lack of it and we have a chance for reform in 2009.

The new year provides us with the opportunity to reinstitute the notions of virtue and moderation as important guideposts in the conduct of our business and financial affairs. For far too long, the marketplace has been viewed as a virtue-free zone—a place were “self-interest” operated free of moral restraints. This attitude has turned something good (a free market economy) into a system where the interests of others were irrelevant to our economic decision making. As a result, radical self interest and unrestrained greed characterized many of our transactions. The housing debacle provides a good example. Home buyers bought more house than they could afford, unhesitatingly misrepresenting their financial capacity to repay their loans. Lenders encouraged irresponsible loans in exchange for handsome up front fees because they expected to pass the risk to downstream institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who, in turn, packaged the bad loans as securities and sold them to investors who were looking for unprecedented returns. All the way along the line, the participants were looking out only for themselves. They were unconcerned for the welfare of any other party to the transaction. This lack of virtue and restraint was commonplace in the broader markets and resulted in a financial meltdown, the likes of which haven’t been seen since The Great Depression.

Assignment for the Republicans
by William Rusher

America is now entering upon an era of government by the Democratic Party. Barack Obama will be our president for at least the next four years, possibly eight. The Democrats will control both Houses of Congress for at least the next two years, and quite possibly four or more. The Republicans are doomed, therefore, to be the minority party for some time to come. How should they conduct themselves?

It goes without saying (at least, I hope it does) that they should avoid mere nitpicking — complaining about small matters. The American people won’t be impressed by Republican objections to this or that minor Democratic blunder. What the GOP must do is put forward a strong case for the proposition that the country would be better off under a Republican president and Congress.

And that will entail not so much demolishing the Democrats as constructing a powerful affirmative case for a Republican administration. The task, in other words, is to build an image of a Republican Party that is based on sound and attractive ideas — and be capable of implementing them in a Republican administration.

No doubt about it, that is a tall order. It requires the GOP to concentrate, not on criticizing this or that Democratic policy, but constructing an image of a Republican Party that has a firm concept of what good government amounts to and a clear plan for bringing it into existence. Luckily, the GOP has acquitted itself relatively well in recent decades. The Eisenhower and Reagan administrations are, in general, favorably remembered by the American people, and — while Nixon certainly had his critics — he is quite rightly identified with various American successes, particularly in the field of foreign affairs.

The Cold War was conducted resolutely and successfully, and ended in the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was surely our most formidable adversary in the 20th century. And while Democratic presidents contributed mightily to that collapse, it is fair to contend that Republican opposition to the spread of world Communism was the central engine of American policy on that subject.

American Czars
by George Will

In 1966, the price of eggs rose to a level that President Lyndon Johnson judged, God knows how, was too high. There were two culprits — supply and demand — and Johnson’s agriculture secretary told him there was not much that could be done. LBJ, however, was a can-do fellow who directed the U.S. surgeon general to dampen demand by warning the nation about the hazards of cholesterol in eggs.

Johnson, the last president with a direct political connection to Franklin Roosevelt, was picked by FDR in 1935 to be Texas director of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration. Two years later, Johnson came to Congress, a rung on the ladder that led to glory as Egg Czar. Today, with Washington experiencing a Roosevelt revival, Johnson’s spirit, too, goes marching on as the federal government permeates the economy with politics.

Or not. In an interview with Business Week, Rep. Barney Frank, the effervescent Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Financial Services Committee, was asked, concerning the auto industry, “How do you make sure the government doesn’t meddle too deeply in day-to-day operations and bring politics — like a push for green cars — into the equation?” Frank replied: “Oh, well, a push for green cars is very much a part of what we’re involved in. We don’t think that’s politics.” So, when the government, its 10 thumbs stuck deep in the economy, uses its power to compel an industry to pursue the objectives of the political party that controls both of the government’s political branches, that is not politics.

Business Week: “Should GM acquire Chrysler?” Frank: “I’m not competent to say.” Frank’s humility is selective: He obviously thinks he is competent to say what kind of cars should be made.

Business Week: “Does Congress realize how few hybrids have been sold, as it pushes Detroit to make them, and will Congress give consumers greater incentives to buy these cars?” Frank: Those who are “blaming the auto companies forget to blame somebody else — the consumers. In the recorded history of America, no one was ever forced at gunpoint to buy a Hummer. But we do believe that the combination of genuine concern about global warming and energy efficiency means people are now ready to buy these cars.” Consumers are such a disappointment to Congress. But what Congress really believes is that people are not ready to buy those cars at a price that reflects the costs of making them. Why else has it voted tax subsidies for buyers?

Forty years ago, Vietnam was a disaster and the Great Society was a disappointment as Johnson limped back to Texas. Today, there is more Johnsonian confidence in government’s competence than at any time since Johnson’s policies shattered such confidence. The resurgence of confidence began under today’s Texan president.

The 1996 Republican platform said: “The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula. … That is why we will abolish the Department of Education (and) end federal meddling in our schools.” One year ago, the Department of Education announced: “U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today honored President Lyndon Baines Johnson in a ceremony officially renaming the U.S. Department of Education Building … as the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building.”

The domestic achievement for which George W. Bush will be most remembered, the 2001 No Child Left Behind law, was the seventh reauthorization of LBJ’s 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which brought the federal government heavily into primary and secondary education. NCLB requires states to define “proficiency” in reading and math, and achieve 100 percent proficiency by 2014.

Frederick M. Hess, director of education policies studies at the American Enterprise Institute, notes that unless the “proficiency” standards are risible, the goal is delusional.

It is ironic, Hess writes, that 50 states establishing divergent standards — the decentralized approach Republicans demanded — have sparked demands for centralization, in the form of national standards, a decade after congressional Republicans opposed President Bill Clinton’s plan for voluntary national standards.

Furthermore, Hess notes, there has been striking dissonance between Republican resistance to race-conscious government policies, and NCLB “requiring states to identify every student by race and then report test scores — and impose sanctions — on that basis.” The Johnsonian attributes of NCLB, which Hess says include “Great Society-style ambition and race-conscious rhetoric,” suggest that the Egg Czar, who also was the first National School Superintendent, would feel right at home in a Washington where he could be Automotive Engineer in Chief.

Postponing Reality
by Thomas Sowell

Some of us were raised to believe that reality is inescapable. But that just shows how far behind the times we are. Today, reality is optional. At the very least, it can be postponed.

Kids in school are not learning? Not a problem. Just promote them on to the next grade anyway. Call it “compassion,” so as not to hurt their “self-esteem.”

Can’t meet college admissions standards after they graduate from high school? Denounce those standards as just arbitrary barriers to favor the privileged, and demand that exceptions be made.

Can’t do math or science after they are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the students can pass to get their degrees.

Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees– but with no real education– can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning itself can last the rest of their lives.

The current bailout extravaganza is applying the postponement of reality democratically– to the rich as well as the poor, to the irresponsible as well as to the responsible, to the inefficient as well as to the efficient. It is a triumph of the non-judgmental philosophy that we have heard so much about in high-toned circles.

We are told that the collapse of the Big Three automakers in Detroit would have repercussions across the country, causing mass layoffs among firms that supply the automobile makers with parts, and shutting down automobile dealerships from coast to coast.

Unsure About “Obama the Centrist”
by Charles Krauthammer

Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right — and has highly irritated the left — with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama’s own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I’m not so sure.

Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about — his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt’s.

As Obama revealingly said just last week, “this painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people.” Transformation is his mission. Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.

Freedom and the Left
by Thomas Sowell

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.

Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don’t approve that you are free.

One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left’s many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do “community service.”

There are high schools across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as “community service.”

The arrogance of commandeering young people’s time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as “community service”– as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?

This is just one of the ways in which handing out various kinds of benefits to people who have not worked for them breaks the connection between productivity and reward, as far as they are concerned.

But that connection remains as unbreakable as ever for society as a whole. You can make anything an “entitlement” for individuals and groups but nothing is an entitlement for society as a whole, not even food or shelter, both of which have to be produced by somebody’s work or they will not exist.

What “entitlements” for some people mean is forcing other people to work for their benefit. As a bumper sticker put it: “Work harder. Millions of people on welfare are depending on you.”

The most fundamental problem, however, is not which particular activities students are required to engage in under the title of “community service.”

The most fundamental question is: What in the world qualifies teachers and members of college admissions committees to define what is good for society as a whole, or even for the students on whom they impose their arbitrary notions?

What expertise do they have that justifies overriding other people’s freedom? What do their arbitrary impositions show, except that fools rush in where angels fear to tread?

What lessons do students get from this, except submission to arbitrary power?

Supposedly students are to get a sense of compassion or noblesse oblige from serving others. But this all depends on who defines compassion. In practice, it means forcing students to undergo a propaganda experience to make them receptive to the left’s vision of the world.

I am sure those who favor “community service” requirements would understand the principle behind the objections to this if high school military exercises were required.

Indeed, many of those who promote compulsory “community service” activities are bitterly opposed to even voluntary military training in high schools or colleges, though many other people regard military training as more of a contribution to society than feeding people who refuse to work.

In other words, people on the left want the right to impose their idea of what is good for society on others– a right that they vehemently deny to those whose idea of what is good for society differs from their own.

The essence of bigotry is refusing to others the rights that you demand for yourself. Such bigotry is inherently incompatible with freedom, even though many on the left would be shocked to be considered opposed to freedom.

Bush’s legacy will be one of protection
Donald Lambro

WASHINGTON — As George W. Bush’s wartime presidency enters its final weeks, there is increasing speculation about his legacy and how his two terms in office will be seen throughout the course of history.

But history is a funny thing that can dramatically re-evaluate past events in a far different light when they are compared in the mists of time to what follows them.

Consider Harry Truman who left office as the most unpopular president in modern history but is now seen as a decisive figure who led the nation in two wars, abruptly ending one of them with a swift decision to use the atomic bomb.

History’s rehabilitation of Truman’s legacy occurred over many, many years, and I suspect that Bush’s presidency, too, will undergo a long-term re-evaluation that will look more kindly on the challenges he confronted as a wartime leader who faced a fiendishly different kind of conflict.

Bush has begun opening up recently about how he sees his legacy — first in an interview conducted by his sister, Doro Bush Koch, as part of an oral-history project for National Public Radio and then in an interview with Charlie Gibson of ABC News.

He is proudest of his $15 billion offensive against AIDS and malaria in Africa that has saved millions of lives and the passage of a market-oriented Medicare prescription-drug program that has lowered medical costs for the elderly.

In national security, he points to his record in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001: He toppled two terrorist regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, liberated some 50 million people, and planted democracies in the middle of the world’s worst terrorist breeding grounds.

His biggest regret on that score is the presumed faulty intelligence that led him to base his invasion of Iraq on the belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

No evidence was found to show that such weapons existed, though Hussein used poison gas and other materials to kill thousands of Kurds. And the FBI agent who met with him daily in the final months before his execution said Hussein told him that he had planned to resume a program to produce nuclear materials.

The history of those wars, much of which remains unknown, is still a work in progress. There is still a lot of information, and maybe long-buried evidence, to be learned about the dangers that this Iraqi madman who had started two wars and was still threatening his neighbors.

But what will be most remembered, and I think favorably, about Bush’s presidency is his leadership in the post-9/11 period when it will be said that “he kept us safe” from another attack.

In my recent interview with former Secretary of State George Shultz, Shultz pointed to President Bush’s pre-emptive doctrine as his most important national-security achievement. It was based on a very important idea, Shultz said, namely that in the shadowy threat of global terrorism, we have to be able to uncover plots before they occur and then take pre-emptive steps to prevent them from happening.

Shultz credited Bush with successfully doing just that, while terrorists have carried out attacks in Great Britain, Spain and elsewhere (including the recent attacks in Mumbai). “We are a harder target,” Shultz said, as a result of the elaborate national-security surveillance intercepts that are at the heart of Bush’s pre-emptive defense doctrine.

On the economic front, Bush has been dealt a bad hand. He came into office in 2001 with the economy in the midst of a restructuring slowdown when the technology bubble burst, followed by 9/11 that plunged us into a deeper hole.

Bush came into office on a pledge to cut taxes across the board and, perhaps, no tax cuts were better timed to counter the shock waves that hit the country then. We weathered that storm, and the economy grew again in the midst of a housing boom and a historic global expansion that raised U.S. exports to record levels.

But all expansions run into corrections, and the housing and credit bubbles burst, ending Bush’s presidency in a recession that has plunged his approval ratings to record lows. All recessions end, and the Bush administration has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at this one, including the stimulus tax rebate this summer, followed by unprecedented bailout interventions in the financial markets by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury. When the economy turns around, it will be on Barack Obama’s watch and, understandably, he will get the credit for it — though Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke at the Fed will have done a lot of heavy lifting under Bush’s direction.

When Bush leaves office next month, it will be said that he governed us through some of the most difficult and turbulent periods in our history — from the war on terrorism to a financial meltdown that was none of his making.

But in the end, it will also be said that “he kept us safe” in the Age of Terror. Now it’s Barack Obama’s turn.

Mixing It Up With Left-Wingers
by Burt Prelutsky

Whenever I refer to liberals in print as pinheads, chowderheads, morons and flakes, I can always count on angry responses. Invariably, they will accuse me of stooping to insult them, instead of dealing with specific issues.

The fact is, I am always dealing with issues, be it the left’s adoration of the U.N.; their cockeyed belief in man-made global warming; their constant attacks on the first two amendments; their intolerance of Christian traditions and symbols, which, by the way, relies entirely on an intentional misreading of the Constitution, a document which does not and never has contained the words “separation of church and state”; their contempt for the U.S. military; the alleged supremacy of gay, Islamic and illegal alien, rights; their opposition to capital punishment; their support of judges who legislate from the bench; and their affinity for professors and journalists who feel their duty is to indoctrinate rather than educate or report.

It’s only in the context of taking liberals to task that I ever make my ad hominem attacks. And please believe me, when I call them pinheads, lamebrains and ignoramuses, I honestly believe I am being kind and letting them off far easier than they deserve. Would they really prefer traitors, Quislings and Communists? If so, I’d be only too happy to oblige.

The truth is, it’s left-wingers who make a practice of evading the issues. For instance, I have yet to have anyone on the left enumerate the rights he lost because of the Patriot Act. I have yet to have any of them explain how it is that we invaded Iraq for oil but failed to confiscate even a single drop. Also, I have never had a liberal name all those countries that hate America because of George Bush. Even when I offer to help them get started by suggesting Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, North Korea and Cuba, they refuse to engage.

I have also never had a leftist explain his love affair with socialism and communism, forms of tyranny which have led to unparalleled human misery wherever they have been introduced. But, then, what sort of freedom lovers side with the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah, against Israel and make cultural icons of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara?

Silence is the same response I get when I have asked liberals, who allegedly favor honest elections, why they have never spoken out against ACORN, and why, although they pay lip service to free speech, people like David Horowitz and Ann Coulter require bodyguards when they appear on college campuses. And why is it that liberals, who already control newspapers, magazines and TV, are pushing for the “Fairness” Doctrine in a blatant, fascistic, attempt to keep conservative voices off the radio?

What sort of people are they who will defend the rights of pornographers and pedophiles to promote themselves in the public marketplace, but feel entitled to banish the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Miller, Kevin James, Sean Hannity, Lee Rodgers, Michael Reagan, Larry Elder and Bill O’Reilly, from the marketplace of ideas?

If I had to describe liberals in a single word it would probably be “feminine.” In most cases, I wouldn’t regard that word as a pejorative. In its best sense, it conveys sensitivity and an emphasis on the emotional. As it relates to liberals, it simply means that feelings trump everything else. So it is that liberals love the idea of the U.N., excited by the notion of a lot of nations sitting down and talking out their problems, as if to a marriage counselor. Unfortunately, when dealing with evil nations with evil intentions, the U.N. is nothing better than a bad joke. Partly that’s because it is inept and partly because it’s as weak as its weakest link and, for good measure, is as corrupt as Chicago politics.

Liberals are in favor of open borders because they feel sorry for those people sneaking across. It doesn’t occur to liberals that American citizens suffer from the influx of millions of impoverished illiterates. They are not concerned with the drain on schools, hospitals, jobs and prisons, because what’s important for liberals is that they feel good about themselves. It’s a unique type of selfishness because it’s disguised as an altruistic concern for others. It’s the same reason they oppose capital punishment. They don’t care about the victims or their loved ones. Any schmuck, after all, can sympathize with innocent people. But it takes a very special kind of individual to hold a candlelight vigil for a monster who had raped and murdered a child. A very special kind, indeed.

Recently, the voters in California voted against legitimizing homosexual marriages. The first thing that happened after the election is that our governor, the ex-actor whose biggest muscle is located between his ears, said that he hoped the courts would overrule the electorate. It’s not an idle wish. California’s voters have become accustomed to having their votes ignored. The second thing that took place was that large numbers of homosexuals went on a rampage, like the spoiled adolescents they so often tend to be.

The third thing that occurred is that L.A. County’s Board of Supervisors took the matter under advisement. Because I happened to be acquainted with one of the five supervisors, I sent him the following e-mail. (His name has been changed for our purposes.) “Dear George: I trust you won’t be party to overturning Proposition 8. It’s time that the people got to have their way at least once. By the way, are you still playing poker?”

He replied: “Burt: Thanks for your e-mail. The Board of Supervisors has joined with a number of others in challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8 based on the equal protection provisions of the State constitution. This is an issue that affects the County because we issue marriage licenses. You and I appear to disagree on this, but the constitutionality issue has to be resolved. I hope all is well with you. I have not played poker in quite some time, and given the economy, I couldn’t afford to play anyway.”

I replied: “Don’t fall for that B.S., George. The homosexuals have equal protection and equal rights. They can all marry members of the opposite sex. What they are demanding, as usual, is to prove that George Orwell might have had California in mind, as well as the Soviet Union, when he wrote about the farm where all animals were equal, but some were more equal than others. It appears that you folks want things resolved once again by overriding the will of the majority. Californians have voted against same-sex marriages, in favor of capital punishment and against benefits for illegal aliens, and each time the liberals have found an obliging judge who happily disenfranchised the electorate. It won’t take too much more of this before people begin to regard voting as a futile exercise and will view the courts with utter contempt. On top of that, at this point, it would appear that you people are simply caving in to mob rule, inasmuch as the punks are expressing their pique by vandalizing churches and intimidating businesses and individuals. This is no time to support the barbarians. As for poker, you could afford to play if you won.”

It’s been a week now and I haven’t heard back.

An L.A. County supervisor, by the way, makes $178,789 a year. I have to assume they will soon be giving themselves a pay raise based on the cost of living and playing poker.

The Washington Stock Market
by Charles Krauthammer

In the old days — from the Venetian Republic to, oh, the Bear Stearns rescue — if you wanted to get rich, you did it the Warren Buffett way: You learned to read balance sheets. Today you learn to read political tea leaves. You don’t anticipate Intel’s third-quarter earnings; instead, you guess what side of the bed Henry Paulson will wake up on tomorrow.

Today’s extreme stock market volatility is not just a symptom of fear — fear cannot account for days of wild market swings upward — but a reaction to meta-economic events: political decisions that have vast economic effects.

As economist Irwin Stelzer argues, we have gone from a market economy to a political economy. Consider seven days in November. On Tuesday, Nov. 18, Paulson broadly implies he’s only using half the $700 billion bailout money. Having already spent most of his $350 billion, he’s going to leave the rest to his successor. The message received on Wall Street — I’m done, I’m gone.

Facing the prospect of two months of political limbo, the market craters. Led by the banks (whose balance sheets did not change between Tuesday and Wednesday), the market sees the largest two-day drop in the S&P since 1933, not a very good year.

The next day (Friday) at 3 p.m., word leaks of Timothy Geithner’s impending nomination as Treasury secretary. The mere suggestion of continuity — and continued authoritative intervention during the interregnum by the guy who’d been working hand in glove with Paulson all along — sends the Dow up 500 points in one hour.

Monday sees another 400-point increase, the biggest two-day (percentage) rise since 1987. Why? Three political events: Paulson’s weekend Citigroup bailout; the official rollout of Obama’s economic team, Geithner and Larry Summers; and Paulson quietly walking back from his earlier de facto resignation by indicating he would be ready to use the remaining $350 billion (with Team Obama input) over the next two months.

That undid the market swoon — and dramatically demonstrated how politically driven the economy has become.

We may one day go back to a market economy. Meanwhile, we need to face the two most important implications of our newly politicized economy: the vastly increased importance of lobbying and the massive market inefficiencies that political directives will introduce.

Lobbying used to be about advantages at the margin — a regulatory break here, a subsidy there. Now lobbying is about life and death. Your lending institution or industry gets a bailout — or it dies.

You used to go to New York for capital. Now Wall Street, broke, is coming to Washington. With unimaginably large sums of money being given out by Washington, the Obama administration, through no fault of its own, will be subject to the most intense, most frenzied lobbying in American history.

That will introduce one kind of economic distortion. The other kind will come from the political directives issued by newly empowered politicians.

First, bank presidents are gravely warned by one senator after another about “hoarding” their bailout money. But hoarding is another word for recapitalizing to shore up your balance sheet to ensure solvency. Is that not the fiduciary responsibility of bank directors? And isn’t pushing money out the window with too little capital precisely the lending laxity that produced this crisis in the first place? Never mind. The banks will knuckle under to the commissars of Capitol Hill. They control the purse. Prudence will yield to politics.

Even more egregious will be the directives to a nationalized Detroit. Sen. Charles Schumer, the noted automotive engineer, declared “unacceptable” last week “a business model based on gas.” Instead, “We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”

The Chevy Volt, for example? It has huge remaining technological hurdles, gets 40 miles on a charge and will sell for about $40,000, necessitating a $7,500 outright government subsidy. Who but the rich and politically correct will choose that over a $12,000 gas-powered Hyundai? The new Detroit churning out Schumer-mobiles will make the steel mills of the Soviet Union look the model of efficiency.

The ruling Democrats have a choice: Rescue this economy to return it to market control. Or use this crisis to seize the commanding heights of the economy for the greater social good. Note: The latter has already been tried. The results are filed under “History, ash heap of.”

Same Old New Deal?
by George Will

Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. “Yes,” he replied, “it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.” It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.

The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America’s biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending — President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt — unemployment was 17.2 percent.

“I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started,” lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.

In “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve’s tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers’ spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits — prerequisites for job-creating investments — were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.

In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that “much of the depth of the Depression” is explained by Hoover’s policy — a precursor of the New Deal mentality — of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.

Furthermore, Hoover’s 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR’s hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.

Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:

“By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s.”

Five Hard Truths For RINOS
John Hawkins

After a GOP beating, there is always a debate between the people who want the party to become more principled and those who want to turn the GOP into a poll-driven pile of mush that they believe will be more appealing to centrists. The problem with this whole discussion is that the “we need to be more moderate” crowd tends to simply ignore a number of inconvenient facts that make their position completely untenable.

We’ve already gone the moderate route — and lost. One of the most surreal aspects of the post-2008 campaign is listening to moderates pretend that the last eight years never happened.

You say that the GOP can’t win as a small government party. Well, we’ve already tried being a big government party for the last 8 years and it failed. You think running a moderate, pro-amnesty candidate who eschews social issues is the key to winning elections? Well, that’s who we ran in 2008 and he received even less votes than George Bush did in 2004.

Basically, we have a lot of moderates in the GOP taking the same attitude that the Left used to take towards communism, “It works, but it just hasn’t been tried by the right people yet.” It didn’t make much sense when the lefties were saying it and it makes even less sense now.

A “moderate” GOP can’t generate the volunteers or money needed to win. Yes, the GOP needs both moderate and conservative voters to win elections. Additionally, in certain districts and states, moderate Republicans are more electable than conservatives.

That being said, the rightward leaning media, fundraising, and campaign workers are dominated by conservatives. So, if the right side of the party is depressed, there’s not enough money or campaign workers to go around and there isn’t a strong pushback against the lies put out by Democrats.

That’s exactly what happened over the last two election cycles, when the conservative base was too demoralized to generate enough excess cash and campaign workers to float the entire Republican Party. Many of the strongest Republicans managed to survive, but the more marginal Republicans, moderates in the West and Northeast, were practically wiped out.

There can be no fiscal conservatism in D.C. without social conservatism. There are some people who think the GOP needs to kick social conservatives to the curb and focus entirely on fiscal conservatism in order to help our election prospects, but they’re missing three very important points.

After the Election, Rebooting the Right
By Ramesh Ponnuru

Republicans are feuding in the wake of the November election. But they are not descending into civil war. That would be too tidy. What is unfolding instead is an overlapping series of Republican civil wars, each with its own theme.

The war that will get the most attention will center on social conservatives. Some Republicans believe that their reputation for intolerance is costing the party the votes of the next generation of Americans. But that argument got harder to make when California, one of the most liberal states in the country, passed a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. The party is unlikely to change its positions on social issues, but it will see a lot of back and forth on how much emphasis to give them.

Next in the dock will be the neoconservatives. Republicans were doing fine, critics will say, until the neocons pushed the country into the Iraq war. The neocons will defend themselves by noting that while they had plenty of company in supporting the war, they are not responsible for its botched execution and that Iraq ended up not being a major issue this fall.

Not long after, expect a range war over legal and illegal immigration. Supporters of looser rules will say the party’s anti-immigrant tone has alienated Hispanics and given part of the Mountain West to the Democrats, with Texas to follow. Opponents will point out that John McCain co-sponsored an amnesty bill and Hispanics still shunned him.

The party’s small-government purists, meanwhile, will insist that voters punished Republicans for going on a spending spree and that what the party most needs to do is re-establish an image of tightfistedness. The problem with this theory is while spending restraint is popular in general, so is nearly every specific spending program.

Other clashes will turn on personality and style. Conservatives will say McCain’s moderate record cost him votes. Moderates will say he ran too far to the right–and erred by picking Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin has vocal defenders who think that she helped the ticket and should run for President herself in 2012. In Congress, some Republicans will want to cooperate with President-elect Barack Obama, heeding the voters’ desire for bipartisanship. Others will seek to draw a clear contrast between their ideas and his.

My guess is that the winning side in these Republican debates will be tough on illegal immigration, federal spending and Obama. But all these arguments will also largely miss the point. When a party suffers the kind of beating the Republicans have taken in the past two elections, the public has not rejected one of its factions. It has rejected the party as a whole. Voters have turned on pro-choice as well as pro-life Republicans, on Senators who favored amnesty and ones who fought it. Evidently voters did not believe that Republicans of any stripe offered solutions to the challenges America faces now.

Daniel Finkelstein, a British Conservative, recently wrote that his party went through a similar period of internal strife after Tony Blair kicked it out of office in 1997. More painful than all the mutual recriminations, he wrote, was the slow realization that nobody outside a small circle cared about any of these arguments. More than a decade later, Conservatives are still out of power in Britain.

Republicans are counting on the natural tides of politics to lift their numbers in Congress in 2010. The Democrats may overreach, or their supporters may get complacent. But to get back in the driver’s seat, to become relevant again, Republicans will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks and where whites are a declining proportion of the electorate.

At the GOP governors’ meeting this month, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota argued that Republicans need to stay conservative but also modernize. A revitalized conservatism would push for tax reform with an eye on middle-class families, not hedge-fund operators. It would seek solutions to global warming rather than deny that it exists. It would place a higher priority on making health care affordable than on slashing pork programs. It would promote the assimilation of Hispanics rather than regard them as a menace or a source of cheap labor.

The refurbishing of conservatism is unlikely to take place in the next three years. That will probably take a presidential candidate who seeks to lead a reformed party in 2012–and a party that is desperate enough to permit it.