Opposing Obama on Stimulus, Republicans Party Like It's 1993

Note: This post by Jon Perr on his blog leads to some striking potential conclusions. When this article by Mr. Perr is read, along with an earlier post we had here on June 26, 2008, entitled, "John McCain: Good for the Supreme Court?" (http://wiconstitutionalist.blogspot.com/2008/06/john-mccain-good-for-supreme-court.html) a potential pattern emerges regarding the successful deception of the GOP in hiding their many commonalities with their Democratic friends (and to be fair, vice versa!). Please review the artilce below as well as our June 26, 2008 post. While many in the GOP vote massively unconstitutional packages through when Congress and/or the Presidency is in their control, they cry wolf when the other party does the same. Similarly, you will find their massive voting FOR leftist Justices to the Supreme Court interesting.



By Jon Perr

Monday Feb 16, 2009

As predicted, House and Senate Republicans on Friday maintained their unified front in turning their backs on President Obama's economic recovery package. As it turns out, Obama wasn't the first Democrat to learn the hard way that bipartisanship is a one-way street for the GOP when it comes to the economy. In 1993, Bill Clinton's $496 billion stimulus and deficit-cutting program passed without a single Republican vote. But in 1981 and again in 2001, substantial numbers of Democrats acquiesced in backing regressive Reagan and Bush tax cuts which, also as predicted, drained the federal treasury.

The table above tells the tale. (Note that figures are not in real dollars adjusted for inflation.) While some turncoat Democrats helped Reagan and Bush sell their supply-side snake oil, Republicans then as now were determined to torpedo new Democratic presidents.

Obama's margins in the passage of the final $787 billion conference bill were almost unchanged from the earlier versions produced by the House and Senate. Despite the claim by Minority Whip and Newt Gingrich Mini-Me Eric Cantor four weeks ago that Obama's bipartisan outreach was a "very efficient process," the President was shut out again by Republicans in the House. In the Senate, the stimulus actually lost ground, as Ted Kennedy's absence and the no-vote of aborted Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg made the final tally 60-38. So much for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's January statement that the Obama stimulus proposal "could well have broad Republican appeal." Still, their opposition to the bill didn't prevent Republicans like John Mica (FL) and Don Young (AK) from claiming credit for projects it will fund in their districts.

If Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

But while Bill Clinton met with total opposition from Republicans, neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush was similarly subjected to scorched-earth politics from Democrats.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan swept to power promising to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget. And in 1981, he delivered on the first part of that promise. With substantial support from Democrats in the House and Senate, Reagan easily won the battle to enact the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, lauded by the hagiographers of the right as the largest tax cut in American history:

The House then completed the formality of giving final passage to the Administration bill by a vote of 323 to 107. Shortly before the House voted, the Reagan forces rolled to an 89-to-11 victory in the Senate. There, 37 Democrats voted with 52 Republicans for the bill.

Of course, Democratic acquiescence to Republican fiscal irresponsibility was repeated two decades later with President Bush.

Unlike the 7.6% unemployment rate and $1.2 trillion deficit Barack Obama inherited, George W. Bush arrived at the White House with a federal budget surplus and joblessness at 4.2% - and no mandate. And yet that spring, some Democrats supported it just the same. With only minor changes (the tax cuts were not permanent, the estate tax was lowered and not eliminated, the total size reduced from $1.6 trillion to $1.35 trillion), the 2001 Bush tax cuts passed both houses of Congress with substantial numbers of Democrats voting in favor:

The bill passed the House by a vote of 240 to 154, with 28 Democrats and an independent joining all Republicans in voting yes. The Senate then passed it by a vote of 58 to 33. Twelve Democrats joined 46 Republicans in support of the bill in the Senate.

Ultimately, of course, history was not kind to the Republican obstructionists who put politics before public policy. Reagan's massive 1981 tax cuts led to even more massive budget deficits, forcing the Gipper to later raise taxes twice. George W. Bush, too, saw the federal government hemorrhage red ink and presided over the worst eight-year economic record of any modern American president. Meanwhile, Democrat Bill Clinton's tenure in the 1990's witnessed rapid economic growth, low unemployment, balanced budgets and projected surpluses.

As for Barack Obama, it's clear that he's in for more of the same treatment as Bill Clinton. No doubt with a twinkle in his eye, Karl Rove said Thursday of the Republicans' stimulus stonewalling, "they are playing their hand extraordinarily well." Through their onstructionism, he said, "House Republicans have used the stimulus bill to redefine their party." And Bill Kristol, who almost single-handedly rallied the GOP to block the Clinton health care plan in 1994, last week called on Republicans to give Barack Obama a repeat on the stimulus - and just about everything else:

"But the loss of credibility, even if they jam it through, really hurts them on the next, on the next piece of legislation. Clinton got through his tax increases in '93, it was such a labor and he had to twist so many arms to do it and he became so unpopular...

...That it made, that it made it so much easier to then defeat his health care initiative. So, it's very important for Republicans who think they're going to have to fight later on on health care, fight later on maybe on some of the bank bailout legislation, fight later on on all kinds of issues."

And so it goes. Even in defeat, the Republicans want to party like it's 1993.

Higher Taxes: Will The Republicans Cry Wolf Again?

From the article: "Among those voting to further bankrupt Medicare were such self-proclaimed protectors of the public purse as House Republican Leader John Boehner, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee Ranking Republican Paul Ryan. When they complain about Obama's spending, they should be reminded that their vote to expand Medicare added $17.2 trillion to the nation's long-term indebtedness, according to the latest report by Medicare's trustees (Table III.C23)."

NOTE: The article by Mr. Bartlett below is not posted as a defense of tax increases. Any casual perusal of this blog would be testimony to our distaste for such things. However, Ed Crane, president of the Libertarian CATO Institute, noted better than I could: "When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. Just cut taxes and grow the economy: government will shrink as a percentage of GDP, even if you don't cut spending. That's why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments." Please read on...


by Bruce Bartlett, 02.27.09 Forbes.com

History, hypocrisy and Obama's first budget.

Yesterday, President Obama issued his first detailed budget. Among its most controversial proposals is a significant increase in taxes, especially on those with upper incomes. Obama also proposes a cap-and-trade system to reduce pollution that is in essence a broad-based energy tax.

Republicans will undoubtedly make extravagant claims about the detrimental economic effect of these higher taxes. When one hears these claims, however, it is worth remembering that they said the same things in years past and none of their dire predictions came to pass.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was signed into law on Sept. 3, and most of its provisions took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Every school child knows you don't raise taxes in a recession unless you want to make it worse," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page warned. Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, "I think it will make the economy sicker." The Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. said it had "no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants."

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth. As one can see, the economy's growth rates after TEFRA took effect were among the fastest in history.


Year/Quarter Real GDP Growth

1982 III -1.5%

1982 IV 0.4%

1983 I 5.0%

1983 II 9.3%

1983 III 8.1%

1983 IV 8.4%

1984 I 8.1%

1984 II 7.1%

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis


The unemployment rate also peaked just before TEFRA took effect at 10.8% in December 1982. Throughout 1983, it fell steadily to 8.3% by year's end. The unemployment rate continue to fall through 1984, reaching 7.3% by December.

In 1993, Bill Clinton proposed another major tax increase. Perhaps because it was initiated by a Democrat, conservatives were even more convinced that it would bring about economic disaster. In an Aug. 3, 1993, media fact sheet, John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis predicted the following results from the higher taxes: Capital formation would be reduced by $1.76 trillion through 1998, 1.34 million fewer jobs would be created and the real GDP growth rate would be 0.4% lower than it otherwise would have been.

An examination of the data, however, shows that this forecast was totally wrong in every respect. The following table shows what happened after the 1993 tax increase was signed into law on Aug. 10.

Year/Quarter Real GDP Growth Gross Private Domestic Investment

1993 III 2.1% 0.0%

1993 IV 5.5% 22.3%

1994 I 4.1% 18.3%

1994 II 5.3% 25.5%

1994 III 2.3% -6.9%

1994 IV 4.8% 19.9%

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis


The unemployment rate was at 6.8% when the law was signed and fell steadily thereafter, reaching 5.5% by the end of 1994. By Clinton's second term, the economy was booming to such an extent that the federal government began running large budget surpluses.

Of course, past experience doesn't necessarily tell us what will happen in the future. Maybe this time, the conservative scaremongers will be right, and higher taxes will abort recovery and bring on a sharp economic setback such as happened in 1937.

But even if conservatives were willing to concede that Obama's proposed tax increases won't deepen or lengthen the recession, they would still oppose higher taxes because they cling blindly to the starve-the-beast theory, which says that if revenues are not allowed to rise, then pressure to reduce the deficit will be channeled into spending cuts.

The problem with this theory is that there is not one iota of evidence that starving the beast works. Under George W. Bush, federal revenues fell from 20.9% of GDP in 2000 to 17.7% in 2008, but spending rose from 18.4% of GDP to 20.9% over the same period.

Bill Niskanen of the libertarian Cato Institute thinks the starve-the-beast theory has actually had a perverse effect on spending. Because Republicans convinced themselves that the only thing they needed to do to restrain the growth of government was cut taxes, it caused them to become "casual about the sustained political discipline necessary to control federal spending."

Republicans have also developed a certain mythology about Ronald Reagan's administration. They think he held the line on taxes and that this forced Democrats to accept spending cuts. The evidence, however, could more easily be interpreted in the opposite direction: Democrats forced Reagan to raise taxes in return for insignificant spending cuts. He himself later lamented that none of the cuts in appropriations he had been promised by congressional Democrats were ever implemented.

As the table below demonstrates, Reagan signed into law major tax increases every year of his presidency after the first. By the end of his presidency, he took back half of the 1981 tax cut in the form of higher taxes. And it should also be noted that when confronted with a crisis in Social Security in 1983, Reagan endorsed a rescue plan drafted by Alan Greenspan that consisted almost entirely of higher taxes.

Legislated Tax Changes by Ronald Reagan as of 1988

Tax Cuts Billions of Dollars

Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 -264.4

Interest and Dividends Tax Compliance Act of 1983 -1.8

Federal Employees' Retirement System Act of 1986 -0.2

Tax Reform Act of 1986 -8.9

Total Cumulative Tax Cuts -275.3




Tax Increases Billions of Dollars

Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 +57.3

Highway Revenue Act of 1982 +4.9

Social Security Amendments of 1983 +24.6

Railroad Retirement Revenue Act of 1983 +1.2

Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 +25.4

Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 +2.9

Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 +2.4

Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 +0.6

Continuing Resolution for 1987 +2.8

Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 +8.6

Continuing Resolution for 1988 +2.0

Total Cumulative Tax Increases +132.7

Source: Office of Management and Budget, FY1990 budget

Many of the same Republicans who today complain about Obama's spending voted for every pork-barrel project proposed by any Republican during the years they controlled Congress, as well as voting for a vast expansion of Medicare spending in 2003 when the program was already bankrupt.

Among those voting to further bankrupt Medicare were such self-proclaimed protectors of the public purse as House Republican Leader John Boehner, House Republican Whip Eric Cantor and House Budget Committee Ranking Republican Paul Ryan. When they complain about Obama's spending, they should be reminded that their vote to expand Medicare added $17.2 trillion to the nation's long-term indebtedness, according to the latest report by Medicare's trustees (Table III.C23).

None of this is meant to defend Obama's tax increases. They must be judged on their own merits and in terms of the potential benefits of the programs they would fund. But when Republicans claim that higher taxes will destroy the economy, they should be reminded that they made the same argument in 1982 and 1993 and that the actual economic results were the opposite of what they predicted. And when they denounce Obama's health plan for expanding the size of government, they should be asked how they voted on the Medicare bill in 2003.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.

Former astronaut speaks out on global warming

From the article: the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

By Associated Press
Sunday, February 15, 2009

SANTA FE, N.M. - Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and once served New Mexico in the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

"I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect," said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists "are being intimidated" if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

"They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming," Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the "global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making."

Williams said Heartland is skeptical about the crisis that people are proclaiming in global warming.

"Not that the planet hasn’t warmed. We know it has or we’d all still be in the Ice Age," he said. "But it has not reached a crisis proportion and, even among us skeptics, there’s disagreement about how much man has been responsible for that warming."

Schmitt said historical documents indicate average temperatures have risen by 1 degree per century since around 1400 A.D., and the rise in carbon dioxide is because of the temperature rise.

Schmitt also said geological evidence indicates changes in sea level have been going on for thousands of years. He said smaller changes are related to changes in the elevation of land masses — for example, the Great Lakes are rising because the earth’s crust is rebounding from being depressed by glaciers.

Schmitt, who grew up in Silver City and now lives in Albuquerque, has a science degree from the California Institute of Technology. He also studied geology at the University of Oslo in Norway and took a doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.

In 1972, he was one of the last men to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 17 mission.

Schmitt said he’s heartened that the upcoming conference is made up of scientists who haven’t been manipulated by politics.

Of the global warming debate, he said: "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity."

How Many Jobs Does Government Create? Zero.

Below is an excerpt from an essay written by 19th Century French economist, Frederic Bastiat entitled, "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen." In this selection from Bastiat's works we will learn that government does not create jobs. As Republicans and Democrats alike often proclaim the comparative value of their competing bills in the language of which party's bill "creates" more jobs, with the help of Bastiat we shall see both parties turn from the truth. The money to create the job of a worker in one (favored) industry is extracted from the wallet of workers in other industries (unfavored by legislation), either now and/or in the future, via greater taxation. Only private capital, unfettered by government force and plunder, creates jobs.


from "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" by Frederic Bastiat


In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

The same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others. Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight. For that reason I shall investigate the consequences of several economic phenomena, contrasting those that are seen with those that are not seen.

Public Works

Nothing is more natural than that a nation, after having assured itself that an enterprise will benefit the community, should have it executed by means of a general assessment. But I lose patience, I confess, when I hear this economic blunder advanced in support of such a project. "Besides, it will be a means of creating labour for the workmen."

The State opens a road, builds a palace, straightens a street, cuts a canal; and so gives work to certain workmen - this is what is seen: but it deprives certain other workmen of work, and this is what is not seen.

The road is begun. A thousand workmen come every morning, leave every evening, and take their wages - this is certain. If the road had not been decreed, if the supplies had not been voted, these good people would have had neither work nor salary there; this also is certain.

But is this all? Does not the operation, as a whole, contain something else? At the moment when M. Dupin pronounces the emphatic words, "The Assembly has adopted," do the millions descend miraculously on a moon-beam into the coffers of MM. Fould and Bineau? In order that the evolution may be complete, as it is said, must not the State organise the receipts as well as the expenditure? Must it not set its tax-gatherers and tax-payers to work, the former to gather, and the latter to pay? Study the question, now, in both its elements. While you state the destination given by the State to the millions voted, do not neglect to state also the destination which the taxpayer would have given, but cannot now give, to the same. Then you will understand that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. Upon one is engraved a labourer at work, with this device, that which is seen; on the other is a labourer out of work, with the device, that which is not seen.

The sophism which this work is intended to refute, is the more dangerous when applied to public works, inasmuch as it serves to justify the most wanton enterprises and extravagance. When a railroad or a bridge are of real utility, it is sufficient to mention this utility. But if it does not exist, what do they do? Recourse is had to this mystification: "We must find work for the workmen."

Accordingly, orders are given that the drains in the Champ-de-Mars be made and unmade. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing a very philanthropic work by causing ditches to be made and then filled up. He said, therefore, "What signifies the result? All we want is to see wealth spread among the labouring classes."

But let us go to the root of the matter. We are deceived by money. To demand the cooperation of all the citizens in a common work, in the form of money, is in reality to demand a concurrence in kind; for every one procures, by his own labour, the sum to which he is taxed. Now, if all the citizens were to be called together, and made to execute, in conjunction, a work useful to all, this would be easily understood; their reward would be found in the results of the work itself.

But after having called them together, if you force them to make roads which no one will pass through, palaces which no one will inhabit, and this under the pretext of finding them work, it would be absurd, and they would have a right to argue, "With this labour we have nothing to do; we prefer working on our own account."

A proceeding which consists in making the citizens cooperate in giving money but not labour, does not, in any way, alter the general results. The only thing is, that the loss would react upon all parties. By the former, those whom the State employs, escape their part of the loss, by adding it to that which their fellow-citizens have already suffered.

There is an article in our constitution which says: - "Society favours and encourages the development of labour - by the establishment of public works, by the State, the departments, and the parishes, as a means of employing persons who are in want of work."

As a temporary measure, on any emergency, during a hard winter, this interference with the tax-payers may have its use. It acts in the same way as securities. It adds nothing either to labour or to wages, but it takes labour and wages from ordinary times to give them, at a loss it is true, to times of difficulty.

As a permanent, general, systematic measure, it is nothing else than a ruinous mystification, an impossibility, which shows a little excited labour which is seen, and bides a great deal of prevented labour which is not seen.

Stimulus Bills, Playgrounds, and Sandboxes

by Jeffrey Robbins

The recent stimulus bill, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has garnered much attention from Republican supporters as evidence of the divide that stands between the Democratic and Republican parties. The final votes for the bill are pointed to as clear evidence. The 246 Yea's in the House consisted of zero Republican members. The whole of the Republican House membership joined seven Democrats in voting no. In the Senate, three lonely Republican Senators joined all Democrats and Independents in voting for the bill. The version which passed was a $787 Billion bill breaking down into the following two major categories: $275 billion in tax cuts, $512 billion in spending (Education, Health Care, Unemployment, Infrastructure, and Energy were the primary categories in spending). In a vacuum, it would appear the Republican supporters have a point. How does one argue ZERO Republican votes for this monster bill in House and a mere three in the Senate? A good place to start might be to look at the "alternatives" proposed by the Republicans which have gotten little attention.

The Senate GOP alternative stimulus bill was a $713 Billion plan put together by Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, who had been working with other GOP senators. The proposal included $430 billion in tax cuts, $114 billion for infrastructure projects, $138 billion for extending unemployment insurance, food stamps and other provisions to help those in need, and $31 billion to address the housing crisis. Now, $74 Billion (the difference between the two bills) is a lot of money to be sure, but I'm not certain we are talking wholesale philosophical differences here. It is also noted that the Republicans were clearly in favor of relying on more tax cuts. However, they certainly did select most of the same areas of the economy for spending, albeit in smaller amounts than the Democrats in some cases.

The House GOP, comparative models of fiscal restraint they've proven to be, came up with its own alternative stimulus bill as well, ringing in at a mere $478 Billion. Like the Senate GOP alternative bill, it was more reliant on tax cuts than the Stimulus bill that passed. Other primary components of the House GOP proposal were unemployment benefits, and a new home buyers tax credit. The House GOP alternative bill was even nearly 33% smaller than the Senate GOP proposal. Even so, at least one major category of spending, unemployment, shows up from the Republicans in the House. To ferret out the differences, let's instead look at just a few of the similarities.

1. Both parties sought to cut taxes.
2. Both parties neglected to cut spending.
3. Neither party addressed the right of the government to access your wallet in the first place and as such we are forced to conclude that both parties believe they have power over your wallet by force. They giveth and they taketh away. Right now they giveth, tomorrow they...
4. Both parties recommended increasing spending, merely squabbling over, sometime differences in where your money is spent, but again, not in whether they can or should in the first place.
5. Both parties believe in the welfare state, including unemployment benefits in all three bills.
6. Both parties believe in the redistribution of wealth. Remember, highlighting tax cuts to one group means you are subsidizing one group of citizens over another, even per both of the Republican "alternative" bills. This also shows up again in the Republican's bill with the new home buyer tax credit, redistributing wealth from renters to home owners.

Where were these seemingly conservative Republicans when the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which created the $700 Billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was passed by the Senate 74-25 on October 1, 2008? The Yea's included not the much talked about 3 GOP Senators who voted for the Stimulus Bill, but 34 Republican Senators who voted yes versus 15 that voted No. In the House, the final vote came on October 3, 2008 and was 263-171. It included not the zero GOP voters that the recent Stimulus bill had, but rather 91 Yea's from GOP House members versus 108 Nea's from GOP House members.

What's going on right now is you have two groups of kids who play in a sandbox that resides on a much larger playground. Both groups of kids generally believe the playground (and the people that vote them into the sandbox) should be "managed" in generally the same way. One group of the kids every few years, inevitably, has their feelings hurt and fewer of their group of kids win spots in the sandbox on the playground. It's sad, but don't make the mistake of thinking the two groups of kids dislikes each other's toys.

To demonstrate, let's ignore all the other toys that the two groups of kids believe you should pay for in order that they might play with them to focus on just two: WELFARE and WAR. I know, weird toys, but trust me, it's a weird sandbox! It just so happens that one of the groups of kids sometimes fancies WELFARE a little bit more than the other group of kids. Of course this leads to little "fits" to be thrown over how much should be spent on WAR versus WELFARE. These "fits" are really for the consumption of those people outside the sandbox, on the playground. We'll call them "voters." Both groups of kids agree WAR and WELFARE should be paid for by one group of people on the playground to provide to another, different, group on the playground. Philosophically both groups of kids like WAR and WELFARE and don't question whether they can or should. But, they like them to different degrees. Or at least sometimes they do. Sometimes they like them the same. Heck, sometimes, they even flip flop and the group of kids that didn't like WAR as much as the other group of kids, before you know it, a few years later they like WAR more than the other group of kids. Anyway, in order for one group of kids to "win" spots back in the sandbox next time, those "voters" outside the sandbox on the playground (you) must believe the group of kids you like doesn't really like WELFARE, for example. And we've just seen this played out masterfully. Not bad for a bunch of kids.

To review in greater detail the lack of difference between the two parties over the past decades, please review our series of posts entitled "Are Republicans Conservative?" parts one through three. They were posted on January 5, 2008. Or copy and paste the following link to go to the first of the series.
http://wiconstitutionalist.blogspot.com/2008/01/are-republicans-conservative-part-i-of.html

Hypocrisy from the GOP

Our national Ponzi scheme

by Walter Williams
February 04, 2009

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, was set up to combat fraudulent practices. The SEC's website explains that "Ponzi schemes are a type of illegal pyramid scheme named for Charles Ponzi, who duped thousands of New England residents into investing in a postage stamp speculation scheme back in the 1920s." It goes on to say, "Decades later, the Ponzi scheme continues to work on the 'rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul' principle, as money from new investors is used to pay off earlier investors until the whole scheme collapses." That is how the SEC described the recent Bernard Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scheme, "a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions."

A Ponzi scheme does not generate any wealth whatsoever; that is why it ultimately collapses. As Circuit Judge Anderson said in the 1922 Lowell v. Brown case, the Ponzi scheme was "simply the old fraud of paying the earlier comers out of the contributions of the later comers." So long as the number of late comers – you might call them suckers – grows, the fraudulent scheme has life.

We have a national Ponzi scheme where Congress collects about $785 billion in Social Security taxes from about 163 million workers to send out $585 billion to 50 million Social Security recipients. Social Security's trustees tell us that the surplus goes into a $2.2 trillion trust fund to meet future obligations. The problem is whatever difference between Social Security taxes and benefits paid out is spent by Congress. What the Treasury Department does is give the Social Security Trust Fund non-marketable "special issue government securities" that are simply bookkeeping entries that are IOUs.

According to Social Security trustee estimates, around 2016 the amount of Social Security benefits paid will exceed taxes collected. That means one of two things, or both, must happen: Congress will raise taxes and/or slash promised Social Security benefits. Each year the situation will get worse since the number of retirees is predicted to increase relative to the number in the workforce paying taxes. In 1940, there were 42 workers per retiree; in 1950 there were 16; today there are three, and in 20 or 30 years there will be two or fewer workers per retiree.

Social Security is unsustainable because it is not meeting the first order condition of a Ponzi scheme, namely expanding the pool of suckers. Social Security has been one congressional lie after another since its inception. Here's what a 1936 Social Security pamphlet said: "After the first three years – that is to say, beginning in 1940 – you will pay, and your employer will pay, 1.5 cents for each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year ... beginning in 1943, you will pay 2 cents, and so will your employer, for every dollar you earn for the next three years. ... And finally, beginning in 1949, 12 years from now, you and your employer will each pay 3 cents on each dollar you earn, up to $3,000 a year. That is the most you will ever pay." The pamphlet also said, "Beginning Nov. 24, 1936, the United States government will set up a Social Security account for you. ... The checks will come to you as a right."

That's another lie. In .Flemming v. Nestor (1960), the U.S. Supreme court held that you have no "accrued property rights" to a Social Security check. That means Congress can do anything it wishes with Social Security. There is little or nothing that can be done to prevent the economic and political chaos that will result from the collapse of Social Security.

Today's recipients of Social Security, along with their powerful AARP lobby, represent a powerful political force. Few politicians are willing to risk their careers alienating today's senior citizens for the benefit of Americans in 2040. After all, what do today's seniors and politicians care about a 2040 calamity? They will be dead by then.

Europeans are finally waking up to the demise of democracy

As of this posting please note President Obama's backtracking on the protectionist proposals in the current bailout bill due to pressure from the 'world.' http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090130/america_buy_090130/20090130?hub=TopStories

See also for background this blog's post from June 8, 2008, entitled "Republic v. Democracy."

Janet Daley
02 Feb 2009

The peoples of Europe have finally discovered what they signed up to. I do mean "peoples" (plural) because however much political elites may deceive themselves, the populations of the member states of the EU are culturally, historically and economically separate and distinct. And a significant proportion of them are getting very, very angry.

What the strikers at the Lindsey oil refinery (and their brother supporters in Nottinghamshire and Kent) have discovered is the real meaning of the fine print in those treaties, and the significance of those European court judgments whose interpretation they left to EU obsessives: it is now illegal – illegal – for the government of an EU country to put the needs and concerns of its own population first. It would, for example, be against European law to do what Frank Field has sensibly suggested and reintroduce a system of "work permits" for EU nationals who wished to apply for jobs here.

Meanwhile, demonstrators in Paris and the recalcitrant electorate in Germany are waking up to the consequences of what two generations of European ideologues have thrust upon them: the burden not just of their own economic problems but also the obligation to accept the consequences of their neighbours' debts and failures. Each country is true to its own history in the way it expresses its rage: in France, they take to the streets and throw things at the police, in Germany they threaten the stability of the coalition government, and here, we revive the tradition of wildcat strikes.

But the response from the EU political class is the same to all of these varied manifestations of resistance. Those who protest are being smeared with accusations of foolhardy protectionism or racist nationalism when they are not (not yet, anyway) guilty of either. It is not purblind nationalism, let alone racism, to resent the importation of cheap labour en masse when its conditions of employment (transport and accommodation provided, as seems to be the case at Lindsey) allow it to compete unfairly with indigenous workers. The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities which, incidentally, is something about which the Tories say they are much exercised. So can the protesters expect their support?

The US had a rule during its great period of immigration in the early years of the last century, that no one could enter the country with a pre-arranged job. This was designed precisely to prevent the unfairness and disruptive effect of the wholesale import of cheap labour. An individual travelling to seek work, prepared to take his chances in fair competition with local workers is one thing: the organised recruitment of people from the poorest regions of the poorest countries in Europe in order to reduce employers' wage costs in the more prosperous ones, is something else altogether.

Nor is it "protectionism" to argue that competition for employment should take place within a context of social responsibility and respect for the fabric of communities. Genuine protectionism is setting up barriers to free trade: this is what Barack Obama is doing when he forbids the importation of foreign materials such as British steel, and urges his countrymen to restrict their purchases of goods not manufactured in the US ("Buy America!") I eagerly await the condemnation of his proposal for US economic isolationism from all those European leaders who were so anxious to see him elected.

Free trade in goods, as opposed to unlimited open borders for transient labour, is absolutely essential to the recovery of the global economy (and for that matter, to the relief of poverty in the developing world). I agree with those who fear that the US under President Obama may be about to do what it did under Franklin Roosevelt, whose protectionism and hard-nosed refusal to make concessions to international needs condemned the world to a depression (followed by a war). But what the British strikers are demanding is not the same at all, and if their complaints are caricatured or defamed, the price in social disorder could be hideous. It is not an exaggeration to say that this could be the moment of justifiable anger that neo-fascist agitators have been waiting to exploit.

The protesters are simply demanding what they thought – what all free people have been taught to think since the 18th-century enlightenment – was their birthright. That is to say, for the basic principle of modern democracy: the understanding between the state and its people that the proper function of a government is to represent the interests of those who elected it. And to be fair to both presidents, Obama and Roosevelt, this assumption is so deeply grounded in the American psyche that it is almost inconceivable for any US administration not to abide by it quite literally.

In the grand abstract terms of the enlightenment, the legitimacy of government derives from the consent of the governed, and therefore no government should have the right to hand over its authority to some external body which is not democratically accountable to its own people. So when the framers of the EU arranged for the nations of Europe to do exactly that, they were repudiating the two centuries old political struggle for the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens, of government "of the people, by the people and for the people". It has always been my view that this was a quite conscious decision by the EU founders who, in the wake of two world wars, came to believe that the infamous national crimes of the 20th century could be traced directly to the democratic revolutions of the 18th century, and that the only long-term solution to this was to replace democracy with oligarchy.

But there it is. And here we are, with a generation of European political leaders who almost all accept the terms in which their predecessors gave away the most important principle of that great democratic pact between a free people and its government. While times were good and there was enough prosperity to keep everybody distracted and happy, the loss went almost unnoticed except by a few persistent and despairing critics. Well, not any more. The American government may be committing itself to a policy that is economically unsound and even irresponsible, but its insistence on maintaining the compact with its own voters – on putting their concerns first – will at least ensure that democracy will survive there. I am not at all sure that will be true in Europe.

T.G.I.F.

Thanks to a friend who caught this good article and passed it on.

January 26, 2009
Laurence M. Vance

The Republican Revolution has been gasping for breath since the Democratic Party won the congressional midterm elections in 2006. After the Republicans were soundly defeated in the 2008 elections, the Revolution was in its death throes until noon on January 20 when George Bush’s second term as president ceased and the Republican Revolution officially came to an end.

Thank God it’s finished.

The Republican Revolution began on January 3, 1995, after the Republican Party had won control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 83rd Congress (1953–1955) under Dwight Eisenhower. Although a Democrat (Bill Clinton) occupied the White House for the remainder of the decade, the Republicans hung on to the House and Senate until the election of a Republican president (George Bush) in the year 2000 gave them an absolute majority.

The Revolution had reached its zenith. Republicans were ecstatic. Although Vermont senator Jim Jeffords soon attempted to derail the speeding Republican train by leaving the Republican Party – temporarily shifting the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats – Republican victories in the 2002 midterm elections restored the GOP’s absolute majority.

After enjoying this absolute majority for the last two years of Bush’s first term, Republicans coasted to victory in the 2004 election – retaining the presidency and further increasing their control of the Congress.

And the country is worse off for it. So worse off, in fact, that I, a conservative Christian who has nothing but contempt for the Democratic Party, much prefer the presidency of Bill Clinton the fornicator in chief to that of George Bush the warmonger in chief, spy in chief, and spender in chief.

The Republican Revolution was a failure from the beginning. The Contract with America that was introduced by the new Republican-controlled Congress in 1995 was bogus because it focused on reforming government agencies and programs instead of eliminating them. It was pointed out in 2000 that "the combined budgets of the 95 major programs that the Contract with America promised to eliminate have increased by 13%."

I remember speaking with Joe Scarborough, my congressman at the time, on a local call-in radio talk show in late 1994 or early 1995. I asked him about the new Republican-controlled Congress repealing some of the legislation passed during the first two years of the Clinton administration. He would have to stand in line to introduce such legislation, he said, because of everything his fellow Republicans had planned.

Okay, let’s take two of the worst pieces of legislation passed during Clinton’s first two years. Did the new Republican majority in the 104th Congress repeal the Family and Medical Leave Act (PL 103-3) or the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (PL 103-159)? Of course it didn’t. Just like it didn’t repeal the Motor Voter Act (PL 103-31) or the Violence Against Women Act (PL 103-322).

And what did the Republican majority in Congress do throughout Clinton’s terms? Sure, there were a few good things that Congress did – like repealing all federal speed limits in 1995 – but how many major federal agencies, programs, or regulations were actually eliminated? How much really egregious legislation was repealed? How many pork-barrel projects were denied funding? How much was overall federal spending reduced? Was the government any less intrusive at the end of six years of Republican control of the Congress? What was actually done to limit the government to that prescribed by the Constitution?

The size and scope of the federal government were not reduced by one inch during the first six years of the Republican Revolution. All we heard during the six years of a Republican-controlled Congress under Clinton were excuses about needing a larger majority, a veto-proof majority, or, better yet, a Republican president to really complete the revolution.

But what happened when the Republican-controlled Congress finally got a Republican president? We got an unprecedented increase in the welfare/warfare/surveillance/nanny state. First came the ignoble USA PATRIOT Act (PL 107-56). This was followed by the No Child Left Behind Act (PL 107-110). Then came the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 (PL 107-243), which gave us the senseless, immoral, unconstitutional, unjust war in Iraq that has already cost the American taxpayers about $1 trillion. Although the seed of the Iraq War was planted by the Iraq Liberation Act (PL 105-338), that was also passed by a Republican-controlled Congress. And then there is the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (PL 108-173) – the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society. Even LBJ would be shocked at the cost of this welfare scheme. And who can forget the increase in farm subsidies, the crony capitalism, the mockery of the Constitution, the Republican acceptance of the neoconservative agenda, and the imperial presidency. No wonder Republicans earned the wrath of voters in the recent election. They deserved to lose as bad as they did, and more.

As I pointed out the following in my article on how bogus the Republican Revolution was, one statistic is all it takes to see that there has been no limit to the growth of government under the Republican Party – the national debt. Consider the following:

On the eve of the new Republican-controlled Congress in 1995, the national debt was just under $5 trillion.
At the time of Bush’s first inauguration in 2001, the national debt stood at $5,727,776,738,304.64.
At the time of Bush’s second inauguration in 2005, the national debt stood at $7,613,772,338,689.34.
On the day of the 2006 midterm elections, the national debt stood at $8,592,561,542,263.30.
On the last day of Bush’s second term, the national debt stood at $10,626,877,048,913.08.
Who is responsible for this tremendous increase in the federal debt? Not the Democrats. Not Bill Clinton. It is the party that laughingly said in its 2004 platform that it was committed to "lower taxes, limited regulation, and a limited, efficient government." Yes, the same party that helped the Democrats pass the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (the Bailout Bill).

But is this really a surprise? Not if one knows anything about the history of the Republican Party – a history of state capitalism, militarism, presidential power, big government, plunder, compromise, and sellout.

Just look at the Republicans' latest outrage: the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Since the day her husband became the president, the personification of evil according to all Republicans has been Hillary Clinton. So, what did the Republicans do when Mrs. Clinton appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to receive the first vote toward her confirmation as secretary of state? With but one exception (David Vitter of Louisiana), the Republicans on the committee voted for Hillary. Then, when the full Senate took a vote on Clinton’s confirmation on January 21, only two Republican senators (the aforementioned David Vitter and Jim DeMint of South Carolina) voted against her. During the presidential campaign, before it became evident that Barack Obama would get the Democratic Party nomination, John McCain never ceased to remind us how bad it would be if we voted for Clinton instead of him. And then he turns around and votes for her confirmation for secretary of State.

This, of course, does not mean that I prefer the Democratic Party. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Neither party is the lesser of two evils; they are both pure evil.

Nevertheless, I rarely bother to write about the evils of the Democratic Party. The socialist and statist policies of the Democratic Party are well known. And since the Democrats don’t masquerade as advocates of smaller and less intrusive government, it is pretty obvious that the Democratic Party is the party of liberalism, socialism, organized labor, environmentalism, affirmative action, wealth redistribution, the nanny state, and increased government intervention in the economy and society. Another reason I don’t bother is that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage need something to rant about.

Strom Thurmond was right. He left the Democratic Party because the party was "leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship." I would just go a step further: The Republican Party during the so-called Republican Revolution was leading the evolution of our nation to a faith-based, compassionate, fascist dictatorship.

When bad revolutions have run their course, they often lead to something just as bad or even worse. The Republican Revolution, like the French and Russian Revolutions, was an absolute disaster. And just as these revolutions gave the world Napoleon and Lenin, so the Republican Revolution has given us Barack Obama – a man with a radical left-wing congressional voting record, with even more radical associations, with a life spent in the service of racial preference, with an aberrant vision of Christianity, and with plans to further redistribute the wealth of taxpayers to tax eaters. That being said, whether he can possibly top George Bush in the "one of the worst presidents ever" category remains to be seen.

The Republican Revolution failed because it was not based on any real principles. Contrast this with the Ron Paul Revolution, which continues unabated because it is based, not on empty Republican rhetoric about the benefits of the free market and the need for less government intervention, but on the bedrock principles of peace, nonintervention, economic freedom, personal liberty, sound money, and a drastically limited state. Any Republican who really believes in these principles should abandon the GOP’s sinking ship of war, statism, and fascism.



Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from Pensacola, FL. His latest book is a new and greatly expanded edition of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State.

No free-ride Claus

Walter E. Williams
Friday, January 30, 2009

My George Mason University colleague Professor Richard Wagner wrote the following comments, which were published by Office of the House Republican Leader.

"Any so-called stimulus program is a ruse. The government can increase its spending only by reducing private spending equivalently. Whether government finances its added spending by increasing taxes, by borrowing, or by inflating the currency, the added spending will be offset by reduced private spending. Furthermore, private spending is generally more efficient than the government spending that would replace it because people act more carefully when they spend their own money than when they spend other people's money." A short translation of Mr. Wagner's comment is: There is no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy. Let's examine the ruse.

Suppose the value of all we will produce in 2009, our gross domestic product (GDP), totals $14 trillion. There cannot be any disagreement that if Congress spends $4 trillion, of necessity there is only $10 trillion left over for us to spend privately. In other words, if Congress is going to spend $4 trillion, it must find a way to get us to spend $4 trillion less. The most open and aboveboard method to force us to spend less privately is to tax us to the tune of $4 trillion.

You might say, "Congress doesn't have to tax us $4 trillion. They could tax us $3 trillion and run a $1 trillion budget deficit." You have that wrong. There is no way for Congress to spend $4 trillion out of our 2009 GDP of $14 trillion by getting us to spend only $3 trillion less privately. It has to be $4 trillion less.

Another method to force us to spend less privately is to print money and inflate the currency. Rising prices reduce our ability to spend privately since each dollar we hold will not buy as much. Another way is for Congress to borrow, thereby reducing our ability to spend privately. By the way, all this means that in any real economic sense the federal budget is always balanced. That is, if Congress spends $4 trillion we must privately spend $4 trillion less whether through taxation, inflation or borrowing.

The stimulus package being discussed is politically smart but economically stupid. It's that bedeviling, omnipresent Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy problem again. Let's say that Congress taxes you $500 to put toward creating construction jobs involved in building our infrastructure. The beneficiaries will be quite visible, namely men employed building a road. The victims of Congress are invisible and are only revealed by asking what you would have done with the $500 if it were not taxed away from you. Whatever you would have spent it on would have contributed to someone's employment. That person is invisible. Politicians love it when the victims of their policies are invisible and the beneficiaries visible. Why? Because the beneficiaries know for whom to vote and the victims do not know whom to blame for their plight.

In stimulus package language, if Congress taxes to hand out money, one person is stimulated at the expense of another, who pays the tax and who is unstimulated. A visual representation of the stimulus package: Imagine you see a person at work taking buckets of water from the deep end of a swimming pool and dumping them into the shallow end in an attempt to make it deeper. You would deem him stupid. That scenario is equivalent to what Congress and the new president proposes for the economy.

A far more important measure that Congress can take toward a healthy economy is to ensure that the 2003 tax cuts don't expire in 2010 as scheduled. If not, there are 15 separate taxes scheduled to rise in 2010, costing Americans $200 billion a year in increased taxes. In the face of a recession, we don't need that.

Walter E. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist and professor of economics at George Mason University.

In-flight confrontations can lead to charges defined as terrorism

At least 200 passengers have been convicted of felonies under the Patriot Act, often for behavior involving raised voices and profanity. Some experts say airlines are misusing the law. Only three GOP Congressmen voted against the Patriot Act. Only 18 GOP Congressmen voted against its renewal in 2005.

By Ralph Vartabedian and Peter Pae
January 20, 2009

Reporting from Los Angeles and Oklahoma City -- Tamera Jo Freeman was on a Frontier Airlines flight to Denver in 2007 when her two children began to quarrel over the window shade and then spilled a Bloody Mary into her lap.

She spanked each of them on the thigh with three swats. It was a small incident, but one that in the heightened anxiety after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would eventually have enormous ramifications for Freeman and her children.

A flight attendant confronted Freeman, who responded by hurling a few profanities and throwing what remained of a can of tomato juice on the floor.

The incident aboard the Frontier flight ultimately led to Freeman's arrest and conviction for a federal felony defined as an act of terrorism under the Patriot Act, the controversial federal law enacted after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

"I had no idea I was breaking the law," said Freeman, 40, who spent three months in jail before pleading guilty.

Freeman is one of at least 200 people on flights who have been convicted under the amended law. In most of the cases, there was no evidence that the passengers had attempted to hijack the airplane or physically attack any of the flight crew. Many have simply involved raised voices, foul language and drunken behavior.

Some security experts say the use of the law by airlines and their employees has run amok, criminalizing incidents that did not start out as a threat to public safety, much less an act of terrorism.

In one case, a couple was arrested after an argument with a flight attendant, who claimed the couple was engaged in "overt sexual activity" -- an FBI affidavit said the two were "embracing, kissing and acting in a manner that made other passengers uncomfortable."

"We have gone completely berserk on this issue," said Charles Slepian, a New York security consultant. "These are not threats to national security or threats to aircraft, but we use that as an excuse."

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd defended the prosecutions, saying that they have helped improve airline security. He added that the department has only pursued prosecution "when the facts and circumstances of a particular case warrant such action."

Indeed, the law has given airlines new flexibility to clamp down on unruly behavior. But the intent of the Patriot Act provisions was to put terrorists in violation of the law before they could execute an actual takeover, said Nathan Sales, a law professor at George Mason University who helped write the Patriot Act when he served in the Justice Department.

But Sales acknowledged that in the fervor to protect the skies, the practical application of the law has strayed.

"A woman spanking her child is not as great a threat to aviation as members of Al Qaeda with box cutters. That much is clear," he said.

For decades, airline personnel and law enforcement have had wide latitude in prosecuting unruly passengers, not only for assaults or threats but also for any behavior, including arguing, that disrupts a flight or "lessens the ability" of crew members to perform their jobs.

In practice, however, airlines have largely maintained order under Federal Aviation Administration rules, in which hundreds of unruly passengers are simply slapped with an infraction and fine each year.

According to FAA guidelines issued in 2007, "interference or intimidation of a crew member by itself is not chargeable under the [criminal] statute unless it rises to the level of physical assault, threatened physical assault or an act posing an imminent threat to the safety of the aircraft or other individuals on the aircraft."

Sept. 11, however, changed everything. Within two months of the attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, a sweeping attempt to improve the nation's defenses against international terrorism. It included broad new powers for law enforcement in such areas as electronic surveillance, money laundering and search warrants.

Included were two key provisions on airline security. The first defined disruptive behavior as a terrorist act, reflecting the seismic shift in airline security.

The second broadened the existing criminal law so that any attempt or conspiracy to interfere with a flight crew became a felony -- a change that allowed flight personnel to act against suspicious passengers even if they hadn't begun an actual assault.

The law gave flight personnel enormous latitude in determining what precisely posed a potential threat or disruption, and judging by some cases, there is no clear standard.

Last summer, a Boston man who took off his clothes and attempted to open an emergency exit during a flight to Los Angeles was not charged with a crime, even though the plane was forced to make an unscheduled landing in Oklahoma City.

Such was not the case with Carl Persing and Dawn Sewell, a Lakewood couple who never left their seats during the 2006 incident aboard a Southwest flight to Raleigh, N.C., that led to their arrests and four days in jail.

FBI and local investigators in Raleigh alleged that the couple engaged in a variety of sexual activities during the flight. At one point, according to an FBI affidavit, Persing was "observed with his face pressed against Sewell's vaginal area. During these actions, Sewell was observed smiling."

A flight attendant twice asked them to stop, according to the affidavit, and Persing responded, "Get out of my face," and later, "You and I are going to have a serious confrontation when we get off this plane."

But he denied making a threat. He said he did not feel well because of a chemotherapy drug and had put his head in Sewell's lap. "We were kind of confused why he was waking us up, why he wouldn't let me sleep," he said in a recent interview.

Charges were dropped against Sewell, but Persing, who had never been arrested before, was sentenced to 12 months' probation.

He almost lost his job as a Port of Los Angeles mechanic, which requires a security clearance from the Department of Homeland Security. The department initially yanked the clearance but reinstated it after a review of the facts.

The Justice Department does not keep data on how many such prosecutions or convictions have occurred, Boyd said. But according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University program, the federal government has obtained 208 felony convictions for disrupting flights since 2003, when data first became available.

The single case of actual terrorism cited by Boyd involved Briton Richard Reid, who is serving three life sentences. Reid was subdued by passengers and flight attendants on a 2001 flight from Paris to Miami after he was seen trying to ignite explosives in his shoe.

Tension aboard planes has increased over the years as the number of flight attendants onboard has declined and flights have grown more crowded.

Airlines, in most cases, have provided no additional training for flight attendants to deal with unruly passengers or potentially threatening situations, said Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Assn. of Flight Attendants. The amount of training attendants receive -- averaging six weeks -- has not changed since Sept. 11.

Tolerance for irrational behavior linked to mental illness has also diminished, said Ronald Honberg, legal director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

In a number of cases, mentally ill passengers act bizarre, falsely claiming to have heart attacks, seeing terrorists or needing to escape the plane. In other cases, including one earlier this month in Los Angeles, they use the word "bomb" or claim to have a bomb. They are typically restrained, but whether they are prosecuted depends on the widely varying judgment of prosecutors around the country.

"If you get out of your seat and walk to the front of a plane and talk about bombs, you get what you deserve," said Sales, the law professor.

On the other hand, Sales adds, "There are other sanctions than throwing the book at a person who has mental health issues."

The costs of a conviction can be enormous. In Tamera Freeman's case, it cost her custody of her children.

The confrontation on the Frontier Airlines flight to Denver was particularly harsh, recalled Amy Fleming, the flight attendant who told Freeman to stop spanking her children. In a recent interview, Fleming called Freeman the most unruly passenger she had seen in 11 years on the job.

"Absolutely she deserved a felony conviction," she said.

But at least one passenger, John Carlson, a defense attorney who was seated near Freeman, said there was no threat. "There was a nasty, loud exchange," Carlson said. Then Freeman "capitulated and offered no resistance. My sympathy shifted to her."

A spokeswoman for Frontier said the airline has provided more training for flight attendants since 2001, including classes on "ways to calm a situation before it reaches a boiling point or physical confrontation."

After three months in jail, Freeman agreed to plead guilty in exchange for being released on probation. A court-appointed attorney told her that a plea deal would be the fastest way to see her children, who had been taken back to Hawaii and put into foster care.

Her probation required her to stay in Oklahoma City, where she grew up, and prohibited her from flying. Meanwhile, legal proceedings in Hawaii have begun to allow the children's foster parents to adopt them.

Freeman has been denied permission to attend custody hearings in Maui over the last six months, court records show.

"I have cried. I have cried for my children every day," Freeman said. "I feel the system is failing me."

The chance for a new world order

by Henry A. Kissinger 1/12/09

As the new U.S. administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.

That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States' management of it is widespread.

At the same time, the magnitude of the debacle makes it impossible for the rest of the world to shelter any longer behind American predominance or American failings.

Every country will have to reassess its own contribution to the prevailing crisis. Each will seek to make itself independent, to the greatest possible degree, of the conditions that produced the collapse; at the same time, each will be obliged to face the reality that its dilemmas can be mastered only by common action.

Even the most affluent countries will confront shrinking resources. Each will have to redefine its national priorities. An international order will emerge if a system of compatible priorities comes into being. It will fragment disastrously if the various priorities cannot be reconciled.

The nadir of the existing international financial system coincides with simultaneous political crises around the globe. Never have so many transformations occurred at the same time in so many different parts of the world and been made globally accessible via instantaneous communication. The alternative to a new international order is chaos.

The financial and political crises are, in fact, closely related partly because, during the period of economic exuberance, a gap had opened up between the economic and the political organization of the world.

The economic world has been globalized. Its institutions have a global reach and have operated by maxims that assumed a self-regulating global market.

The financial collapse exposed the mirage. It made evident the absence of global institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse the trend. Inevitably, when the affected publics turned to their national political institutions, these were driven principally by domestic politics, not considerations of world order.

Every major country has attempted to solve its immediate problems essentially on its own and to defer common action to a later, less crisis-driven point. So-called rescue packages have emerged on a piecemeal national basis, generally by substituting seemingly unlimited governmental credit for the domestic credit that produced the debacle in the first place - so far without more than stemming incipient panic.

International order will not come about either in the political or economic field until there emerge general rules toward which countries can orient themselves.

In the end, the political and economic systems can be harmonized in only one of two ways: by creating an international political regulatory system with the same reach as that of the economic world; or by shrinking the economic units to a size manageable by existing political structures, which is likely to lead to a new mercantilism, perhaps of regional units.

A new Bretton Woods-kind of global agreement is by far the preferable outcome. America's role in this enterprise will be decisive. Paradoxically, American influence will be great in proportion to the modesty in our conduct; we need to modify the righteousness that has characterized too many American attitudes, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

That seminal event and the subsequent period of nearly uninterrupted global growth induced too many to equate world order with the acceptance of American designs, including our domestic preferences.

The result was a certain inherent unilateralism - the standard complaint of European critics - or else an insistent kind of consultation by which nations were invited to prove their fitness to enter the international system by conforming to American prescriptions.

Not since the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy half a century ago has a new administration come into office with such a reservoir of expectations. It is unprecedented that all the principal actors on the world stage are avowing their desire to undertake the transformations imposed on them by the world crisis in collaboration with the United States.

The extraordinary impact of the president-elect on the imagination of humanity is an important element in shaping a new world order. But it defines an opportunity, not a policy.

The ultimate challenge is to shape the common concern of most countries and all major ones regarding the economic crisis, together with a common fear of jihadist terrorism, into a common strategy reinforced by the realization that the new issues like proliferation, energy and climate change permit no national or regional solution.

The new administration could make no worse mistake than to rest on its initial popularity. The cooperative mood of the moment needs to be channeled into a grand strategy going beyond the controversies of the recent past.

The charge of American unilateralism has some basis in fact; it also has become an alibi for a key European difference with America: that the United States still conducts itself as a national state capable of asking its people for sacrifices for the sake of the future, while Europe, suspended between abandoning its national framework and a yet-to-be-reached political substitute, finds it much harder to defer present benefits.

Hence its concentration on soft power. Most Atlantic controversies have been substantive and only marginally procedural; there would have been conflict no matter how intense the consultation. The Atlantic partnership will depend much more on common policies than agreed procedures.

The role of China in a new world order is equally crucial. A relationship that started on both sides as essentially a strategic design to constrain a common adversary has evolved over the decades into a pillar of the international system.

China made possible the American consumption splurge by buying American debt; America helped the modernization and reform of the Chinese economy by opening its markets to Chinese goods.

Both sides overestimated the durability of this arrangement. But while it lasted, it sustained unprecedented global growth. It mitigated as well the concerns over China's role once China emerged in full force as a fellow superpower. A consensus had developed according to which adversarial relations between these pillars of the international system would destroy much that had been achieved and benefit no one. That conviction needs to be preserved and reinforced.

Each side of the Pacific needs the cooperation of the other in addressing the consequences of the financial crisis. Now that the global financial collapse has devastated Chinese export markets, China is emphasizing infrastructure development and domestic consumption.

It will not be easy to shift gears rapidly, and the Chinese growth rate may fall temporarily below the 7.5 percent that Chinese experts have always defined as the line that challenges political stability. America needs Chinese cooperation to address its current account imbalance and to prevent its exploding deficits from sparking a devastating inflation.

What kind of global economic order arises will depend importantly on how China and America deal with each other over the next few years. A frustrated China may take another look at an exclusive regional Asian structure, for which the nucleus already exists in the Asean-plus-three concept.

At the same time, if protectionism grows in America or if China comes to be seen as a long-term adversary, a self-fulfilling prophecy may blight the prospects of global order.

Such a return to mercantilism and 19th-century diplomacy would divide the world into competing regional units with dangerous long-term consequences.

The Sino-American relationship needs to be taken to a new level. The current crisis can be overcome only by developing a sense of common purpose. Such issues as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, energy and the environment demand strengthened political ties between China and the United States.

This generation of leaders has the opportunity to shape trans-Pacific relations into a design for a common destiny, much as was done with trans-Atlantic relations in the immediate postwar period - except that the challenges now are more political and economic than military.

Such a vision must embrace as well such countries as Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, whether as part of trans-Pacific structures or, in regional arrangements, dealing with special subjects as energy, proliferation and the environment.

The complexity of the emerging world requires from America a more historical approach than the insistence that every problem has a final solution expressible in programs with specific time limits not infrequently geared to our political process.

We must learn to operate within the attainable and be prepared to pursue ultimate ends by the accumulation of nuance.

An international order can be permanent only if its participants have a share not only in building but also in securing it. In this manner, America and its potential partners have a unique opportunity to transform a moment of crisis into a vision of hope.

Henry A. Kissinger served as national security adviser and as secretary of state in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

Take It From McCain's Advisers: The GOP Would Raise Taxes

By MATT MILLER, WSJ, 1/12/09

Though Barack Obama is offering record tax cuts this year as part of a new stimulus package, make no mistake -- taxes will rise substantially in the next decade. The reason is simple: As 76 million baby boomers hit their rocking chairs, we're poised to double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare.

We've already got $50 trillion in unfunded liabilities in these and related programs. There's no way to make the math work at current levels of taxation.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to some of today's pre-eminent Republican budget analysts, who've told me that taxes are going up no matter who is in power. Like every Republican who aspires to serve in a public role, they've been schooled by the party's antitax police to avoid saying things too definitively, or to leave themselves an "if we only got tough on spending" escape hatch. We know this spending talk is a charade, though, because Republicans balked at trimming a few teensy billion from the next trillion in planned Medicaid outlays when they controlled every corner of Washington a few years ago. So there's no mistaking what these folks are saying.

"If you do nothing on the spending side, you're going to raise taxes whether you're a Republican, a Democrat, or a Martian," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the Republican-appointed director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) from 2003 to 2005, who also served as the top economic adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign. "It's arithmetic."

Federal revenue today is 18.8% of GDP, and federal spending (not including 2008's extraordinary Fannie and Freddie bailouts and TARP) is 20%. Mr. Holtz-Eakin told me "the pressures are there" to lift spending and taxes to 23% or 24% of GDP by around 2020, and to as much as 27% if health costs remain out of control. Note that, in the context of a $14 trillion economy, he's predicting (at the low end) a $550 billion to $700 billion tax increase, per year, in today's dollars.

Over lunch one day during the recent presidential campaign, I spoke with Dan Crippen, another former CBO chief who was advising Sen. McCain. (Our ground rules were that I could not attribute these comments to Mr. Crippen until after the campaign, because a "straight talker" like Mr. McCain could not be seen to be advised by someone who actually talked straight on taxes!)

Are taxes going up? I asked.

"Yeah," Mr. Crippen said. "I think it is inevitable."

"If you were a betting man at this point, are taxes going be higher as a share of GDP in 2020?

"Definitely."

"How much higher?

"I don't know."

"Ballpark."

"Twenty-two [percent of GDP]," he said. "But 2020 is still a little bit at the front end of the boomers. You can figure 24, 25 by 2030."

"Let's say we're at 22 in 2020, up from 18-ish today," I said. "Is that some disaster for the economy? Will it really make a big difference?"

"Probably not," he said. "Depends on how you do it, of course."

David Walker is a Republican turned independent who served as comptroller general of the U.S. from 1998 to 2008, when he left to run the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. As head of the Government Accountability Office, he was part of a national "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour" in recent years that called attention to our long-run budget woes, a campaign he is expanding in his new role. Mr. Walker told me when we spoke in his government office in 2007 that taxes would grow to 20% to 25% of GDP within 20 years, depending on how "radical" we get about spending cuts. Since we know serious spending cuts are unlikely -- and that even reasonable success slowing the growth of entitlements will leave spending much higher as a share of GDP than it is today -- it's fair to interpret Mr. Walker's conclusion as being closer to 25% of GDP than to 20%.

So, the consensus of two professional Republican budgeteers and the nation's pre-eminent fiscal worrywart is that taxes will rise by between 4% to 7% of GDP over the next 10 to 20 years, translating (in today's dollars) into $550 billion to $1 trillion more in new annual taxes. You heard it here first: The Republicans have a secret plan to raise taxes. So do the Democrats, of course, and well beyond the rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the top rates they felt safe discussing during the 2008 presidential campaign.

No taxpayer looks forward to paying more. But the inevitability of higher taxes offers an overdue chance to change the debate. Though it may seem hard to imagine now, the endless fights about whether taxes should go up will soon seem passé. The real question once this recession has passed will be: Given that taxes have to rise, how should we raise the revenue we need in ways that are best for the economy? The answer will involve lower taxes on payrolls and corporations, and higher taxes on dirty energy and consumption.

This adjustment will be hardest for the GOP, because the conservative mind is caught in the past. Republicans cherish the political triumphs their tax cut mantra has delivered, and naturally resist the idea that its time is passing. But, as Ronald Reagan often said, "Facts are stubborn things." Lowering the top marginal tax rate from 70% toward 30%, as the Republicans did under Reagan, was a major economic and political achievement. Going downward from the mid 30s, where the marginal rate stands today, wouldn't be nearly as big a deal, and the boomers' imminent retirement makes it a moot question anyway.

So why, I asked Mr. Holtz-Eakin, does tax-cutting mania persist among Republicans -- given that the impact can't be great at today's much lower tax rates, and that, as he himself explained to me, taxes will soon have to go up substantially in any event? "It's the brand," he said. "And you don't dilute the brand."

Yes, we still have a serious recession to get through. But the overarching challenge for Republicans in its aftermath will be to craft a new political identity that doesn't rely on a dead idea.

Mr. Miller is the author of "The Tyranny of Dead Ideas," published this week by Times Books, and blogs at mattmilleronline.com.

The rich vs. the pols

The rich vs. the pols
by
Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Sometimes I wish there were a humane way to get rid of the rich. Without the rich for whipping boys, we might be able to concentrate on what's best for the 99.5 percent of the rest of us.

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, with about $60 billion in assets each, are America's richest men. With all that money, what can they force us to do? Can they take our house to make room so another person can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run retirement Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Can Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Unless they are granted power by politicians, rich people have little power to force us to do anything.

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It is they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's hawking of Barack Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel's alleged tax writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson's business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what's for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption.

For example, according to the Miami Herald, by March 2008, the powerful Florida Fanjul sugar family had given more than $300,000 to politicians and political committees. They didn't fork over all that money to help politicians to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. Like businessmen who approach Charlie Rangel, Rod Blagojevich and William Jefferson, they give politicians money because they want a favor in return - namely import restrictions on sugar so they can charge Americans higher prices. In the case of the Fanjuls, and thousands of others buying favors, they are engaged in legal corruption.

Legalized corruption is widespread and that's the job of 35,000 Washington, D.C., lobbyists earning millions upon millions of dollars. They represent America's big and small corporations, big and small labor unions and even foreign corporations and unions. They are not spending billions of dollars in political contributions to encourage and assist the White House and Congress to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. They spend that money in the expectations of favors that will be bestowed upon them at the expense of some other American or group of Americans.

This power helps explain, for example, why a seat on the House Ways and Means Committee, not to mention its chairmanship, is so highly coveted. For the right price, a tax loophole, saving a company tens of millions of dollars, can be inserted into tax law, a la the Charlie Rangel scandal. At state levels, governors can award public works contracts to a generous constituent. At the local levels mayors can confer favors such as providing subsidies for sports stadia and convention centers. When politicians can give favors, they will find buyers.

The McCain-Feingold law was to get "money out of politics" but more money was spent in the 2008 election cycle than ever. The only way to reduce corruption and money in Washington is to reduce the power politicians have over our lives. James Madison was right when he suggested, "All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." Thomas Jefferson warned, "The greatest calamity which could befall us would be submission to a government of unlimited powers." That's what today's Americans have given Washington - unlimited powers.

Walter E. Williams is a nationally syndicated columnist and a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Bringing the Arab-Israeli War Home

by Michael Scheuer

If America were blessed with a noninterventionist foreign policy, we could all thank Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for giving President-elect Barack Obama a thoroughgoing lesson in the absolute irrelevancy of Israel and Palestine to the national interests of the United States. More than a week into Israel's invasion of Gaza, America is still alive and kicking and none of our citizens are dead, which is the way it should be, as this is their religious war and not ours. If stubborn noninterventionism were our creed – as the Founders intended – the Gaza war could continue for two more days or two more months and we could simply shrug and mutter "Who cares?" America could simply go on its way, rebuilding its economy and marveling over the madness of two religions fighting to the death over a barren sandpit at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, America today is run by a political and media elite that is addicted to intervention. This would be bad enough if these men and women had the brains to intervene and produce a result that benefits U.S. interests, but they are not. They are instead – despite their Ivy League diplomas – uneducated and naïve people who still live in the Cold War, foolishly believing that America is the boss of a strong Western/NATO community (which is now in its death throes on Afghanistan's plains); that other nations are eager to do America's dirty work; and, most fatally of all, that the national security interests of the United States and Israel are identical.

There should be no mistake among Americans about what is going on in Gaza. Although Israel has billed its invasion as an attempt to destroy Hamas and thereby protect Israelis, its main goal is to ensure that Obama is tied as tight as Gulliver to the status quo of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. In addition to hurting Hamas, Israel's invasion of Gaza was designed to and has successfully underscored the salience of Osama bin Laden's now 12-plus-year-old message to the Muslim world:

First, that the United States – under Republicans or Democrats – will allow Israel to do anything it pleases in regard to starving and bombing the Palestinians. This has been underlined for Muslims by the words of President George W. Bush, the silence of President-elect Obama, and, according to the Jerusalem Post, by the blame-it-all-on-the-Palestinians visits of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Congressman Gary Ackerman, and leaders of major U.S. Jewish organizations.

Second, that the ruling Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere are impotent "agents" of the Zionists and Crusaders and will do nothing to protect Muslims when they are attacked by the U.S.-led West, be those attacks in Palestine, Pakistan, Iraq, or Afghanistan. "[The] failure of the Arab foreign ministers at their meeting in Cairo to take any position to confront the continuing Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip," explains the independent and influential UK-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, "confirms the theory that says the Israeli aggression has come as a result of coordination and the blessing of influential Arab states, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia."

Third, that Muslims are regarded by the West as subhumans, and their blood, lives, and children are – for America, Israel, and Europe – worthless and expendable. The Gaza score to date will indelibly make this point across the Islamic world: to date, 500 dead and 2,300 wounded Palestinians and less than 10 dead Israelis. As Pakistan's Frontier Post has said, the West silently watches as "Israel is set to starve the Palestinian Muslims into nonexistence. … No respect for Muslim life! Muslim blood is cheaper than water!"

After the Gaza invasion, Israel will have accomplished two vital goals. It will have reenergized Hamas, which will in turn renew the suicide bombings inside Israel that allow America's Israel-firsters – including Obama's IDF-veteran chief of staff – to portray their country-of-first-allegiance as the poor, put-upon innocent. It will also have produced the end of whatever slim hope there was of an Arab-Israeli peace settlement over the course of Obama's term. What is likely to become known across the Islamic world as the "Gaza slaughter" will ensure the continued growth of the Sunni insurgency al-Qaeda leads and inspires. All told, Israeli leaders at the conclusion of the Gaza invasion will be able to more credibly quote President Bush and say that their "mission" has been accomplished.

Now, there is no reason for Americans to be angry at Israel. Hamas is a nagging military threat to Israel, and Israel's leaders can defend their citizens in the manner they deem appropriate. Indeed, had various U.S. governments abstained from continuously intervening in the Arab-Israeli conflict over the past 30 years, it may well have been long since settled and over – one way or another.

The American people should be livid, though, with their bipartisan political elite and the Israel-firsters at Commentary, the New York Times, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Post, as well as that hive of anti-American U.S. citizens that fund and lead AIPAC, for involving them in this barbarous mess. At some point down the road, every U.S.-taxpayer-funded bomb, artillery shell, and bullet aimed at the Palestinians will yield Americans killed at the hands of al-Qaeda, its allies, or those it inspires in attacks launched in response to U.S. support for Israel. Those Americans will be killed because their political and media leaders – corrupted to the bone by AIPAC – have involved them in a religious war that threatens nothing vital to their country's principles or national security, their personal economic well-being, or their children's lives.

And worse is yet to come. Israel's Gaza invasion has produced an unusual number of public anti-Israel demonstrations by American Muslims around the United States. The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war produced similar events, but the current, Gaza-focused demonstrations are angrier and larger in number. How long, one wonders, will it be before Israel's military actions lead to violent clashes in America?

If this occurs, Israel and its American supporters will have the insurance policy they desire above any other, one they are desperate to obtain before Israel takes harsh action – by forced deportation or other means – against its rapidly growing and radicalizing Arab population. Once the Arab-Israeli religious war has been brought into the United States and is producing blood in America's streets, the Israel-firsters will claim the carnage proves that secular America and theocratic Israel are in the same boat and facing the same enemies. Flogging this plausible but palpable lie, AIPAC-owned American leaders will consign this country to an unending war against Islam, the same catastrophe that is Israel's lot.

Learn how to think straight

December 31, 2008
by Walter Williams

© 2009

Many professors, mostly on the liberal side of the political spectrum, use their classrooms to proselytize students. I have taught economics for the past 40 years and challenge anyone to find even one student, among the thousands who went through my classes, who can say, "Professor Williams used his class to proselytize students." While acceptable at most universities, it is nothing less than academic dishonesty to do so. Like others, I have my own values and opinions, such as those expressed in some of my nationally syndicated columns, but they never become a part of classroom discussion.

Learning how to think straight, as opposed to what values and opinions to hold, is the crucial part of education. Part of that learning is to be able to understand the distinction between subjective statements, for which there are no commonly accepted standards of proof, and positive statements for which there are. For example, the statement "Scientists cannot split the atom" is a positive statement because if there's any disagreement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. Just visit Stanford's linear accelerator and watch them do it. By contrast, the statement "Scientists should not split the atom" is a subjective statement. There are no facts to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement. Disagreement can go on forever. A fairly good proxy for whether a statement is subjective is the presence of words such as should and ought. This lesson is closed by telling students that it is not being suggested that they purge their vocabulary of subjective terms such as should and ought because they are excellent tools to trick others into doing what you want them to do. However, in the process of tricking others, one need not trick himself.

A related lesson is dealing with terms such as better and best and worse. This lesson might be approached by my asking students which is the best system for resource allocation: capitalist, socialist or communist? After several fall for my bait, I tell them that the correct response is to tell me it's a nonsense question. It is akin to asking their physics professor: Which is the best state: a liquid, gaseous, solid or plasma state? However, if the physics professor were asked: Which is the cheapest state to nail a nail into a board? He could answer the question and probably say that it is the solid state. Going back to the question about capitalism versus socialism and communism, asking which system maximizes personal liberty and societal wealth, the answer would be capitalism, at least here on Earth.

Another pitfall to straight thinking is sometimes called the cause and effect fallacy. That fallacy is made when a person sees event B coming on the heels of event A and then says A caused B. There may no causal relationship at all. Such is the case when the rooster crows and shortly thereafter the sun rises. That is easy to see, but many historians assert that the 1929 stock market crash caused the 1930s Great Depression. Little is further from the truth. Instead, it was caused by inept fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.

There are a number of other pitfalls to straight thinking that I lecture on as introductory material before we begin to explore economic theory. I tell students that if they hear me say something subjective, without my having prefaced it with "in my opinion," they are to raise their hand and tell me that they took my class to learn economics and not to be indoctrinated with my values. Personally, I want students to share my values that personal liberty, along with free markets, is morally superior to other forms of human organization. The most effective means to accomplish that goal is to give them the tools to be tough, rigorous, hard-minded thinkers, and they will probably reach the same conclusions I have.