The ASA boycott of Israel

The American Studies Association (ASA) called this week for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, as a protest against human rights violations in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank  It is an astounding piece of hypocrisy, even by the hypocrisy standards of liberal academia.  All it really proves is that rabid antisemitism is still alive and well, even in America.

Yes, some brutal things happen between Israel and the Palestinian communities.  Most of them initiated by the Palestinians, by the way.  I haven't heard of any Israeli suicide bombers blowing themselves up among civilians in the Palestinian territories. I keep wondering what the ASA people would suggest if, say, Mexico or Canada started firing random missiles into USA cities.  Terrorists took down two US buildings, and our response was to take down the government of two whole nations. So it is OK if we respond to terrorism, but not OK if Israel does?

I would be more impressed if the ASA initiated a boycott against other countries like, say, China, whose human rights abuses are much, much greater.  There are lots and lots of nations with worse human rights records than Israel.  Indeed, I suspect the US, in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is better qualified for an ASA boycott than Israel.    But in fact the ASA have simply displayed their antisemitism by singling out Israel.

I am glad to see that major universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton have spoken out against this blatant antisemitism. More universities and academics need to do so.

Edward Snowden – Traitor or Hero?

Now that, as a result of Edward Snowden’s revelations, the nation has begun to see the real scope of the extensive domestic surveillance that the US intelligence establishment has put in place since 9/11, the question again arises of whether Snowden’s actions made him a traitor or a whistleblower hero.

Clearly he violated the security agreements he signed, so he is technically a criminal.  On the other hand, without his revelations we would have had no idea of how out-of-control the security apparatus in this country had become – violating with impunity, and in secrecy, the most fundamental constitutional rights of Americans. Yes, all these intrusive surveillance systems are technically legal, but only because they were put in place secretly by executive order, and/or voted into existence by a Congress that was not doing its job (no surprise there). Indeed, James Clapper, testifying to the Congressional oversight committees as Director of National Intelligence, lied to them repeatedly (with no apparent consequences) about the extent of the surveillance systems, so it is hard to claim that there was any effective oversight by Congress.

Of course the intelligence bureaucracies will claim they need all the powers (and funds) that they can get – that is what bureaucracies always do.  Yet despite a massive PR effort, the security agencies have yet to identify a single case in which the collection of phone or email metadata has led to the prevention of a terrorist act. And by their own admission, the system has already been abused a number of times by analysts using it for personal reasons.

I am inclined now to think Snowden has done the country a great service, at some considerable risk to himself. I wouldn’t want to establish a precedent encouraging others to break their security agreements, but remember that when Nazi officials claimed at their post-war trials that they were just following orders when they committed terrible atrocities, we didn’t accept that as an adequate defense.  We argued that individuals had a responsibility to stand up to immoral orders. I think this may apply in Snowden’s case as well. He saw gross violations of our Constitutional rights, and stood up to oppose them, despite the risks and consequences.

We would do well to remember again Ben Franklin’s comment that “They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The Politically Incorrect Guides

In general, the John Wiley “For Dummies” books, with their trademarked yellow and black cover, are uniformly good, and can pretty much be depended upon for good beginner information on whatever subject they cover. Wiley clearly tries to maintain a consistent standard in these books.

After reading the excellent “Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East” (published by Regnery Press) listed in the previous blog, I had initially assumed that the “Politically Incorrect” series with their distinctive covers would exhibit a similar uniform quality. However the quality in fact is quite uneven. For example, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism” is mostly a religiously-based argument for Creationism and Intelligent Design. And “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science” appears to be written by someone who doesn’t quite understand the scientific method.

Of course any book dealing with “politically incorrect” subjects is going to be controversial – that after all is the point - but it is not unreasonable to expect accurate reporting supported by sound evidence. These books are still worth reading, just to get an alternative point of view, but don’t expect them all to be of the same quality of Martin Seiff’s excellent book.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East

Martin Seiff is a veteran foreign correspondent with United Press International.  His 2008 book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East is a breath of fresh air in a field otherwise obscured by foggy theory and wishful thinking. He has little time for liberals and neocons who dream of imposing democracy in the area (and doing so in only a few years), and he is scathing about the inadequacies of various government leaders, particularly during the British administration of much of the Middle East in the last century.  If you are committed to believing Churchill never made mistakes, you won’t like this book. If you are committed to believing that free elections always bring good democratic government (despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary), you won’t like this book.

I don’t agree with all of his points (his brief for Saudi Arabia as a new center of stability in the region seems to me a bit of a stretch, for example), but his blunt, non-nonsense appraisal of the history and current condition of the Middle East seems to me far more realistic than what usually comes out of the academic world on this subject. And it is certainly politically incorrect - it will offend diehards on both the left and the right! It has been clear ever since we launched the Iraq and Afghan wars that our government is woefully naïve about the cultures of that area of the world, with consistently painful and expensive results. A book like this might help dispel some of that naiveté

Recommended: Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

“A war begun for no wise purpose, carried on in a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired by this war.”

This indictment, which might well describe the America experience in the war in Afghanistan, was in fact written in 1843 by the Rev G. R. Gleig, the British Army chaplain who accompanied the ill-fated British attempt to subdue Afghanistan.  William Dalrymple has written an excellent work, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, detailing the whole ill-fated British expedition which ended in such humiliation in 1842.

One would have thought our Ivy-League-educated East Coast ruling elite would have learned something from the British experience, or if not that, then at least from the disastrous Russian experience of 1979-1989, which was far more recent.  But as the philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Return of a King is an interesting book to read, because there are so many parallels between the British experience and the American experience in Afghanistan. Both expeditions were launched by ideologically blinded people who drastically underestimated what would be required, both expeditions were hampered by inconsistent strategy and incompetent political and military leadership, both undertakings were distracted in the middle by other wars (Iraq for us, the Opium wars in China for the British), both undertakings suffered badly because the invaders did not understand the Afghan culture.

This is a book worth reading.

Recommended: The Revenge of Geography

I have been reading Robert Kaplan's 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. It is a refreshing excursion away from the day-to-day crises toward a much longer-term view of the world.  Kaplan argues that geography shapes history and civilizations today just as it has all through recorded history.  The first two-thirds of the book look back at past empires and civilizations to see how their geography shaped their destiny.  The last third of the book looks at America in that light, and explores what the future might hold for us.

I was particularly struck by his argument that, despite the obsession of the East Coast ruling elite with the Middle East and Asia, it is actually the influence -- good or bad -- of Mexico that ought to concern us most, a point Samuel Huntington made repeatedly in his later years. If we are bordered by an increasingly autonomous, lawless and wealthy narco-state, no longer controlled by Mexico's central government, and driven primarily by the drug markets in our own nation, this ought to be a prime concern to us.

And indeed, one wonders what would have happened if we had put the trillion dollars we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan into helping Mexico overcome its problems.  The result mught have been much more satisfactory.   This is a book worth reading. 
 

Now the other shoe….

President Obama’s now notorious promise was “If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Your Doctor.” Well, the first part turned out not to be true for many people, resulting in the political fuss over the past few weeks.

Now the second shoe is about to drop. Many people will find out that their doctor is not included in the new network they were forced to move to. See this story this morning from Reuters: UnitedHealth drops thousands of doctors from insurance plans.

If we thought there was a lot of fuss over the past two weeks about cancelled health insurance plans, wait until people begin to discover they can no longer go to the doctor they have used for years……

Has anyone noticed….?

We have all watched the incredibly inept launch of the ObamaCare website, and the desperate Democratic reassurances that “everything will be fine…real soon now”.  But has anyone noticed that, as far as I can tell, not a single person has been fired for this incompetence?  Not Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Not Health and Human Services Chief Information Officer Frank Baitman or Deputy Chief Information Officer Henry Chao.

We all heard about the murder of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and four of his staff in Bengazi in 2012.  And we all heard after the fact about the repeated requests his staff made for better protection – requests which were refused and ignored by State Department officials in Washington.  But as near as I can tell no one was ever fired for that oversight and poor judgment.

We all have heard of Edward Snowden, now in Russia, and the damaging leaks he has provided to domestic and foreign newspapers.  And after the fact we have all heard how sloppy communication between security agencies meant that documented concerns about his behavior were never passed on to his new employers. But as near as I can tell, no one ever lost their job over that sloppiness.  Certainly no high-level executive seems to have been disciplined.

I am no fan of President Bush’s administration, but after the incredibly inept FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) response to the Katrina hurricane disaster he did at least replace FEMA director Michael Brown.

I know that in companies I have worked  in – IBM and Lockheed Martin – executive heads would have rolled in response to such disasters. When Apple’s initial 2012 launch of its own map service on the iPhone was so disastrous, the executive in charge, Scott Forstall, was fired. When the 2011 opening of British Airways Heathrow terminal five was a disaster, Gareth Kirkwood, director of operations at BA, and David Noyes, head of customer relations, were both summarily fired.  In the real world, companies do make mistakes and have disasters, but people get fired as a consequence.

Not so, apparently, in Washington. In the Federal Government, apparently, one can be thoroughly incompetent and there are no consequences so long as one is high enough in the food chain.

I wonder how long it will take...

President Obama got into a lot of hot water by promising repeatedly “If you like you current health care plan, you can keep it. Period.” Of course, that was impossible because Health and Human Services wrote a whole bunch of regulations that specified the minimum coverage that could be offered, and a lot of the less expensive plans didn’t meet all the required minimums.

So now, after a lot of uproar, the President has tried to recover politically by promising an administrative fix that allows (but does not require) insurance companies to extend those “sub-standard” plans through 2014.

I wonder how long it will take the Democrats to catch on to the fact that, with the new extension, all those cancellation letters will be going out again just about this time next year, just before the elections? Not too smart!!

The 11 American Nations

Colin Woodard has written a new book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, in which he argues that America is really 11 separate nations.  It is not a new idea; others have pointed out variously that we can be divided into 5 or 7 or 12 different regions, based on political outlook, ethnic balance, history, liberal/conservative balance and the like, but he makes a good case for his view.

Here is his map:

The point being that these regional grouping are so fundamentally different in outlook that contentions issues like gun control will never acquire a consensus.

Until the fat lady sings....

How rapidly the political landscape changes. A month ago Democrats were sure the unwise (actually, stupid) Republican government shutdown had set them up for an easy election cycle next time. Now Democrats are in full panic mode as the ObamaCare mess continues to deepen, and the president's approval ratings have falling to a new low. As they say, a week is a lifetime in politics.

Underneath all of this, the nation is still split almost exactly 50-50 between conservative and liberals, so election results will probably be determined more by local gerrymeandering and local issues than by any of this Congressional posturing. No doubt there are more ObamaCare problems to come, since the government seems incapable of even fielding a relatively simple website one can assume the deeper and more complex issues (like linking all the various agency databases together correctly, and managing the high volumes many were never designed for) will produce yet more discomforting news for Democrats.

On the other hand, Republicans show no sign yet of having learned anything useful from all their various missteps in recent years, so perhaps they will again manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In the famous words of journalist Ralph Carpenter "It ain't over till the fat lady sings..."

Do we really want the government to manage our health care?

Liberals, with a decidedly paternalistic outlook on the nation, would dearly love to have the government run our health care system, the way the British government, for example, runs their health care system. Does anything about the rollout of the heath care websites give any confidence that the government can do this without massively screwing up? Does anything about the British health care system (currently 2.9 million Britains are waiting to get into a hospital) give anyone any confidence our government can run a health care system?

The Health Care Exchange debacle

By now almost everybody has heard of the chaos surrounding the government’s roll out of ObamaCare health care exchanges in 36 states.  As near as anyone outside the government can tell (the government thus far refuses to talk about the issue at all), something like 1% of the people who have tried to enroll thus far have been successful, and insurance companies are in chaos because the system is feeding them bad or incomplete information.  Thank goodness IBM put me into a private exchange rather that the government exchange when they dropped retiree health care (thanks again Mr. you can keep your current insurance if you like it!).

Of course the problem was predictable.  Congress (well, the Democrats) expected states to build these exchanges, though of course they didn’t give the states any money to do that, nor enough time.  Not surprisingly, 36 states refused, since no money came with the request and states are having enough fiscal problems of their own.

So the government had to build them, on the same inadequate schedule they had given the states, and with no money appropriated to do the job.  Now a little-known statistic outside of the system engineering field is that over the past four decades about 65% of systems built by the government are so flawed they are never fielded, and the reminder typically take millions of dollars and years to fix enough to make them able to be rolled out. So this is typical, just more public and embarrassing for the administration than usual.

But it sure shows why you really don’t want the government building big IT systems. It’s hard enough when private companies do it, but at least the private companies fire the incompetent managers and programmers when this happens, unlike the government.

For the Arthurian fans among us, from my daughter:

It’s always a bad idea……

I’ve mentioned before that every political act carries a price. It is pretty clear the price the Republicans are paying for their attempt to hardball the President.  What is not so clear, but probably will become so shortly, is the price the President and the Democrats are going to pay for having so humiliated their opponents in this battle.

It is OK to win a battle, in fact that is the whole point, but it is always a bad idea to humiliate your opponents as well, as the Democrats did by not allowing any small face-saving sops to the House Republicans in the final bill. It would have cost them almost nothing to allow, for example, the cancellation of the medical device tax, which the Republicans wanted but in fact is favored by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans anyway. But once again their hubris got the better of them (and the President’s jibe at the Republicans today “Win an election!” didn’t help).

The President hopes to get several more signature pieces of legislation through Congress as part of his legacy, starting with immigration reform.  My bet is that at least for the next few months, anything proposed by the President is dead on arrival in the House, just because he wants it.

A little magnanimity in victory toward one’s opponent is always a good tactic, especially if one is going to meet that opponent again.

Why is Congress acting so stupidly?

It would be easy under the current circumstances to assume that all the members of Congress, as well as the President and his advisers, are just plain stupid.  But in fact few if any are stupid – while one does not have be exceptionally bright or well-educated to get elected, it does take a certain minimum level of competence to run a successful campaign for federal office.  So the answer to why Congress and the administration appear to be acting so stupidly must lie elsewhere.  

In fact, members of Congress are for the most part acting quite rationally from their own point of view.  Tea Party members are doing just what they were elected to do by the voters who put them into office – trying to curb the excessive government spending (ignore the side issue about defunding ObamaCare). Liberals are doing just what they were elected to do by the voters who put them into office – protect popular entitlements and union jobs.

Because of extensive gerrymandering at the state level by both parties, most members of Congress have safe seats (over 95% get reelected), which means they only worry about primary challenges, which would come from more left-leaning challengers in Democratic distracts, and more right-leaning challengers in Republican districts.  So of course they are stubborn in these negotiations; if they weren’t they would risk being defeated in their next primary.

Shorn of all the hyper-partisan rhetoric and largely irrelevant side-issues, the nation’s fiscal problems really come down primarily to the growing entitlement burden – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As the baby boomers retire and live longer, and as the ratio of workers to retirees drops, these programs, as currently constituted, will over the next couple of decades bankrupt the government, absorbing 100% plus of federal revenues. We can look at the current Eurozone crisis to see exactly what happens when voters allow politicians continue to buy votes with expensive social welfare and pension programs that they can’t pay for.

What we as a nation have yet to have is a reasoned national debate about just how much entitlement and social safety network spending we are willing to finance with our taxes. It’s great to give our seniors generous social security and health benefits (I enjoy them), but are young workers willing to pay the taxes needed to support them, especially as the ratio of retired to working people drops over the coming decades?  And if we tax corporations and young workers enough to pay for them will we simply drive businesses out of the country to more favorable tax regimes, making the funding problem even worse?

The reason Congress is at loggerheads at the moment is because we as voters have never had a rational debate about these issues – voters on both sides are still living in fantasyland, liberals ignoring the rising costs of their cherished entitlement programs and conservatives ignoring the real need for social safety networks in a modern economy.  Until we voters come to terms with reality, the representatives we elect will continue to reflect our own unrealistic views of the world.

Recommended: Balance

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every political or economic problem there is an answer which is simple, obvious, plausible, ideologically consistent, and wrong. In the hard sciences theories aren’t accepted until there is hard evidence to support them. Unfortunately the same rules apparently don’t apply in either political thought or economics, where people believe, often passionately, in all sorts of theories for which there is either no evidence at all, or worse yet, clear evidence that they are incorrect.

Glen Hubbard and Tim Kane address this issue in their new book Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America.  Hubbard and Kane are both prominent economists bent on testing popular economic and political theories against real data from the real world. The results are often surprising. Several things I thought were true certainly aren’t supported by the evidence.

I got three major take-aways from this book:

(1) Despite its currently dysfunctional political process, America is still by far the leading economy in the world, and will remain so for some time yet, whatever the pessimists say and however incompetent our politicians prove to be,

(2) the history of great power decline is depressingly consistent throughout history: increased centralization of power, increasing debt, increasing shift of power to rent-seekers (what we now call special interests) who oppose change because it would threaten their prerogatives, until finally the empire/nation is so rotten from inside that it falls to (an often fairly puny) outside threat, and

(3) although America is going down the familiar path of great power decline, there is ample time still to change course, if only we as a people have the will to do so.

This is perhaps the most enlightening book on economics I have read this year.

Recommended: US Debt from the Founder's Perspective

George Friedman of STRAFOR has, yet again, produced an insightful article: US Debt from the Founder's Perspective. He argues that the founders of our nation, always concerned about the growth of the sort of government tyranny that ruled Europe in their time, deliberately constructed a nation in which government moved slowly, with authority divided among many competing groups , the central government, the courts, and state and local authorities, so that they would act as checks on each other. From their perspective, the sort of gridlock currently in evidence in Congress is good - if there isn't consensus on what ought to be done, than better nothing should be done until some consensus can be reached.  In that respect the current impasse isn't a failure, but the passage of ObamacCare by brute force political hardball in the face of majority public opposition was a failure.

With respect to the US debt, he argues to the founders debt was not an economic issue but rather a moral one. It would be unthinkable to fail to pay back a debt one owes as a matter of moral obligation.  But it would be just as unthinkable to assume a debt without any plan or prospect of paying it back. They would no doubt be appalled at the debt we have accumulated, and the purposes to which we have put that borrowed money.

Recommended: First Thoughts - Can Boehner sell the emerging deal in the House?

The NBC News site has an interesting article today entitled First Thoughts: Can Boehner sell the emerging deal in the House? The article itself is intertesting, but especially interesting are the eight political factions they ideintify in the nation, from the "Bleeding Hearts" left through the "Talk Show Heads" right, and the accompanying quiz one can take to see where one's own political views fall on the spectrum (full disclosure, I rank as one of the "MBA middle", socially liberal and fiscally conservative).

The link to the quiz is at the end of the article, and also here.

Of particular intertest is the conclusion that the political middle in the nation as a whole is far larger than is popularly assumed, and far larger than the bitter polarization in Congress would lead one to expect.  But of course it doesn't really matter the composition of the electorate - what matter is the composition of the electorate that shows up on election day. Unfortunately, the ideological extremes tend to be more consistent in voting than the middle, so we seem to be getting more ideologically extreme representatives.  Hence the dysfunction in Congress.

The real problem

Lost in all the rhetoric about the current government shutdown and the impending need to raise the debt ceiling (yet again!) is the real underlying problem - the federal government spends more than it takes it, borrowing the difference, and this is simply unsustainable in the long run. Here is a chart from www.heritage.org, based on Congressional Budget Office figures,  that makes it very plain:

It's all very well for the administration to argue that it needs to raise the debt ceiling to preserve America's fiscal credit, but why, in almost six years in office, has it done so little to address the real issue - the growing deficit?  Only the sequester, to which the administration was dragged kicking and screaming,  has slowed the spending increases.

Recommended: The Roots of the Government Shutdown

George Friedman at STRATFOR has an interesting piece today: The Roots of the Government Shutdown.  He argues that the shutdown is the unintentional result of political reforms movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which took political power away from state-level political bosses who, while certainly susceptible to corruption, were not especially ideological, and delivered it to much more ideologically-driven groups who now see any compromise as betrayal of their principles.

Fareed Zakaria makes something like the same point in his book The Future of Freedom, in which he notes that legislators used to be able to make back-room deals (ie - compromises where each at least got half a loaf), but with the transparency forced by reformers in recent decades, all these negotiation now take place in public, and as soon as one side seems to be compromising they get a thousand phone calls and emails demanding that they not compromise, which pretty well mucks up the political process.

It does seem to me like another case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions - the inevitable unintended consequences of what seemed at the time like good ideas.

Still think NASA is "non-essential"?

Shared by my grandson:

Another government shutdown

Well, now we have it – another government shutdown. Pundits think the Republicans will be blamed by the voting public, and perhaps they will. But in fact Democrats are just as responsible as Republicans for the impasse we have reached.

Michael Barone has an article today in RealClearPolitics, If Only Obamacare Had Been Passed With Careful Deliberation, that compares ObamaCare with passage of the Civil Rights Act, another piece of legislation that was highly controversial, but as he points out, was passed by a bipartisan majority, unlike ObamaCare.

As he says:

Obamacare has been a different story. Universal health care was promised, not to address a high-profile headline crisis, but because President Obama's twenty-something speechwriter wanted an applause line for a campaign speech.

The poorly drafted bill was passed almost entirely on party lines by exceedingly narrow margins -- and in the face of majority negative public opinion.

So it's not surprising that opponents won't accept its legitimacy or permanence. History tells us what that takes. 

All political acts exact a price. The price that the Democrats are paying for the hubris of assuming  Obama’s election  gave them  a mandate to pass major controversial legislation without any bipartisan support at all is the dogged  Republican resistance they now face.  That has been a heavy price – it has stymied most of President Obama’s legislative initiatives.

The bitter partisan warfare in Congress these days isn’t all due to that single act of hubris and hardball politics, but it certainly did exacerbate it.  What liberals have to come to terms with is that the nation is almost evenly divided these days between conservatives and liberals, so neither side has a clear mandate to push ideological policies favored by their extreme ends. The Republicans learned that (maybe) the hard way in the last administration.  The Democrats are learning it the hard way (we hope) in this administration.

Recommended: US and Iranian Realities

George Friedman at STRATFOR has another insightful piece today: U.S. and Iranian Realities.  It is well worth reading.

Inequality

I have been reading a book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, which I shall no doubt recommend shortly. The authors explore why some nations are prosperous and other poor, examining all the current reasons proposed by various academics for these differences – cultural, geographic, historical. They conclude that in the end it is political differences that account for the diversity – nations with a political elite who rule an extractive economy (think of North Korea, for example, or the old Soviet Union) simply do far worse than nations with a pluralistic political system in which individuals have an incentive to work hard, without fear that some privileged elite will confiscate their profits or prevent their new innovation from being marketed.

So much seems obvious, and our American nation has prospered because of the accidents of history that gave us a government adequately constrained so that no privileged elite could rise to power and then hold power indefinitely.

One has to wonder, though, if that is changing. When it changed in Rome after the fall of the Republic it led to centuries of civil war until an enfeebled state fell to a fairly puny force of barbarians.

The rising inequality in America is due in part to the emergence of a fairly incestuous ruling elite of politicians, lobbyists, CEOs, and others who have enough political power and wealth to gain special favors from the government.  Think of Monsonto’s increasing grip on farming, using their wealth and political influence to force farmers to use their genetically modified seeds. Or think of the massive farm subsidies each year which go almost entirely to a small group of politically powerful megafarmers. Think of the defense industry which contrives, with sweetheart deals for select politicians, to build ever more expensive weapons systems with little obvious purpose. Think of the current Obamacare law, which is a windfall for well-connected insurance companies. Think of the well-connected Wall Street managers who managed, after tanking the economy, not only to avoid any significant consequences, but even to have their losses covered and their bonuses funded by taxpayer money.

Yes, the current Tea Party shenanigans in Congress are stupid.  But the Tea Party itself is in part a sort of disorganized peasant revolt, and it exists in part because of increasing frustration by the majority at the increasing income inequality between most people and a small well-connected elite in the nation who are perceived to be (and may actually be) abusing their power and position. Could we be on a path similar to Rome’s?  It’s worth pondering.

This is stupid

This impending government shutdown is stupid, and in fact both parties share the blame equally, whatever the public perception turns out to be.

It is stupid for the Tea Party to try to defund Obamacare – yes, it’s a ridiculous piece of legislation that the Democrats saddled us with that does nothing effective to address the health care issues, but trying to defund it in the face of a Democrat-controlled Senate and Presidency just isn’t a tactically smart way to deal with it.

It was stupid in the first place for Democrats to push through such a controversial piece of legislation (and with such hardball tactics) without bipartisan support.  It has poisoned the air in Washington politics ever since, produced the Tea Party, and made President Obama’s job just about impossible.  

It is stupid for the Democrats to refuse to address the growing federal deficit and debt, or even acknowledge that there might be a problem with borrowing so much money every year just to run the government.

It is stupid for the president to try to handle this situation by just making confrontational White House statements to the press, rather than getting his hands dirty negotiating with the Republicans to try to find some acceptable middle ground.

As near as I can tell, stupidity reigns supreme throughout Washington these days.

Recommended: How Civilizations Die

The criteria for inclusion in my book list (see sidebar) is that the book has provided me with some new and unexpected insight, or proposed a new way of looking at an issue. The problem with the commonly received wisdom in a society like ours is that it can suffer from “groupthink” – a belief is wrong, but since everyone believes it there is a self-reinforcing factor in play that maintains the belief, even in the face of evidence that it is wrong. That is why I am always looking for books that argue cogently for alternative positions.

David Goldman’s new book How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), meets the criteria of proposing a new and different way of looking at the world. David Goldman is a polymath (economist, investment banker, harpsichordist, music critic and music teacher, and prolific author) who has authored the widely-read “Spengler” column in the Asian Times for some years. In his 2011 book How Civilizations Die he lays out the demographic evidence that many major nations will essentially disintegrate in the next 50-100 years, as their low reproductive rate leads to an ever aging population supported by every fewer young until eventually the existing social and political system is no longer supportable.

Goldman writes from a decidedly Judeo-Christian perspective. That doesn’t mean his arguments require religious faith to accept. Instead, he argues that current foreign policy and political science fail to understand the current world because they are thoroughly secular in outlook – they ignore the profound effect that a culture’s religious beliefs can have on the choices that culture makes. He explores just why some nations are suddenly depopulating themselves, and suggests it may have to do with their reaction to the realization that their comfortable and familiar culture is in danger of disappearing in the modern world.

It has certainly been clear for decades now that US policy makers don’t understand other cultures very well. The current Democratic administration has stumbled repeatedly by misreading the political dynamics of other nations, and the Republican administration that preceded it wasn’t any better. This book is worth reading and thinking about because it proposes another way to try to interpret and predict the actions of other cultures.

Recommended: John Green's online video about health care

This is a first. I am recommending a short on-line video: His First 4 Sentences Are Interesting. The 5th Blew My Mind. And Made Me A Little Sick.. One of my daughters put me on to this, and it is well worth watching.

Green explodes, with data, many of the simplistic explanations about why US health care costs so much. He also talks fast. Also, the links for further data that he points us to are worth following.

How stupid can people get?

The new “Miss America” was crowned a few days ago.  She is of Indian descent, and fairly dark-skinned, though completely American,  Yet  her crowning was followed by a few  bloggers accusing her of being an “Arab terrorist”, apparently unable to distinguish between an Indian and an Arab (and where did the "terrorist" label come from??).  One does have to wonder how stupid people can get!

Actually, most people are fairly shrewd in their own short-term self- interest, but sharply limited otherwise by their cultural upbringing.

One only has to look around at the range of utterly implausible religious beliefs in the world to see this. Or the range of equally implausible political beliefs and ideologies. Or the astounding naiveté of most people about financial matters.  There is a reason why the Nigerian scam (we have a million dollar inheritance to send you, if you will just supply us with your bank account details so we can deposit it) continues to be run.  There is a reason why we all still get email spam about increasing one’s penis size with a pill. There is a reason why Bernard Madoff was able to build such a large Ponzi scheme and run it for so long. There is a reason why we continue to elect politicians who promise things which are clearly impossible to deliver. It’s because enough people are taken in by these scams to make it worth running them.

Part of our nation’s problems right now are due to the culturally-limited vision of our ruling elite – the (largely Washington and New York) politicians, CEOs, and think-tank advisers who set the nation’s policy. Many of them have no idea how the rest of the nation lives – they can (perhaps) sail their yacht, but not fix a lawnmower . In fact, many probably don’t even own a lawnmower – their gardening service handles that. When then-president Bush discovered that he didn’t know how to go through a self-check line at a supermarket, one got a glimpse of this sort of cultural isolation.

In the absence of real-world experience they substitute ideology – great sounding ideas (like the minimum wage idea discussed in my last post) that have little or no root in the real world.  This infects the ruling elite of all persuasions – right and left alike, conservative and liberal alike.  And since people tend to associate with. work with and live among people like themselves, these ideologies get reinforced every day, even if they are obviously not working and obviously at odds with the real world.

There really is nothing to be done about this. We are all primates, shaped by our evolution and our environment and the cultural milieu we grew up in. In fact, given these limitations, it really is remarkable that we have survived as a nation as long as we have. More and better universal education would certainly help, but in fact even the educational system is constrained by these same cultural limitations and myths.

It’s a problem worth thinking about.

Recommended: Minimum Wage Madness

Thomas Sowell has written another of his economics articles going right to the common-sense core of the problem. His piece today in RealClearPolitics entitled Minimum Wage Madness makes the same point I made a month or so ago - if the minimum wage is more than the worker is worth, they simply don't get jobs.

The minimum wage idea is not an economic idea; it is an ideological idea. Like so many ideological ideas, it sounds great on paper, but it doesn't fit with reality. As the old saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

This is one of those cases. Sowell provides some interesting statistics which seem to support the argument that unemployment, especially of the youth, is far lower in places and at times with no minimum wage than when a minimum wage law is present. That is common sense. If, for example, children delivering newspapers had to be paid minimum wage, there simply would be no paperboy jobs for youngsters to earn pocket money, and more important, to learn valuable work habits.

Recommended: Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis

Geroge Friedman at STRATFOR has written an ongoing series of incisive analyses of what has been happening with the Syrian question. His latest posting,Strategy, Ideology and the Close of the Syrian Crisis, is a good example, and worth reading.

The Shoes begin to drop

This January is when "Obamacare" really begins to come into force, and now the shoes are beginning to drop. President Obama, back when he was pushing for passage of his massive health care bill, promised that "if you like your current insurance plan, you can keep it". Sure! As an IBM worker and now retiree, I have been on IBM's health care plan for decades, and I like it. Guess what? January 1, 2014 IBM stops offering a health care plan and we are all dumped off to a health care exchange.

So much for President Obama's sales pitch! So much for how great Obamacare is going to be for all of us!

A Syrian deal that just might work

The sudden emergence of a new proposal last night for Syria to turn over its stock of chemical weapons to international control for destruction is a deal that just might work, and might get President Obama out of the uncomfortable box he has gotten himself into.  It might work because all the principle players have the maximum incentive to make it work.

Syria will probably agree in order to avoid having its military further crippled. For all its bluster in recent days about retaliation for an America attack, President Assad’s regime is just barely hanging on in the civil war, and certainly doesn’t want to be weakened further.

Russia will support the proposal because (a) they don’t want to see Assad fall, (b) it gives them international prestige for having played a significant role in resolving the issue, and (c) because they don’t want a precedent set for international intervention that someday might be used against them.

China will probably go along for much the same reasons.

President Obama and Congress will agree because it gets the president out of the box he put himself into, and Congressional anti-war Democrats can avoid a very difficult vote – to vote against their president or vote against war.

The Arab League will agree because it avoids yet another incursion by America forces, and because it addresses one of their real concerns – Assad’s chemical weapons.

The UN will agree because it gets to play a significant role again in resolving the issue.

And in fact the proposal, if it is really carried out, does address the only real America national  interest in this whole civil war – eliminating the chance that Assad’s chemical weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists who might use them elsewhere.

Deals like this work (a) because it is in the self- interest of all the parties to make it work, and (b) because the consequences of its not working (an American attack on Syria) are worse than the consequences of making it work.   It is only fair to note that a proposal like this wouldn’t stand a chance without the threat of America military action to make it more appealing.

In the oriental game of Go an important tactic is to place stones in threatening positions, which forces the opponent’s hand and restricts his/her play options. The lesson is that military power is best and most efficiently used when it isn’t used, but just threatened.  Of course, if the bluff is called, one must be prepared to follow through, or the threat ceases to be believed.  That is where President Obama got himself into trouble in the first place.